DON’ T IMMEDIATELY TRUST MAINSTREAM SITES ON PUBLISHING STORIES( CONT’ D)
And at the Bookseller, editor Philip Jones, arguably the single most astute of all UK industry observers, noted non-fiction that, when,. the Publishers Association report announces falling ebook sales, they don’ t count Amazon’ s numbers, of course, or Bookouture’ s, or those from Head of Zeus, Endeavour Press, Amazon Publishing, or self-published writers.“ Were we a little clearer about this missing bit, we would not today be reading about how … the ebook was dead( again),” he wrote.
The publishing industry in the UK and US has a real problem— not necessarily of its own making— in trying to assess its digital reach, given the lack of accurate digital sales data from online retailers. While that problem can be laid at the steps of Amazon, it’ s the job of publishers associations to characterize what data they do have on digital sales as only partial, and to be wary of contributing to overstatements of what’ s known about ebook sales and print supposedly blasting back. Not coming clean about this is misleading to their own customers, as well as to the culture at large.
EDITOR’ S NOTE: Thank you for the heads up about the third party resellers of books listed as new. It is something that I never questioned, so I decided to check it out with one of my own books. It certainly raises the question, and I will be contacting Amazon to“ test the water” using what I found below for the Silver Sisters Mystery TERROR IN A TEAPOT. Check out your own books. Are these sellers legitimately selling copies they bought a wholesale or discount, or not? Notice that they ship from multiple states. This is a book published through CreateSpace with pricing all over the place.
WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE
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SUMMER 2017