Biting the Advantage Bullet

I had a dream to sell  paperback books on Amazon at competitive prices. The plan focused around registering my book on Nielsens, printing through Lightning Source and Amazon sucking in the detail, which included the 45% discount on the £9.99 RRP. And for a short time it actually worked. I had a book that was being sold for £5.50 and it sold. But then the different distributor databases stopped talking to each other and Amazon couldn't see where to order the book from. So they brought it at the RRP (from somewhere) and sold it at the same price. And that's how it stayed.

I have talked with Nielsens, Ingram's and Bertram's and they don't know what's wrong and I can't find anyone who can fix it. It boils down to time and control. I haven't got any spare time to hunt down the glitch. So after a month of struggling, I gave up and joined Amazon's Advantage program this afternoon. This is not going to make my book as competitive as I hoped but it should make it more competitive than 9 bloody 99. This has necessitated a couple of changes and this is how it should work.

Lightning Source print my books. It costs me a base price of .70p to print each and every book plus .1p per page. As there are 366 pages in Chasing Innocence we have a base unit cost of £4.36

The RRP for Chasing Innocence was £9.99 but as Amazon's Advantage program demands a discount of 55% I'd be making 13p per unit. So I hiked the RRP to £12.99, which means I make £1.48 per unit, except I don't. Because I have to pay for books to be shipped from the printers to Amazon. A box of 22 books weighs a lot.

So I should clear £1.00 per book selling with Amazon Advantage. Which is exactly what I was going to clear before. So what's the deal you may ask? The deal is people won't ordinarily pay more for an indie book unless they're looking for indie books, which is a very niche market.

We persevere. I just registered Chasing Innocence with Amazon and should get their first order through in the next few days. In the medium term I will probably switch printing over to Createspace, Amazon's own printing arm. We will see. All a little depressing when you consider Chasing Innocence got it's first independent rating on the Kindle Book Review yesterday. Sarah Burns the reviewer scored it 5/5. You can read the review here.