There is no more welcome letter here from the President of Amazon.com, and you'll find no more links to purchase books from them or search engine boxes tied to their site. Even the Darke Palace Bookstore, the Amazon-associate section of my web site which involved immense amounts of work, has been completely disbanded.Why? If you've paid a visit to the Amazon site recently (and not so recently), it's hard to miss the little buttons directly below nearly every title. You know the ones-- they're blue rectangles with elongated gold buttons in the middle that say "I have one to sell!" and "Sell yours here" Now I have no problem with selling used books-- how can I, when I have my own small online book store, Dusty Stacks? The problem is that they're offering these used books in direct and obvious competition with the same BRAND NEW book.
What's wrong with that? Here's a crash course in the author's paycheck side of publishing:
Most paperback royalties are, give or take, around 6% of the cover price of the book. Media tie-in royalties are considerably less, usually only 1%. Cover price is what you pay for the book, not what's actually printed on the cover, by the way. Of course, the author gets zip for a used book. Huge corporate booksellers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, and others, sometimes employ mass buying. This means they will buy out the entire print run of a book, "just in case." They don't put the book on the shelves and try to sell it. Instead, all these books are packed away in a warehouse somewhere "just in case" the author suddenly gets "hot" and becomes a bestseller. Then they'll have 98% of the copies available (while your local independent booksellers won't be able to get copies of it at all). Because the books aren't available (i,e., they're in the warehouse instead of on the shelves), the books don't sell. A week or two before the deadline for doing so, they return ALL COPIES to the publisher for credit.
To the publisher, it looks like the author's work bombed out. No one bought all these copies, so no one wanted to read it. The books are pulped. DESTROYED. Kaput. The author doesn't earn out his or her advance, and so the publisher isn't interested in buying the next project. And let's not forget that all these publishers look at all the same distribution numbers, so Publisher A can see if a book might not have "sold" for Publisher B, and vice versa. In the meantime, the author is likely getting emails or letters from people who actually still walk into real-life bookstores. These bits of correspondence contain the frustrating statement "I can't find your latest book anywhere!"
Think this is an exaggeration? Then consider Final Impact. A dual-award winner, this book sold out its 40,000 print run... not. I was told it did, then eventually I got the royalty statement. On it were 17,000 sudden returns. SEVENTEEN THOUSAND all-at-once returns of a book for which I still get emails asking where the book can be purchased.
The kicker, the thing that pushed me over the edge, was zipping over to the Amazon site in mid-October, 2001 to see the status of Tales of the Slayer. It was brand new and due out any day, so new, in fact, that I had yet to receive a single contributor's copy from the publisher. And do you know what I saw up there on the site?
You guessed it. A used copy already for sale, right below an image and a line of text which clearly said that the book was NOT yet available but could be pre-ordered. Yet there it was, a used copy already competing with the new.
I read that when the Authors Guild and the Romance Writers of America (and who knows how many other writers' groups) lodged formal complaints with them, Amazon reluctantly agreed to at least not put those blue and gold buttons up on pages where the books were not yet published. Obviously they went back on their word, because I saw it with my own two eyes. That same well-written and thoughtful article showed how Amazon actually made more money on used book sales than new, this due to commissions and profit on shipping and handling charges. In the meantime, the author, the guy or gal who spent a year or two carving out those words, gets absolutely NOTHING... except their potential sales of new books severely sliced.
Folks, this is blatant corporate greed. There's simply no other term for it. My protest to Amazon when they first started this got me two form letters, both trying to convince me it was "good for the customer." Well, I was an Amazon customer and I didn't see any benefit. I'm also one of the people who makes the product Amazon sells, and I can damned sure feel how detrimental it is. I've struggled to promote my books over the years despite publishers who pump money only into bestselling authors and who only see the numbers... the numbers that get royally skewed thanks to voracious business practices like this.
These companies are to the bookselling industry what Microsoft is to the computer industry-- sharks. They eat up the little guy and leave nothing-- not even bones-- behind. I tried to just float along and live with it, but this is just too much. So you won't find any links to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Borders on this site. Now now. Not ever. And the next time you order from them and pay their shipping and handling, remember that you could just have easily ordered from someplace like Stars Our Destination in Evanston, Illinois, or Crime and Space in Austin, Texas, both of which are struggling to keep their stores afloat in a business environment that has become dominated by corporate giants. (Addendum: Stars Our Destination has now, sadly, closed its doors as of 2003.)
I love writing, and I love little bookstores. I can't do much, but refusing to help gigantic parasites suck the life out of my own livelihood is my way of making a stand.
All best, Yvonne Navarro
Return to Darke Palace.