Strange glitches

Normally, when I load print and Kindle copies to Amazon, after a few days the two listings merge into one. I uploaded ‘Samuel’s Girl’ on Nov 27th 2017 and as of now, they haven’t merged. I called in tonight to check.

I searched ‘Samuel’s Girl’ and it’s not there. Odd.

I searched ‘ H K Hillman’, scroll down and it is there. Still not merged. Not only that, the print version was over £5 off at £1.58. I have no idea why, but I immediately did what any author would do and ordered five copies. I’ll report the anomaly later…

There was more strangeness today. Dirk Vleugels contacted me because his books were listed by an unknown seller on AbeBooks.com. The seller is located in Exeter and has most of the Leg Iron Books catalogue in his listings – with no mention of Leg Iron Books. I certainly don’t get anything from him, or maybe I do.

He’s listed the books in dollar prices at about twice the price of the respective Amazon listing, and charges hefty postage on top. I suspect he takes an order, buys it on Amazon, posts it to America and keeps the change.

I also suspect he hasn’t sold any at those prices so I’m not going to bother chasing him. All he’s doing is advertising for free – and if he does make a sale he’ll still have to get the book on Amazon and we (the author and me) get paid.

He’s going to be a bit disappointed if he does sell one. I’ve just put up the prices on a lot of the royalty-paying books so that’ll cut into his profits. However, I doubt he’ll get a sale. A lot of the online booksellers list books they don’t really have at insane prices just to make their catalogue look bigger. There are a few others with Leg Iron Books titles listed, but all at daft prices.

I looked into selling books direct on AbeBooks, but they want a $25 a month fee whether you sell anything or not, and they also want 8% commission on any sales on top of that. Nah, I’d need some decent turnover before I tried that. And there would be no way I could match the Amazon price so I’d be undercutting myself anyway.

Well, back to work. I’d really like to get all three of the current books out in April so I can do a bit of gardening in May.

CStM has joined the local library and has found that she can ‘borrow’ eBooks and audiobooks online. Really! You don’t have to even visit the library. Just log in, download the audiobook and listen while someone else reads it to you. This must be the ultimate in idleness!

I guess, in the future, audiobooks will be all there are. Hopefully that’s a very long time away.