After our good #FutureChat exchange about the recent protests of Amazon’s negotiating tactics, one of our FutureBook community members noticed that the #UK’s “Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store” ranking seemed to be top-heavy with a group of Amazon Publishing titles.
In fact, these titles doing so well on the list were all books published by Amazon Publishing imprints. And they were the same titles, in fact, that the mobile-service company EE was offering in a free-Kindle-ebook promotion.
This was a good tip. And when I reached Amazon’s folks about it, they were forthright and honest in responding: something was causing the giveaway downloads of the 10 titles in the promotion to be incorrectly counted as sold copies, not free ones. The company was working on a fix right away relative to this promotion, which was concluding over the weekend.
It was a minor incident, of course, but one indicative of how easily things can go awry at times when automation handles so many tasks — in this case, distinguishing (or not) between an actual paid copy of a book and a freebie.
I remembered, though, something that the Pennsylvania-based author Chuck Wendig had said during our #FutureChat that day. We had been talking about potential over-dependency by some authors on Amazon.
Read the Full Story at The FutureBook
Join us each Friday for a #FutureChat session with The Bookseller’s FutureBook community. We’ll be live on Twitter, at 4 p.m. London time, 11 a.m. New York time, 8 a.m. Los Angeles, 5 p.m. Berlin, 3 p.m. GMT.
By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: #FutureChat recap: Multi-track issues
Read the full post at: FutureBook.net
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