Publishing Milestone and an Inside Scoop

We have something wonderful to celebrate here at Women’s Intuition Worldwide. I’ve recently toted up the number of books in print — that’s the number of copies published by us in America and also foreign editions.

Between aura reading, face reading, and books for empaths, we’re at 204,00 and counting!

Those 25 foreign contracts help….

In America, we’re making it as easy as possible to buy my books on reading people deeper. We have a tollfree number that you can call 24/7 from the U.S. and Canada:

800-345-6665

Try it! Unless they’re having an emergency over at my fulfillment company, you’ll get a real person, not a machine. So you can ask questions, as well as simply ordering.

For online convenience, click here to order any of our books. (To help you preview them, they’re all listed below, under LINKS.)

FOREIGN ORDERS

What if you’re outside the U.S. and Canada?  It’s easy. Just order online. Recently a Japanese student complained that Aura Reading Through All Your Senses wasn’t available, for love or money, from Amazon. Other foreign readers have found that ordering from Amazon takes a very long time.

Well, Blog-Buddies, don’t turn to Amazon. You’ll get much better service by ordering directly from us. Just click here.

Or, if you would prefer to correspond directly, use this email address: Judith.Peter[at]pathwaybook.com.

SPEAKING OF AMAZON

I’m grateful to Amazon. As an independent publisher, this is my only way to have exposure that competes with the big boys, America’s five big publishing conglommerates that dominate the industry. Did you know that the big chains, like Borders and Barnes & Noble have policies that forbid them to carry books by self-publishers? True.

Amazon offers nice discounts, too. In case you’re wondering, however, let me share some perspective that you might not get just by clicking on websites and comparing prices.

Publishing is not a quick-’n-easy money industry. Amazon makes money via The Long Tail — basically, high-volume sales. Also by forcing publishers like me to give them deep discounts.

If you special order my books at a store like Borders (yes, they do allow special orders, just not having the book on its shelves where customers can discover them) or you go to a quality independent bookstore (yes, some of them still exist, thank God), the store takes a 40% discount.

Amazon? It demands a 55% discount, plus shipping. For technical reasons I won’t bother to go into here unless you’re curious, Amazon also has unique shipping requirements that quadruple the publisher’s shipping time to send every order.

Bottom line, our profit on a typical book sold directly through our website is, perhaps, $10. For a book sold at Amazon, it’s more like $3. Except it gets stranger…

AMAZING, PATHETIC, BUT TRUE

Ready for a real head scratcher? Next time you go over to Amazon.com, notice that just about every book sold is being sold new in two different ways.

The publisher sells new books, of course. These are regular copies. Often they’re heavily discounted. Amazon can afford to do this because they already demand deep discounts, have very few space limitations and, therefore, don’t need to make as much as a regular bookstore.

But “new and used” books are usually sold separately as well. Think for a minute. How can that be? For any of these  “new and used” books, zero income goes either to the publisher or author.

Second-hand books have always been sold. Hey, I have no problem with that. But name me another product where someone other than the manufacturer can get away with selling it. Without risking jail time.

Can you imagine this in any other industry? Say that you’re buying toothpaste at the store. There’s the shelf space for “Colgate Total” and next to it is another pile of “Colgate Total.” Toothpaste in these identical boxes, you find, sells for a lower price. And the profits go to “some guy who happened to pick it up for cheap.”

Where do those  “new” books sold at Amazon come from, if not the publisher? Reviewers request books and sell them via third parties. Pretty tacky, isn’t it, selling copies in competition with the legitimate publisher? I’m beginning to wonder if book printers are also getting into the act, running off extra copies and then selling them in bulk. It’s baffling, how these books end up for sale in competition with their legitimate publishers.

Some day, perhaps there will be a class action lawsuit against Amazon for selling “new” books that obviously are stolen property, one way or another. Before then, please tell your friends. Ask them to pay the extra $5, rather than rewarding this kind of sleaze.

LINKS