We alerted you back during the summer about a new way Amazon promotes listings on book home page — see Amazon’s ‘Buy Button’ Policy Change Hurts Publishers and Authors — third-party vendors are “winning” the coveted Buy Button, but are sometimes not selling new books.
Now here’s a story about that from the New York Times that explains it better than we did — “An obscure and seemingly harmless modification to [Amazon’s] website has opened the door for some third-party sellers to deceive Amazon’s customers by selling books as “new” that may not come straight from a publisher or its wholesaler, thus depriving authors of royalties they should have earned from the sale of a new book.”
You can learn more from the Independent Book Publishing Association (IBPA) at ibpa-online.org or email the IBPA Advocacy Committee at [email protected].
