Hachette and Amazon

I’m sure for most of you book industry people, or REALLY avid readers, you will already know about the disagreement between my lovely publisher, Hachette, and Amazon.com (that is, so far at least, just the Amazon in the USA).

A few scant weeks after I was squeeing about my lovely book covers and blurbs being up on Amazon, they took all my e-books and my pre-order buttons away.

Suddenly I was deluged with questions like, “did your publisher change their mind?” (something I’m perpetually fearful of!), “What did you do to piss off Amazon?” (nothing except spend roughly a third of my income on their site – STILL!), “What is the gross national debt of Berkina Faso?” (it exists, look it up.) and others I had no good answer for.

For those who don’t know, pre-order buttons are gold to an author. If loads of people pre-order a book, and then download it (if it’s an e-book) on the day it releases it can give the book a nice bump up the rankings…and the higher in the rankings it goes, the more people see the book in searches and on lists.

Truth is, there is nothing we can do about it. If Amazon is happy to exist not selling J.K Rowling’s books, what hope do the rest of us have? In the meantime though, if you like supporting debut authors, I encourage you to go find Kennedy Ryan’s debut WHEN YOU ARE MINE, which launched just a couple of weeks after Amazon whipped away the pre-order buttons.

As far as I’m concerned, I can only hope that Hachette and Amazon have settled their differences by the time my book comes out in August. Mean time, if you want a paperback of any of my books, and you care to pre-order, please go here, or here if you are all Apple-y and would like to read my debut novella in e-book. Thankfully there are many booksellers who are discounting Hachette books in response to Amazon’s hardball tactics.

So far, Amazon in the UK are still playing nice, and pre-order buttons are still up…fingers crossed that lasts. But, in the following months, I will try to spotlight a few Hachette debut authors who are also launching without a pre-order button!