Quote:
Originally Posted by abookreader
I'd appreciate it if somebody could tell me why this would be a thing for authors to cheer over?
I've always been under the impression that Authors were ecstatic when they'd wake up one morning and find out that Amazon had discounted their book.
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Well, it depends.
If you have agreement with Amazon, that gives you 70% of the price, the agreement has a catch or two.
Like, you get 70% of sale price and not list price.
Another nice catch is, that when somebody discounts your book, Amazon matches the price.
So.
You publish your book on Amazon. List price $1.99.
For each book sold you get 0.7x$1.99. Nice and dandy.
You also publish on Smashwords, with the same price $1.99
Then comes third party, that gets the books from Smashwords and discounts your book to $0.0
Amazon matches the price, and your "sales" skyrocket. Except now you make 0.7x$0.00 on each sale.
You - the author - rush to Amazon and try to change the contract to 35% of the List price. No problem here, 0.35x$1.99 is significantly more than 0.7x$0.0 and you make the difference up on volume. BUT! (You knew there would be a but, didn't you?) But, the process takes 2 days or more.