Peoples at Amazon.com are punks...

[Maestro]

Greetings ladies and gentlemen.



Yesterday, I received this e-mail from my publisher, PublishAmerica.

Dear Author,

PublishAmerica is intensifying its ties with BarnesandNoble.com as its primary online vendor. At the same time, we are devaluating our relationship with Amazon.com. Unfortunately, we are doing this under pressure.

Amazon has informed us a few days ago that they are insisting on printing every PublishAmerica book they sell, in their own recently bought in-house digital printing facility. We have been given just over two weeks to comply. Their ultimatum implies that PublishAmerica must submit almost 60,000 separate book files (text and cover), and redo every single one of them so they conform to the complicated technical specs that Amazon's in-house press requires.

They also demand a huge increase of their own profit-per-book, which would lead to dramatically lower royalty payments for our authors on all books sold through Amazon.com. Amazon's threat: if you do not play ball, we will disable the "Buy" button for your books.

Not surprisingly, PublishAmerica refuses to be swayed by anyone's strong-arming tactics, big name or otherwise, especially given the fact that budging would mean an additional expense on the publisher's side of tens of thousands of dollars, on top of the unacceptable royalty losses for our authors.

When they tried to force our hand in the past, Amazon representatives have suggested that PublishAmerica should simply pass on its Amazon-caused expenses to its authors. Of course we have refused this. PublishAmerica never charges its authors as much as a single penny, ever. We are not going to change this winning policy under the threat of anyone's intimidation, nor are we willing to involuntarily accept any royalty cuts on behalf of our authors.

PublishAmerica's almost 30,000 titles remain available to Amazon, and we will continue to also make all future titles available to them. Amazon continues to be able to access our books the same way they, as well as all other retailers, have always accessed them, through at least four separate venues. One of those venues is LightningSource, a daughter company of the world's largest book wholesaler Ingram, which prints our books for retailers. (Amazon was attempting to take away a portion of this printing volume from Lightning Source until we prevented it.) If they want to obtain any PublishAmerica title, they can at all times, as they always have.

PublishAmerica's books will furthermore continue to be available to just about every other book retail venue as well, including all Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waldenbooks, Books-a-Million and many other chain and independent bookstores, and to online outlets such as BarnesandNoble.com.

Barnes and Noble remains PublishAmerica's number one customer: more of our books have always been sold through Barnes and Noble and that company's online store than through any other vendor. Given the new circumstances, we now fully anticipate significant sales increases through BarnesandNoble.com and other places.

Thank you for your support. If you feel inclined to let Amazon.com know what you think of their actions, we encourage you to contact them at cust.service@amazon.com or call them at 206-266-1000 or 1-866-216-1072.

Thank you,
PublishAmerica Author Support Team

It's a damned good thing that peoples at PublishAmerica are not lacking of guts ! Go PA ! Don't let those f*ckers tell you how to run your business !

[Matt308]

I'm confused. They were bought out? And as a new consolidated company they have a new directive to post their "books online"? Is that right?

[Maestro]

No. In fact, Amazon.com bought a printing facility and they want to print every books from PublishAmerica that are bought from Amazon.com.

You see, PublishAmerica is the publisher and their distributor (the company that print and sell the books to the bookstores) is Ingram. So Amazon.com had to buy every books they sells from Ingram. Now they want to print them and "kick Ingram out of the deal".

Anyone on here remember the P2P program called "Napster" ? It's the same thing except that this time the "pirates" would be making money out of it.

[wilbur1]

Thats bulls##t greedy bastages!

[Matt308]

Sorry Maestro. It's much to complicated for me to give a $hit. You wrapped up in this and losing money?

[Maestro]

No. But I would if PublishAmerica had accepted to bend to Amazon's demand. Because PublishAmerica would have lost money, they would have been forced to ask every new authors to pay for being published. And that would have royally sucked.

We are supposed to be paid on the books we sell. Not pay for selling books !