Very revealing .. from Health Lover, Ilena Rosenthal:
www.BreastImplantAwareness.org/
http://ilenarose.blogspot.com
This excerpt is from an AZ-based website for self-published authors
and people interested in book marketing. Interesting that Lois Stern's
book on cosmetic surgery is featured this week. The new concern with
Amazon is that they are demanding that POD authors and companies print
their books with their POD company, Booksurge, if they want their
self-published books posted on Amazon.
AMAZON TACTICS -
From author Lois W. Stern,
I suspect Amazon is using some other tactics to force out the
independent publishers. I wanted to share my observation in regard to
Amazon.com with my book, ***, Lies and Cosmetic Surgery. We need
other independent authors to do similar investigations to help us know
exactly what we are dealing with.
In early December, my good friend Susan Haley mentioned that there is
a way to check the popularity of your book on Amazon simply by going
to their site, keying in your book title, and then clicking on your
book on that next screen to arrive at their posted details, such as a
brief book description, the number of pages, etc. One line gives a
Sales Rank number. (The lower that number the better, as the current
#1 best seller would receive a sales rank of #1.) Now the first day I
checked the sales rank for my book, it was 550,633 and was priced at
$13.57 (cover price $19.95). On Dec. 30th a full-page article titled
Hey, It’s Still Me in Here was published in the Style section of the
Sunday Times. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for that
article and Mia Navarro devoted three paragraphs to me and my book.
Nirvana, I had arrived – or so I thought. The next day, Dec. 31st , my
sales rank on Amazon dropped to 12,253. Wow! I had hit the big time –
maybe. For the next two months my sales rank numbers hovered in the
one hundred to three hundred thousand range. Not bad numbers. I
checked out the sales rank of other books written on my subject, most
of whose authors were noted plastic surgeons with ready audiences, and
to my delight, found that my numbers were consistently higher, which
means better.
But strangely, I noted something else beginning to happen. Amazon was
playing around with the pricing of my book. One day it would be priced
at $19.95, the next, $13.97. I called them to inquire, but was told
that this is an internal decision to which authors are not privy. At
first I told myself that perhaps when a book is selling well, Amazon
raises their selling price accordingly. But I soon realized that that
was faulty reasoning as they had not chosen to raise the price on any
of the traditionally published cosmetic surgery books. My book sales
on Amazon are definitely suffering. (Yesterday, ***, Lies and Cosmetic
Surgery was still priced at $19.95, with a sales rank of 507,923.
while the plastic surgeons’ books are being offered in the $12.95 to
$13.95 range and their sales ranks have bettered considerable. So my
suspicion is that even when Amazon can’t force the hand of an
independent, they can do everything within their considerable power to
manipulate the market.
I am making a plea to other independent authors: Please keep stats on
your Amazon posted books for the next month and re****t back so we know
if my suspicions are well founded or simply unique to my book. My
suggestion is you make yourself a three column stat sheet headed with:
Date, Price, and Sales Rank, and monitor your book every five days or
so on Amazon. At the same time, check out some competing books of
similar genre to yours (traditionally published and independents) for
comparison. Then re****t back to Jerry, our best hope for the future of
independent authors like you and me.
Lois W. Stern
Author of ***, LIES AND COSMETIC SURGERY
http://www.***liesandcosmeticsurgery.com
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COMMENTARY -
Lois has an excellent point above and I think it’s more than possible
this is yet another way in which Amazon can and will manipulate the
market to their advantage, or rather to the advantage of their own
company, BookSurge.
For anyone willing to track your results, please re****t back to me
and I’ll gladly share with the world, but before I go public in a big
way on this, I need accurate information. Thank you Lois for your keen
observation and willingness to share.
--
Ilena's Personal Blog<http://ilena-rosenthal.blogspot.com>
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