Erg to Amazon. Just when I was getting happy.
Sunday, January 31st, 2010So, I finally get a serious nod in The New York Times Book Review and Amazon & my publisher are in some hot dispute!
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Imagine my puzzlement when someone emailed me Friday evening complaining that my book wasn’t available on Amazon.com.
I checked it out myself: Indeed, it was listed, but no buy button. You could purchase it from a third party, but you couldn’t even pre-oder it from Amazon. It looked like it was out of print.
I emailed my editor and publicist and they responded that they were totally miffed–that they would try to get to the bottom of it. I guess no one told them, just as no one told me, that all books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, had vanished from Amazon.com. Macmillan’s imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt.
The disappearance, it turns out, is the result of a disagreement between Amazon and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon said no. Macmillan pushed the point, and Amazon responded by removing Macmillan books–and not just the ebooks.
According to Publishers Marketplace, all of Macmillan’s books–including bestsellers, top releases, and Kindle editions–were removed from Amazon’s site. Macmillan Kindle titles all lead to pages that read, “We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.” It’s the first shot across the purchasing bow in big publishers’ efforts to reset ebook pricing above the loss-leader $9.99 price point and retake control over that pricing by moving from the wholesale selling model to an agency selling model.
Kindle customers further reported on Amazon forums that any Macmillan books that were on their “wish lists” disappeared from those lists with no explanation, as apparently did Macmillan sample chapters that had been downloaded previously.
Macmillan has answered only with a paid announcement in Publishers Marketplace addressed to its authors: “You are a vast and wonderful crew. It is impossible to reach you all in the very limited timeframe we are working under, so I have sent this message in unorthodox form. I hope it reaches you all, and quickly. Monday morning I will fully brief all of our editors, and they will be able to answer your questions. I hope to speak to many of you over the coming days.”
It’s a wild development in book publishing and book selling, and of course disappointing and deflating for me as an author to have my book caught up in it…
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Moral: Shop your local independent.
Other moral: The publishing industry sucks.
Is writing worth anything? In the age of digital media, do words and ideas have value–or is paper the only thing that has value in the marketplace?
Does Amazon have the power to set all the rules of publishing and book selling? Should they? Is their unannounced action on a Friday evening fair play?
Where do you buy your books?
(Lots of folks have been writing saying they want to boycott Amazon but can’t beat their prices. Here is a place to get books cheap: Strand Books
