Hoy, Others Respond to Amazon Changes

Angela Hoy, a former television reporter who is one of the most successful self-publishers on the Internet, emailed the following response to an earlier post. It appears here with her permission.

This information also appeared on WritersWeekly.com. Check there for the latest information on this controversy.

Hoy is co-owner of Booklocker.com and WritersWeekly.com, the highest-circulation freelance writing ezine in the world with more than 67,000 subscribers. She is also a well-known online author, whose books include How to Write, Publish & $ell E-Books, How to Publish and Promote Online and Buzz Your Zine.

Monday, March 31, 2008, 7:53 PM - Ex-Amazon Catalog Developer, Glenn Fleishman, takes a red pencil to the statement Amazon issued today. See his comment under THIS ARTICLE .

Monday, March 31, 2008, 4:10 PM - Amazon.com has released an official statement about their actions HERE. .

It basically just rehashes what you already know, but puts a pretty spin on things from their end.

They rationalize they can ship books faster. Our printer, Lightning Source, ships books to Amazon’s customers directly, even using an Amazon.com return address sticker. They rationalize they can ship items together to save money, and that doing this saves transportation costs and fuel. What they don’t tell you is that forcing a publisher to pay Amazon to print their book, plus setup fees for new books, plus 48% of each sale could and probably will mean higher list prices on books and, thus, less money in the customers’ pockets, less money in the publishers’ and authors’ pockets…but more money in Amazon’s pocket.

Furthermore, Amazon has, according to Wikipedia, 10 distribution centers in North America alone; and 14 more abroad. Are they currently printing print-on-demand books in each of those centers? I don’t think so. So, their “save money/time by packaging POD books with other products” rationale appears to have a few glaring holes in it.

If Amazon can’t currently print POD books at all its distribution warehouses, why are they telling POD publishers to sign that contract NOW?

Notice they left out the setup fees ($50 for new titles), the printing costs, and the 48% they want from each sale. In fact, there’s no mention of fees at all in the statement. They also don’t mention that the average publishing package for authors at Booksurge is over $1,000.

Also, regarding the Advantage Program, they left out the fact that publishers/authors have to pay $29.95 per year, PLUS shipping costs to get the books to Amazon, PLUS 55% of each sale to Amazon. They don’t seem too concerned with shipping and fuel expenses for this part of the statement, probably because the publisher has to pay for those.

Finally, they, of course, don’t mention the past quality control problems experienced by Booksurge. If a customer gets a book with missing or upside down pages, who’s going to get the blame? Not Amazon, that’s for sure. The publisher will get the backlash for that.