Quote:
Originally Posted by Purple Lady
From what I remember when the big publishers went to agency, they left the smaller stores without a contract for quite a while. I remember Fictionwise selling Random House books but no other big publishers. It's hard to stay in business without having the products to sell.
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You remember correctly:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b....html#comments
Quote:
Livolsi has been critical of how the switch to the agency pricing model was implemented from the beginning and voiced complaints that it was organized strictly to benefit the big retail players and “devastated,” independent e-book sellers. He pointed to the lingering impact of the switch to agency pricing in 2010, a switch he said severely impacted indie e-book retailers because it removed Big Six titles—the switch was sudden and included major changes in metadata and delivery that severely affected e-book distributors—from his inventory. Indeed LiVolsi said he lost access to thousands of titles, some for more than a year, because of the Agency Model switch, and in the process he said, “we lost 70% of our customers.”
LiVolsi said Books on Board was “collateral damage in the publishers' war against Amazon,” and said, “it has taken us a year to get back some of the agency titles. This is something that only affected indie retailers.” Although Agency Pricing has been cited by publishers as way to help indie e-book retailers, LiVolsi called it “a misguided move.” Indeed LiVolsi said at the time of the agency model switch, Books on Board was the #3 e-book retailer behind Amazon and B&N and ahead of Kobo. After losing thousands of titles from his catalog due to the switch, he said, “we had a very broad selection of fiction and nonfiction titles and we lost them all. I was left with mostly romance titles. I lost customers over the next year and never really got them back. We basically have had to start over. Publishers just didn’t think about how this would affect distribution,” he said.
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Diesel had the same problem.
The reports I saw back in the day were that they had trouble even getting the BPHs to start negotiating.