Tuesday, April 01, 2008

One possible solution from Jerry Simmons



This morning I received the following email from Jerry Simmons of the Nothing Binding Project in response to my email to him, and all on my mailing list calling for a boycott on Amazon until this situation is satisfactorily resolved.

"Dear June,

You know me and hopefully my reputation. As a former New York publishing executive I understand what is going on behind the scenes and it’s not good news for the self-published, print-on-demand, and small publishers who use POD. I agree with your boycott and will support it, however I think you need to address the bigger issue and that is - how to overcome this problem?

We’ll not solve the issue immediately, but I do have a plan. Using my experience and knowledge of the business I’d like to make a proposal. That all self-published, print-on-demand and small publishers get all of their authors and their books placed on the website http://www.nothingbinding.com/ . Now you know my involvement in this site, it’s been my passion for a long time, and my commitment to the Independent author is unquestioned. Here is how I see it working.

All self-published, print-on-demand, and small publishers that are faced with the Amazon problem, place their titles on Nothing Binding, then that site can be the central shopping point for these books, not those of the bigger New York publishers. Let Amazon handle them and their Booksurge clients, Nothing Binding will become the focal point for the Independent and small press books. Now, since I’m not charging the authors for placement or for selling, then readers can link from Nothing Binding, back to the site of the author, publisher, or whatever account the author decides to use for distribution to sell copies. If everyone promotes Nothing Binding as the alternative, then we all win. And it’s free!

The platform is available, it’s free, what the site gets is traffic and a central location for readers to browse the smaller print books. It’s a win-win. The key is the author or publisher must be willing to discount their cover prices to come close to Amazon, that is the only way to turn traffic into sales. Readers buy books from Amazon because of price, so the key to selling more books is reducing the cover price and make it a discount. But if Amazon refuses to sell these titles, what is the alternative? This is my proposal.

I’d love your support and feedback. The only way to overcome this problem, is for the self-published, print-on-demand, small published authors to respond to this is pull their books from Amazon and immediately place them on my site. Create their own single location for book sales that bypasses Amazon and that website is http://www.nothingbinding.com/.

Thanks for reading this….

Jerry"

So, you know what to do ...

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