For those who might have missed it, best selling author John Grisham was on the Today show this morning to plug his new book, Ford County, but also had a thing or two to say about the recent web war with book pricing that’s been taking place amongst Amazon, Wal~Mart, B&N, and Target. He believes printed books are an endangered species and that the surge in popularity of EBooks isn’t helping.
It’s been a busy summer for me! Working in the textbook industry for me is like the month of December for retailers, except our rush season starts July 5th and lasts for almost three months as college bookstores prepare for students to return to campus. After coming home from a grueling day, the last thing I wanted to do was to look at a book, much less anything related to books. But Facebook and its many “Oregon Trail” like games helped to distress my busy mind supplying a numbing sensation and much time wasted watching virtual crops grow.
Yesterday, I posted about an email blast I got from Lulu saying my book had been picked to be part of the Amazon Marketplace program. Today, I have more information to add to that for the authors who are in the dark just as much as I am over the information presented in this Lulu email, or lack thereof.
Back on May 12th, I did a random search on Amazon.com for my book, Stealing Wishes, and found an odd separate listing for my book. It had no picture and only had one copy for sell by a third party seller. I promptly clicked on this link only to find the seller’s name was LuluPress. You can view the listing here, although the copy that was for sale and even the name of my book has since been removed from it. You can view LuluPress’s profile here. I decided to email LuluPress asking if their authors received royalties for these Marketplace sales. They replied two days later with a simple “yes.” So, I left it at that.
Today, like every day, I checked my Amazon.com sales rank and discovered it had bumped up quite a bit. I’m now at 101,491. Now as I’ve discussed in the past, this might very well mean I’ve sold just one copy over the weekend, or even up to 5 copies. And chances are the rank will fall fast unless another copy sells today.
From mid-March to mid-April, LLBR held a poll asking you how many copies of your book sold the first year if your book had been published for at least one year. The blog received a total of three thousand hits during this time, and only thirty of you voted in the poll. So, 1% of our visitors voted in the poll, and I think that’s actually a fair comparison to how those 30 people ranked in sales.
Many of us are still boycotting Amazon due to the huge Booksurge/POD war that has been taking place this year. Many of us have moved forward and tried to find other venues for selling our books outside of Amazon. I hope it’s paying off for those of you out there pounding the pavement.
While our fellow reviewer LK Gardner-Griffie was preparing for her WITW is MMC promo, she fell victim to Lulu’s price hike in production expenses, and she also pointed out to me that Lulu has increased its shipping expenses as well…
…my surprise over the increase in the shipping costs from a couple weeks ago to this is astounding…USPS media mail has increased from 3.95 to 5.90 for shipping one hard bound, so net increase of $4.95 over all. And gas prices have gone down. . . .go figure.
By now, most of us involved in the POD industry as authors have probably heard of Jeremy Robinson and his success story with self-publishing his first book on LuLu. Jeremy used his experience and success to also write a POD help book for other authors. It’s called POD People.
Greetings all and welcome to May! Before we get rolling with this month’s reviews, I wanted to take some time out to discuss a few topics of the POD industry.
Although my Success tab at the top of this page has been extremely slow (hint…hint), it’s been nice to hear from some of you personally about the success of your Lulu books. When asked for advice, I seem to be saying the same thing over and over again…If you haven’t done so already, buy an ISBN for your book!
Do you love to read?
Do you support the POD community?
Can you be critical, yet positive?
Do you like to review books?
If so, we'd love to hear from you. LLBR is looking to add a few more reviewers to its team. Email us at llbookreview@gmail.com for details.
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