I have recently been receiving an interesting, if painful, lesson in how the publishing marketplace works these days.
In my last blog post, I mentioned that, in the midst of all the great publicity I’ve gotten for The Mother Daughter Show, there was one little fly in the ointment: on the day the book was supposed to be released–the same day I got a huge PR boost with an item in The Reliable Source, the Washington Post‘s gossip column–Amazon for some reason chose to list my book as “out of print and unavailable.”
That problem has been corrected–sort of. The next morning, December 2, the status on the book’s Amazon page shifted to “ships in 1-2 months,” which was better, but not exactly enticing to anyone looking for a holiday gift. Later the status shifted to “ships in 4-5 days.” I would have preferred “ships immediately,” of course, but this was certainly a vast improvement.
Yesterday someone alerted me to the fact that the book’s status on Amazon has now gone back to “ships in 1-2 months.” And as of this writing, that’s what it says.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of books available. What, you may ask, is going on here?
Well, here’s how things work at Amazon, as best I can determine–at least when you have a small publisher, as I do: When Amazon gets an order–or a group of orders–it relays the information to the publisher, who is required to send the books to an Amazon warehouse within a few days. The cheapest way to send books is via media mail, which can take a week–or, during the holiday season, possibly longer. Then, when the books arrive at Amazon, they need to be logged in to the system, which can take a few days. Then, at last, they get sent out to customers.
This system may work fine when only a few orders come in. But when there’s high demand for a book, Amazon doesn’t have enough copies on hand to fill orders, and apparently the computer system gets nervous (I realize I’m anthropomorphizing here). Rather than saying something like, “We should be getting some books in any day now, but I can’t absolutely promise that,” it decides to hedge its bets and say something like, “ships in 1-2 months.”
This is apparently what has happened in the case of The Mother Daughter Show. Books should be arriving there any day now, if they haven’t already, but you’d never know that from looking at the Amazon page. And of course, even after those books come in, if more orders come in as well–which I hope they do–the status may well revert to the dreaded “ships in 1-2 months.”
This wouldn’t be so terrible if Amazon didn’t completely dominate the marketplace for books. I’m not necessarily blaming Amazon for this situation. I’ve been telling people they can get the book right away by ordering it through the publisher’s website–fuzepublishing.com–but it’s not clear anyone has chosen that option. People are used to ordering stuff from Amazon, and they may be reluctant to go to some website they’ve never heard of and enter their credit card information (even though you can use Pay Pal!). Amazon has made ordering online such an easy, user-friendly experience (except in the case of my book, of course) that people just naturally gravitate there.
Then there are what have become known as the brick-and-mortar bookstores–if you can still find one. In all of the United States, there is, at the moment, only one actual bookstore that’s carrying the book–Politics & Prose in Washington, DC. And right now they’re temporarily sold out of the book as well, although, again, more books are on their way. (My publisher is working on getting books into the remaining Barnes & Noble stores, but so far that hasn’t happened.)
The whole experience has brought home to me the power that Amazon wields in the marketplace. They’re kind of like God. You can’t actually talk to anyone there to get the situation straightened out. All you can do is send an email, which my publisher informs me gets routed to India. And then you pray. Sometimes they answer your prayer and fix the problem, sometimes they don’t. They move in mysterious ways.
I’ve also realized that books, as we have known them, are probably on their way out. Much as I prefer to read an actual book rather than an e-version, the fact is that there are huge costs and inefficiencies associated with printing and shipping them. All during my travails with Amazon, it’s always been possible–as Amazon cheerily reminds you on the book’s Amazon page–to download The Mother Daughter Show and start reading it on Kindle in “under a minute.” (It’s also available, through Barnes and Noble, in a Nook version as well.) The problem right now is that if you want to give a book as a holiday gift, somehow the e-version just doesn’t quite cut it. But even that may change someday.
Of course, if you’re really intent on ordering a hard copy of The Mother Daughter Show through Amazon immediately, I see there is one option: there’s a used copy available for $88.16. Technology may change, market paradigms may shift, but the American entrepreneurial spirit apparently springs eternal!