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Old 01-20-2013, 03:23 AM   #16
gmw
cacoethes scribendi
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I think that's one of the downsides for operating through and intermediary (whether it be Smashwords or Bookbaby or whatever). The processes are definitely flawed, appear to have little or no quality assurance testing, and as a result there are inconsistencies with how things appear with different resellers ... and it seems that no one's in a great hurry to improve the situation.

And it's not just e-books. My print edition appeared in The Book Depository with no description for some weeks before the description finally caught up (with no input from myself).

There's not a lot of incentive for distributors to care about individual self-publishers as long as the majority get through "good enough". I can understand it with Smashwords, they don't get any money for trying harder, but I think paid services could try harder than they do ... but I'm guessing the volume makes that difficult - 130,000 new releases on Amazon in the last 30 days. How many came from distributors like Smashwords? And there's not a lot of incentive for resellers to care when the majority of their sales are happening from other more controlled sources.

I don't know whether Amazon is getting it right more than others because people are taking better care when dealing with such a big reseller, or whether Amazon is such a big reseller because they take care to get it right more often.
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