Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
You can have a good business plan and still fail as a business. However they did have a compellng sales model that made some people choose them over Amazon. What they may have lacked was enough people knowing about it.
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I used to buy a lot of ebooks at Fictionwise but stopped long before agency pricing. Fictionwise never grew iwth either its customers or its quantity of books. It had a very poor filtering scheme and did nothing to make searching easier as the number of titles it carried grew. I found that to find new books to buy, I'd have to spend hours going through the subject-matter list. After about 15 minutes of searching, I simply gave up.
(FWIW, this is also a problem at Smashwords although the filtering has gotten better. With all the titles Smashwords carries, it really needs a much better filtering system to encourage buyers to look for titles.)
From my perspective, FW was rapidly becoming a has been long before agency pricing. Its club discounts and other discounts weren't worth anything if I couldn't find a book to buy. Even now when FW offers large weekend discounts I don't bother going to the site. It is simply too difficult to find a book to buy.