Sunday, 22 January 2012

9 Bloody 99 (Or - Aiming at Amazon)

So far in Chasing Innocence. Potter thinks up an idea. He writes a book. He edits the book. He lobbies literary agents and discovers a harsh reality. He wants people to read his book so he makes his own publishing company. Now he has total control and the aim is high quality entertainment. He worked with a copy editor, proof editor, model, make-up artist, photographer, graphic artist and bought a book about publishing by Aaron Shephard. And then two other books by the same man. Potter signed a deal with Ingram's to print his book. He worked with a typesetter to create the printed book and when the first proof was printed in greyscale, he found out why and fixed it. Ingram's accepted his book for printing and euphoric, John made a big mistake. He had no set publish date so he revised his ISBN data at Nielsens to 'published'. The pre-orders already purchased for the target price of £5.50, started getting printed and delivered. With pictures of the book popping up across Facebook the book started getting noticed, just about the same time its availability glitched. The lead time on Amazon dropped from next day to 6-9 days, the price shot up from £5:50 to the full RRP of £9:99. The glitch fixed itself and Amazon were now stocking the book, actually ordering copies from Ingram's to keep in stock - hoorah. But we were still looking at the despairing sales killer of £9.99 for the paperback.

So what had gone wrong?

When Ingram's accepted my book for printing, they took control of the books 'distribution data', previously held by Lightningsource. This contains among many other things, the full RRP and wholesale discount of 45%. This is what Amazon had been using to sell the pre-orders at a reasonable price. When Ingram's take that data it then takes three weeks for it to properly appear on their systems. Which of course I didn't know. During this time Amazon and other stores cannot apply these discounts to their pricing because they can't see the data, so they sell it at the full RRP. That is never going to make your book competitive. The RRP is only there to contrast against a more realistic discounted price. If I hadn't set the book's status to published this would all have gone on in the background while it was still in pre-order. We live and learn.

The good news is I have just one week left of the three weeks. Anyone who knows something about Amazon and selling through them, might be asking why I am not subscribed to Amazon's Advantage program? That would be a very good question.

The standard process for indie publishers selling books on Amazon, is to create an Amazon Advantage account and YOU pay for and ship the books to Amazon and you give up a 55% discount. Amazon as the worlds biggest book seller then have a monopoly on your book's pricing. It can mean your book being priced quite high (yes I realise the irony). The reality is, Amazon are a hugely efficient seller. They work very hard to make sure you (the customer) come to them for EVERYTHING.  They pull in data from all kinds of places on absolutely everything that can be purchased. Their database is not a record of what they sell, it is a record of everything that can be sold. They want you going to Amazon as a habit, which they have been very successful in achieving. They know you want what you buy from them NOW. So if they suck in details of a book called Chasing Innocence, that is not part of their advantage program and people start buying it, they will very probably buy in stock, just so they can be competitive and ship it to their Prime customers for next day delivery.  Just as they are likely, as they were during pre-order, to aggressively discount the price for a book their automated systems think is cheaper elsewhere, because it's not part of Advantage.

As an independent publisher of my own fiction novels I am focused on people enjoying the experience so much they recommend someone else do the same thing. Not going Advantage is not about making more money, I get the same if Amazon sell at 9:99 or 5:00. It is about shifting books and getting them into the hands of readers. Word of mouth is key, as are high standards. A competitive price is vital. With Amazon selling my book at 9:99 I am going to struggle to sell beyond family and friends. So I will be very grateful in a week or so, when these pesky databases start catching up with each other.

No comments: