crap. another press release
i must have missed… :+)

-bowerbird

I am suspicious of the giant best sellers because I know all their dirty tricks.

I live in the Italian Riviera and I have wrapped my literary tentacles around booksellers who have street stalls. A book chain will often discard their newest books after six months for a song. Thse street peddlers snap them up and sell them at two- thirds their original price. They also keep a lookout for me for the great classics which have long been out of print. No, I don’t mean The Happy Hooker.

I buy many books from AMAZON because they can obtain out of print books for me as well. They are efficient, attentive and polite.

Bookstores had better start offering reading rooms, tea and coffee shops. En fin, an ambience. They need to provide SERVICE and COURTESY.

Chelsea Green’s decision was wise. If the book is marvelous the bookstores will clamor for it.

Books on politicians are usually too boring for words. Tell all books.? Tacky, Tatty and terribly written as a rule.

I can’t wait for Apple to launch en E site.

Contessa Isabella Vacani

First – does anyone think that B&N would have cancelled orders if one of the major publishers had set up this Amazon exclusive? Highly unlikely. This is what would have happened: B&N would have made an angry phone call to the offending publisher, which would have bowed and scraped in apology and offered some kind of other exclusive on another title in compensation. And none of it would ever have gone public. (Take note…in the cosmetics industry (and others,) it is utterly normal to set up retail exclusives with one vendor. The retailers are used to competing for the privilege.)

I hope B&N and any indies who are cancelling orders rethink their stance. The publicity for the book has piqued consumer interest. The disappointed customer who might not bother to seek the book elsewhere might opt instead to rent a DVD– another lost book sale in a marketplace and economy where books are increasingly viewed as discretionary items. All this inside brawling and the customer has been forgotten.

Many publishers currently offer exclusive marketing programs with retailers. The understanding is, as a publisher, that you play fair and offer one exclusive program to one retailer, and a slightly different one to another retailer in the form of author interviews, videos and so on. Going one step further into an exclusive distribution deal was inevitable. The marketing mistake Chelsea Green made was in not protecting their important relationship with B&N. A little imagination and perhaps Chelsea Green could have come up with an alternative exclusive marketing or distribution idea for bn.com (which, by the way, is currently accepting pre-orders for the book.)

It hurts my heart to see a book sale lost. Can’t we all just get along? And work harder together to find those loyal reading customers and keep them buying books?

Considering that Chelsea was quite popular with the booksellers/publishing types in Denver, it would be interesting to see their reception now. It’s unfortunate that they had to be the first small publisher to take this route and as such get slammed for it, especially when I don’t see a lot of independent options that would have been able to provide the same level of all in one service as Amazon. The idea behind using controled print on demand set up is made for the blink and you missed it moment most political books have to catch on. I wonder if they’d also offered an ebook whether or not the outcry from independents would have been as loud. Powells offers ebooks through its site and it can’t be the only one.

aren’t ebooks greeen?

isn’t green part of the publisher’s name?