In my experience: Amazon automatically discounts some books, a certain time after their release. I've published several through their subsidiary CreateSpace, and the two that sold more than negligible amounts were discount the same ~28%. One eventually went back to my 'retail' and the other stayed discounted.
Again in my experience, Amazon's discounts do not effect the author's take. At least in CreateSpace, the author's royalty is based on the retail price the author sets.
"Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it."
It certainly would be an interesting idea, and while it wouldn't be difficult to write them, who in their right mind would buy them, much less not demand a refund?
Multiple books are created at high but not too high prices. Stolen funds are used to buy them; (through multiple intermediaries, work from home mules being a favorite) and the profits are moved through multiple accounts as well.
The criminals don't care that they are giving a bunch of money to Amazon (it's stolen remember), they do want the funds coming out to be clean, untraceable, and usable.
The unfortunate thing being that Amazon's incentives are, in this case, aligned with those of the criminals. And while I'm sure that Amazon regularly helps law enforcement track down this sort of thing, I wouldn't doubt that there exists a temptation to not notice that sort of misbehaviour.
Sounds like this could be the plot of the next Stross book. In 2020, the ordinary tax base has almost been destroyed. Everyone channels their illegal earnings by generating and reselling Kindle books. The main character of the book is a government bot program designed to analyze books and dig through BitCoin chains to determine whether the transactions are fraudulent or genuine. But as all goods have turned to electronic form, are they even any humans at the end of these transactions? Everything changes when the computer program has to analyze (some religious/philosophical book).
I wonder if anyone has written a book from the point of view of a computer program (and not just yet another human-like AI in a strange glowing suit). Stanislaw Lem's books may be close.
Parts of _The Adolescence of P1_ by Thomas Ryan are from the viewpoint of P1, which is an AI that develops from a learning worm written for IBM mainframes by a protohacker at U Waterloo.
Taking this line of thought to it's logical conclusion, how many real "books" are actually just a simple way of laundering money? I mean, who actually buys the book by Rick Santorum?
That's a good point. Few actual people want to read Newt Gingrich's political autobiography, yet it was a New York Times bestseller based on sales. And Romney has done similar things http://www.salon.com/2010/10/15/mitt_romney_book/
I'm not sure how Amazon works; if they discount your book, and I buy it at the sale price, did you just get shafted out of some money? Or do they make up the difference?
Advantage Instructions and Rules - Updated January 29, 2008 [1]
7.2
"You, the vendor, receive 45% of the List Price. You set the List Price, also known as Suggested Retail Price, of your products, and all payments made to you are calculated based on the List Price. If Amazon.com decides to further reduce the sales price to the customer below the List Price, the customer discount comes out of Amazon.com's percentage."
Wait, Amazon takes %55 of the list price, and has control over the actual price its sold at.
Meanwhile, Apple takes %30, and you have total control over pricing.
Yet whenever the iBookstore comes up here, people go on and on about the "Apple tax" and how Apple is trying to drive authors out of business? By taking Less?
55% of MSRP, which in practice is around 30% of what Amazon actually charges since things seem to be perpetually on sale for 20-30%. More significantly, Amazon stores your stuff in warehouses and covers the costs associated with shipping the product to customers, which is significantly more expensive than storing some files in a data center.
Jobs tried to get you to make HTML5 apps for the iPhone. He even gave you nice ways to install them with their own icon and run them offline. But nooooooo, you're having none of it. No HTML5 installable apps with access to native APIs for you. You prefer to insist there's no alternative...
Excuse me if I'm incorrect here, but I believe the "Apple tax" refers to the markup on Apple hardware. That is, if you were to buy the same parts separately for a Windows machine it would be far cheaper.
Doesn't Amazon ban you for selling non-existent books? Because otherwise it has occurred to me that next time I look into buying a book, I could pretend to sell it for a really low price and wait for a bot to underbid me, so that I can buy it off the bot for very little money.
I remember reading an article before which stated that the bots are able to charge a higher price because they have a good reputation. I guess it depends on how much you want to make. Maybe the bot would pay $1 extra, but not $20 extra?
I'm afraid to. :) they might buy them bulk and I end up with a load of books. I forgot to mention this is print on demand which makes it even more silly.
Again in my experience, Amazon's discounts do not effect the author's take. At least in CreateSpace, the author's royalty is based on the retail price the author sets.