The first week went by without a hitch. We had an incredible number of visitors and thousands of free E-books downloaded. Please feel free to get yours, and be sure to drop in later to look around, or leave your comments about When Graveyards Yawn. Click here to get your free copy.
We’re having ongoing discussions with Amazon.com and other online book sellers about removing record of my books’ previous incarnations. I’m trying to break ties with the old business model, you know?
Going through Amazon.com and other middlemen doubles the price of my books. Since they don’t store print-on-demand titles, or advertise the books, it’s impossible to justify the extra cost. Okay, they index the titles in a haystack of ISBN’s, but that’s as far as it goes. Anyone looking for one of my books would have to know the title going in, and then part with a considerable sum of money to order one, especially with shipping attached. I saw no reason to continue that relationship. In fact, the exorbitant price they charge made the whole enterprise counterproductive and acted to perpetuate the myth that print-on-demand titles have to be expensive. They don’t. Not if you remove the middleman and sell directly.
So far, they won’t remove the information or alter its description to reflect those editions’ status as out-of-print with that publisher. Amazon.com says: “As you may know, we offer customers the opportunity to locate out-of-print books through our Marketplace feature. It is our aim to list a wide selection of titles for our customers’ reference and convenience, so it is not our practice to remove a listing even when it is out of print.†If they were truly interested in providing information for their customers’ convenience then it would better serve them to let the book’s details reflect its true status.
Gwellstaylor.com and Wildclown.com say it is not our practice to have a company flogging books that G. Wells Taylor owns copyrights for without his permission. Amazon.com had a deal with my former publisher, not me. I’ll keep you posted.
