Thursday, July 12, 2007

Sale! Sale! Sale!

Once again, Amazon.com is running a "Bargain Price" on Tall, Dark & Dead, so if you're like me and you think that it's outrageous that anyone charges $14.00 for a book, now's your time to order. TDD is available for only $5.49. The Barnes & Nobel sale was over very quickly, so dare I say it? Act now!

I should warn y'all, though... I ordered a bunch of books when B&N had their sale and they were clearly books that were marked to be returned by the bookstores. They all had a black marker line on the bottom of each book, so they no longer would qualify as "new." However, given THEIR price (B&N was giving the books away at 4.00 a piece, which is way cheaper than my publisher sells them to me), I was okay with that. I've never ordered these bargain price books from Amazon.com, but given that they don't have any brick and mortar stores that would be returning books, I suspect they won't be marked up.

Also, any authors, editors, booksellers, other industry professionals or people with an insider track on the business out there reading this blog? Because I'm wondering why Tall, Dark & Dead is getting such discounts from the booksellers. Is this a good thing? I mean, I suspect it is, given that they are trying to sell them and not, say, returning them to the publisher. But... this is the third time the book has been deeply, deeply discounted (first at Amazon.com, then B&N, and now Amazon is doing it again.)

Thanks to my previous history, I'm terribly gun-shy about things like this, so if anyone has information that would assuage my freakage, I could really use it.

Sometimes I wonder how anyone ever lasts in this business.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm entirely ignorant about this kind of thing, so don't take anything I say about it too seriously. But my wild guess would be that maybe it isn't your book specifically - that maybe recently places have started taking the books they plan to return and offering them at hugely discounted prices, as a last effort to sell them. In the past couple of months, I've noticed more and more deeply discounted books on Amazon; I never used to see them, and now they're all over the place.

Anonymous said...

A lot of the big industries such as Amazon.com and B&N having teh buying rightsd to discount the books at such a low margin. Its all competition, each place has the prominently dispalyed as one of their "top-seller" and most enjoyed. I can walk in teh door of B&N and see both 'T,D & D' and 'DeadSexy' on the entrance table. Also amazon is notorious for trying to, pursae, outbid other bookstores for the "lowest" price. So, in this case I think it's a compliment!!

tate hallaway said...

I like the idea of this whole thing being a compliment. I'll go with that... :-)