It is an odd world I find myself in these days. In May 2017 my little novella The Adamantine River Passage was released by Urban Farmhouse Press.
It was originally priced at $17, a little high in my opinion, but as the author I don’t get to set the price. In September though I noticed the price began dropping. A little bit at first, from $17 to $15. I knew my book sales weren’t stellar, so I just assumed my publisher was lowering the price in the hopes of giving them a little boost. Because I was pretty busy with other projects I put it on the back burner of my brain for a while. Then in December I noticed my book was down to $3. At this point I freaked out and shot off a WTF e-mail to my publisher. They assured me that Amazon was responsible. They said Amazon had over purchased for X-mas and were now trying to dump my book in hopes of selling other titles (presumably more expensive ones) listed on their site with my book. Fair enough, I think. As of today, Feb 11, 2018 my novella is selling for $1.89, which doesn’t exactly scream “Quality Read Here!”.
I understand the concept of loss leads, but it still feels like a raw deal to me though. I’m pretty sure if I bought 20 copies of Stephen King’s latest book from Amazon at $14 a pop and then started selling them out of the trunk of my car for say $5 with a deal for my own novella on the side for every copy bought I’d be in thrown in jail pretty quickly.