Don't buy your books from Amazon

So, it's been a long time since I've posted. Lots of reasons. Mainly, I guess, that I've been busy with paying work--a contract that went south a couple weeks ago leaving me high, dry and as usual, broke. In the meantime, Amazon.com did something appalling. And it concerns me because:

1) I am an Amazon stockholder; and,
2) because I have long planned to publish the On the Edge books under Private Ice's own imprint using Print on Demand to print them.

Basically, Amazon bought BookSurge, one of the minor players in POD printing a couple years ago. That printer had an appalling rep for low quality, bad service, and shady business. Recently, publishers which print with with major POD printer (LSI) have been getting calls from BookSurge saying "switch to us for printing or else." The "or else" was "or else we'll turn off your book's buy buttons, meaning that to get books sold on Amazon you have to pay to have them stocked ($29/yr plus small quantity postage every time Amazon wants a few more) or you have to say good-bye to the lifeline of Amazon sales--most small and micro publishers rely on Amazon sales almost exclusively since bookstores won't carry them. You can read more about Amazon's extortionate demands in Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else... and IT'S NOT OVER! Amazon Tells Publishers, Pay Us To Print Your Books...Or Else and at the Amazon BookSurge Information Clearinghouse

Now, most of you are readers, not publishers, not writers, how does Amazon's move affect you? Well, say you want to buy a POD printed book (and they come from big publishers as well as small). You won't get free shipping. You might have to buy it from Amazon Marketplace and pay whatever shipping a third party wants to charge. Even if you do get free shipping, to make up the losses that Booksurge's higher printing costs and higher discounting demands cause (or the increased costs of Amazon (dis)Advantage, publishers will have to raise prices... by 30-50%. That's coming out of YOUR POCKET. What's more, eventually, Amazon will remove all LSI printed books from their catalog... that's right, they will tell you which books you can buy and which ones you can't. It's just plain fascist.

But say you're a traditionally published author, the travails of POD crap-houses don't concern you. How do you think your backlist gets printed? Right. POD. So when a buyer orders your book from Amazon and it comes with cover on screwy or the last 4 pages missing, who do you think they're going to blame? Not Amazon, whom they don't even know is responsible! But it'll make YOU look bad. Not only that, but in order to be available both at Amazon and at regular bookstores, your publisher will have to maintain accounts at BOTH LSI and Booksurge, raising the costs of producing books and lowering your eventual payday... higher costs means fewer books bought, lower advances, and an eventual hit to your pocketbook.

This is a bad move for everyone: authors, publishers, customers, stockholders. Amazon is not known for backing down in the face of even overwhelming public disapproval, but they will notice if we stop shopping there. So despite being a stockholder, I encourage you to STOP spending your money at Amazon. Use their web site to do research, but order and buy elsewhere. Don't point people there for book purchases. If you can get along without revenue from Amazon Associates Program, take those links down. Send letters to Amazon's Investor Relations at ir@amazon.com. Sign the Stop the BookSurge Monopoly petition.

Here's the text of my email to Amazon:

To whom it may concern:

I hold a quantity of Amazon stock in my daughter's education account and I am very displeased with recent actions taken against small publishers who use Print on Demand to produce their books. Extortion is not good business. Nor is it good for Amazon's reputation in the marketplace.

There are no good options for most small or micro publishers. CreateSpace is NOT a professional printing option. The cover "template" is laughable. The rights grab in its contract is completely unacceptable to ANY publisher. BookSurge has a history of poor quality, rotten service, dicey business actions. And frankly, this latest doesn't help any. Moreover, thy don't even want customers with fewer than 10 books. How do you think publishers GET to "more than 10"? Amazon "Advantage" is a joke because it's so unprofitable and annoying for the publisher to have to pay postage to mail one or two books at a time.

The reduction in profit is going to either raise the price of books (how does THAT help your customers or us stockholders?) or send many small pubs careening into bankruptcy. Any way you slice it, this wrongheaded policy reduces the number of good books that Amazon has to sell. The vanity publishers have little to lose by signing away their "author's" profits, but many, many small publishers--which would otherwise put out good books that actually sell--will go under and more will never get started. Bad books will remain on Amazon, but many good books will be unavailable. This is NOT good business.

What would be good business? How about improving the contracts so they are attractive and not abusive? How about improving BookSurge's print product and pricing? How about providing MORE value for the money instead of threatening people who Amazon thinks are too small to fight back?

Oh, and for the record, I am an Amazon customer too. And I am so disgusted with the BookSurge debacle that I am boycotting Amazon. Last Christmas, I spent over a thousand dollars at Amazon. I buy all my books there. This year, I will not buy a single book from Amazon. I won't spend a thousand dollars at Christmas. I will take my money to local book stores and to Amazon's bricks and mortar competitors. Why? Because at those stores, I can buy any book I want. They may have to special order it, but they won't tell me what I can or cannot buy based on who publishes it and how it is printed.

If BookSurge cannot compete in the marketplace, they should not use Amazon's large market share (more than 10% of the US book market) to force people to use their more expensive, lower quality service.