I Got It Cheaper at Amazon! · 11:57am Apr 26th, 2017
So you're an astute shopper and you buy your paperback books at Amazon.com – good on you! Now let me tell you about the other side of the story.
I'm in the middle of preparing a couple more paperback publications of my stories which involves a lot of work on top of the effort of writing the stories in the first place. I do all of my self-publications through CreateSpace which has a lot of clear instructions for people new to the business. It's located in South Carolina, USA, which means I don't have to pay horrendous shipping fees from Australia, and it has served me well for years. They have their own online store too, so you can order it direct from the publisher. Of course they will sell through other channels also, which naturally includes Amazon.com.
The beauty of self-publication through CreateSpace is that they do print-on-demand, which means I don't have to carry stock. It also means that I don't have to sell thousands of copies to get a royalty payment. Even if I just sell a handful, I get some nice pocket money. Let me give you an example of one that I am doing now. It's a 5.25" x 8" paperback with 490 pages. Pretty big, although not the biggest that I have done. Createspace quotes a minimum list price for the book, but you are free to set any price above that. I have set the list price at $19.95 USD. If someone buys a copy from Createspace directly, I get a royalty payment of $9.23 – a tiny step towards paying off the cost of all the art inside, but nice nevertheless. However, if you buy the same book from Amazon.com, I only get $5.24 royalty. So you say that of course they deserve their cut? Yes, except all they do is facilitate the purchase. Amazon owns CreateSpace, so they're double-dipping. That's not the only thing that irks me though. When was the last time that you bought a book there that was not discounted? I sure haven't seen any lately. Here's the zinger though – the discount comes out of the author's royalty! Amazon never discounts its cut. It's theoretically possible for me to sell a hundred books through Amazon and come away with almost nothing to show for it, depending on how deeply they discount my books. The worst thing though is that most people will only ever go to Amazon when they are wanting a book, so you have to sell through them or miss out on any royalties at all!
So next time you buy a book from Amazon.com, think of all the authors that are regularly screwed to save you a few dollars. That's business for you!
P.S. I do advertise links to all my paperback books on my website which features both MLP and Chakat Universe stories.
Hmmm... I work at Amazon, and get a 10% discount on orders fulfilled by Amazon. However, reading your post, I think that when I am ready to order some books from you, I'll ask you directly for the link to Create Space so I can buy them there.
Happy to help a friend. Now, all I have to do is wait for my Amazon stock to vest so I can sell the shares to get the spare cash required to order a brace of books. 2 more months...
Wow... I didn't know that about Amazon's discounts. That's pretty rotten. Feels close to theft actually, even if it's nowhere near it from a legal standpoint I guess.
And now it's time for the obligatory *sigh*.
It seems that many people who appreciate art and literature tend to have little money, at least that holds true for the people I know. There's a limit to how many creators one can support. I live in Denmark and have about 1700$ a month for a family of five and this country is expensive as hell. I still try and scrape money together to pay for artists and the like, 'cause art makes life that much better. Can't eat it though. For people like me it's the choice of buying books at a discount and give the author a meagre royalty, or buying no books at all.
Don't get me wrong. You have every right to be frustrated. It's the system that sucks.
This is why I hate buying the generic supermarket branded 2 litre milk for a $2, but buy the name brands that give the dairy farmers an actual profit margin for $3. On the generic brand the farmer is lucky to get a couple cents a litre but 30 to 40 cents on the name brands. The biggest trouble for farmers is they aren't paid per litre on the paperwork but per kilogram of milk solids which varies from farm to farm and deciphering the actual volume price is confusing on the contracts before they sign them in advance. If you have ever seen a tanker pickup at a dairy you always see them take a small sample of the farmers milk as they load up. This is used to determine the milk solids for this load and the farmer is then paid accordingly. Cheaper is no good for the primary producer.
I did not know that about Amazon/CreateSpace. I try to buy Furry books through Rabbit Valley. For your books though, someone was selling them at the last con I attend, I bought three because the fourth was sold out. Why is there not an ebook of Flight of The Star Phoenix? To my understanding, ebooks are almost, if not completely, pure profit. When I really love a book I have bought in ebook format, I turn around and buy the physical copy as a conversational piece. Also, I have a blind friend who reads ebooks through text-to-speach programs. i do the same thing for convenience's sake. I read more books because of TTS, than I would with my eyes alone. So again... Why aren't you selling in ebook?
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My friend, Gary, sells them for me at a couple of conventions. Both of us will be at Mephit Fur Meet in September selling our books there.
I don't know why you think that isn't available as an e-book. It has been for a while:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/395120
I have to pay state sales tax on amazon
4510709 I didn't know because I was only looking on Amazon XD This is not the first time someone has told me that Smashwords has the Furry books I want to read, so obviously, from now on, I'll make it my first place to check. I had to laugh when you mentioned Gary's name, that is from who and where I bought the books. Do you plan on holding a writing panel at MFM? At some point, I hope to ask you to sign my books.
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No, I won't be on any panels. When I'm not at the dealer table, I plan to enjoy the con purely as an attendee. I have only ever been to MFM once before, and that was at least fifteen years ago!
As for signing your books - sure! Only ten bucks a pop.
Just kidding. I'm just flattered that anyone likes my stuff bad enough to find me and get me to sign them.
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Do you have your own table, or are you going to camp out behind mine?
(You may as well; I've already got the book display stands, and I've already got the hardware to process credit-card payments. Heck, I've even got the fancy-schmancy card-reader gizmo that takes "contactless" cards, ApplePay, and AndroidPay... supposedly, anyway. No one's actually tried paying me with one of those yet... 
)
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I thought that was the plan all along. I was in no position to book a table anyway.
Anytime I buy a book, it's always through the author's site that they sell directly through because most retailers cut the author's profit to add to their own. For all of your books though, I've actually acquired all of yours in person at AnthroCon. Having them autographed by the author(you) is a big bonus to me as well. Typically an autographed thing adds to the monetary value, but this is one of those cases where the sentimental value is far greater than any monetary value the item could ever have; the autograph is a reminder that I got to actually meet the person that created something that I personally enjoy.
Speaking of which, were you still planning on attending AC this year?
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As much as I would like to do so, I can't make it this year. I'm coming over to America in August to see the total eclipse of the sun, and going to Mephit Fur Meet in September. I do plan to be back at Anthrocon next year though. Only so much vacation time and money to go around, unfortunately.
4511497 While that's a bit disappointing to hear, I totally know what you mean about limited PTO. There never seems to be enough, doesn't it? Ah well, them's the breaks.
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(You know what they say: the memory is the second thing to go. I forget what the first thing is...)
It probably was; I just couldn't remember if we'd actually decided that was the intended course of action or not.
Be aware that CreateSpace's output quality isn't as good as Lulu.com's.
(My mother helps people set up for print-on-demand and often releases the same book through both because putting a Lulu book on Amazon results in the price getting marked up twice. When you have both in your hands, the Lulu.com printings feel like they're printed on better paper and the binding feels like it'll last longer.)
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I have never had a problem with quality so far.
When I decided to make my very first book, I looked at Lulu, and put it into the too-hard basket. That was years ago, and it might have improved since then, but Createspace has always had a superior interface with creators who want to do things on the cheap and do all the work on their own.
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Our experience (I'm her technical consultant) was that CreateSpace's interface is crippled. For example, it imposes a much smaller file-size limit and provides no resumable upload mechanism (Lulu offers FTP as an alternative), so it's far less suitable to illustration-heavy books.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by too hard though... but then we have always been going with the "do all the typesetting offline and then upload an interior PDF and a full-wrap cover PDF" approach. (In fact, Lulu is more forgiving than CreateSpace when the PDF contains harmless "flaws" such as a PDF generator producing pages with transparency enabled, but not any actual transparent regions.)
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It would seem that despite the number of illustrations in my books, I have not hit that limit yet. I can imagine that things like art books would be a problem though. FTP would be a good idea. I might check out Lulu again someday, but it might be a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
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Fair enough.
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All of his book have been top quality made.
I have most of them and have gotten a lot for other people and none have been cheaply made.
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I never said CreateSpace did bad work... I just said that, when you have both in your hands together, it's clear that Lulu does noticeably better work.
That said, I take issue with the "top quality" claim. To this day, the cover art on A Different Perspective has been the camel's back-breaking straw that has kept me from even considering putting it on my "to buy" list.
It just looks too amateurish to be something I'd pay a premium to collect. (With my budget, unless I'm buying something specifically as a collectible, I get my books as paperbacks for $2.50 to $6 CA (typically $3.50 to $5 CA) at one of the the local used book shops or as hardcovers ($1 CA) or paperbacks (50¢ CA) at the local library's surplus books boutique.)
(Examples of collectibles I paid a premium for would be my second-printing copy of Past Sins and my copy of Through the Well of Pirene.)
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As it happens, I plan to replace that cover soon.
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In that case, I'll have to try to build up some breathing room in my budget. (I also collect games and a lot of my eBay watches have been switching from "multi-year dry spell" to "good deal" in recent months.)