Amazon manipulation of book prices / Lois Stern cosmetic surgery book.

[Guest guest]

Thank you very much Kate. Very revealing. I'm going to pass this on.---------- Forwarded message ----------From: Kate <kater@...>

Date: Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 2:56 PMSubject: Amazon manipulation of book prices / Lois Stern cosmetic surgery book.

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, Sex, 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 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, Sex, 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 report 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 report back to Jerry, our best hope for the future of independent authors like you and me.

Lois W. Stern

Author of SEX, LIES AND COSMETIC SURGERY

http://www.sexliesandcosmeticsurgery.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 report 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>