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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/17/2016 in Posts

  1. Hey @Bill, thanks for commenting here. There are is one hard fact which makes your suggestion very, very difficult to implement: No other online bookseller can compete with Amazon on the things that are most important to customers price, speed of delivery, and trust. Indeed, it is impossible to do it. I'll also go a step further and say this is even more true for the Black independent online booksellers. This is why there are so few of us selling books, independent of Amazon, and making very much money doing it. What is worse the VAST majority of publishers and authors who direct people to Amazon don't even bother to use an affiliate code!? Increasingly, authors areusing Amazon as their primary website. This is probably worse than using Facebook as one's primary web presence because at least Facebook allows hyperlinks to external websites (for now) and Amazon does not. This too hurts us more than it helps in the long run. I say this as someone that has been selling books on the web since 1997. Amazon owns the Black book ecosystem, to our detriment, and it is our own fault. The question is what do we do about it? Hi @Elva D. Green, well if that newsletter you publish your article in has enough of the right readers it may help. What we really need is a critical mass of folks with a platform to hammer into the public what the impact of Amazon means to Black-owned businesses and what this means to readers of Black literature. But most people are really too involved in their own struggles to be concerned about Amazon's impact on the Black book ecosystem, particularly if Amazon is giving them discounts on books and free, same day, delivery. I'm sorry to read about your experience with that one bookseller. Ignoring his rudeness (there is not excuse for that); his reaction is not terribly surprising. Look at it from a book seller's perspective; in the last 15 years or so there has been an explosion in the number of self-published books. Booksellers have been inundated requests to stock these books. We simply can not afford to waste time vetting products that will not likely sell. These books are often poorly edited, have no advertising budget, no publicity support, have not been critically reviewed, and written by obscure writers without a platform or much knowledge of the publishing industry. So the authors of these books are often left with no choice but to sell their books themselves using Amazon as their primary platform. Again this usually does not result in the sale of many books, because the reach is too small and there is a ton of competition. Now Amazon, who is the publisher of a large percentage of these books, makes money no matter what, for their revenue is transaction based--quality is incidental. So today, your only perceived option is Amazon. It shouldn't be, it does not have to be, but sadly this is the situation we are in for now.
    2 points
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