Discussion
My beloved fellow indie authors, if you do a scheduled price drop (especially through a third-party aggregator), be sure to check Amazon listings after the sale ends.
For some reason (greed or slopcode, who knows?) Amazon may refuse to list your book at its proper price afterward.
This has been an intermittent problem for months, growing steadily worse. Not even Bookwire (Ingram) can get a straight answer out of Amazon—in some cases, the ‘Zon (if responding at all) flat-out and demonstrably lies saying it’s price-matching to a different distribution platform.
When caught in the lie, Amazon sometimes (not always) fixes the pricing error, but it’s unclear whether they pay proper royalties on books sold during the period of improper pricing.
So take screenshots, document, and keep a wary eye.
So far it’s happened whether or not there’s territorial pricing (frex, making CAD match the USD price, as I like to do), and the length of the sale (a week, two weeks, a month) doesn’t seem to matter either.
It’s getting to the point I don’t want to do price drops AT ALL.
@lilithsaintcrow do price drops generate enough extra sales to offset the drop? I know people love sales, but they love a lot of things they won’t pay for anyway so in curious.
@lilithsaintcrow I’d seen this eye opener a few weeks ago:
https://youtu.be/5otF7Bj5LxI?si=SxEgoXuZNoeE3RLn
We Uncovered Amazon’s Scheme To Inflate Prices Everywhere
YouTube