Some Publishers Abandoning Amazon

People in general don’t like monopolies, and why should they?  Monopoly – the term not the board game – is a bad word. Amazon.com is pretty darn close to a monopoly in the ebook world, and the behemoth has taken quite a few steps towards alienating publishers, including dictating prices and various other strong-arm tactics.

Writer John Oakes of Publishers Weekly recently penned a piece on this topic, profiling a smaller publisher that is focusing on direct sales to the consumer. Oakes writes…

Despite a computer on every desk and exciting new marketing tools online, we perpetuate the same old system, working through retailers and treating the electronic world as simply a tool to augment our presence in the real world. And it means wrestling with Amazon over how to sell.

Although we are certainly not abandoning the Amazon e-book platform, All Star Press is like many publishers in that we are also offering our books for sale right here on our website. There is no reason publishers can’t do both. Our view is that the All Star Press books should be available to everyone and anyone.

Check out our current inventory of e-books from All Star Press:

Quiet Spaces: Hearing God’s Call in a Noisy World

The House that Richard Built

Sleep Great for Life

The Road to Recovery: Overcoming and Moving Beyond Your Grief

 

Is $9.99 still the Magic Price for an e-book?

“What ebooks I buy for my Kindle and what I am willing to pay for them has absolutely nothing to do with the price of the device itself.  And to say that it does is ridiculous.  I buy between 20 – 40 books for my Kindle per month.  I am a voracious reader.  Unless a book is by an author that I like enormously I will not pay over $9.99.  I usually don’t buy books that cost even that much.  Period.  I put books that cost that much on my Wish List & check back periodicaly to see if the price has dropped, which usually happens when a paperback edition of the book is released. I don’t read as many mysteries anymore because for some reason that genre has higher prices than any other.  I’m a patient person.  I wait until the price goes down.  Or get it from the library.

Publishers need to realize that by lowering their prices they’ll make more money from ebooks because they’d sell many, many more.  Even old books that were published 60 – 80 years ago are being put out by publishers at $9.99!  Get real.  Once a book is on the publisher’s computers for publishing, the editing and other technical details are done anyway.  The only thing they have to do for an ebook edition is to format it properly.  It’s all digital.  No additional costs for cover art. No cost for warehousing ebooks.  No returns processing for ebooks. No printing costs for ebooks.  And publishers expect us to pay the same prices they charge for hard copy books?!?”

READ THE FULL STORY FROM PAID CONTENT