Beyond Niche Marketing: The Problem with Booksurge

Optimizing Amazon wants authors and publishers to "simmer down" over the strong armed tactics being used by Amazon to promote their POD publishing service... BOOK SURGE.

Here's the story:

Amazon bought POD publisher Booksurge a few years ago and Amazon has been quietly "pushing" the Booksurge PO service.

POD stands for "print on demand". Instead of publishing a book "traditionally" and printing 5,000 or more copies of the book, POD allows publishers to print books as they're sold. There are two "wholesale" options for POD publishing... INGRAM and BOOKSURGE.

Publishers who use INGRAM's services are able to offer POD books for sale via traditional book stores. For example, if you went into Barnes and Nobles and ordered my book Beyond Niche Marketing, Barnes and Nobles could order the book from Ingram and have it delivered to your local Barnes and Noble store in a relatively timely fashion.

Had I chosen Booksurge as my POD printer, that would NOT be an option. Any book buyer who tried to purchase my book through Barnes and Noble would be told it wasn't available. UGH!

That's one problem with Booksurge. The other problem is actually bigger. Authors and publishers who have used Booksurge are often barraged with complaints about the book quality. Frequent issues include pages being printed upside down, pages which fall out of the book and covers that are printed off center are frequent complaints.

Now remember, when Booksurge prints your book, their name doesn't appear ANYWHERE on the book. Your publisher's name appears and some readers will voice their complaints about the book's quality there... but the number one place to complain about a book's quality is... you guess it.... to the author whose name appears LOUD AND PROUD on the book's cover.

Which is why authors and publishers, in general, have chosen NOT to use Booksurge for POD publishing.

The beauty of a free market is that publishers and authors have a CHOICE in the POD publishing service they used.

However, Amazon has decided to embrace "strong armed tactics" to force publishers to use their POD publishing service. Angela Hoy reports on her Writer's Weekly website

When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

So that's the deal. Booksurge does a CRAPPY job of providing POD publishing services. Instead of fixing the problems with Booksurge, Amazon has decided to flex it's retail muscle and threaten authors and publishers with the removal of the buy button if they don't use Booksurge.

There is no promise of better service or better quality... just the threat that your number one sales channel will be shut down if you don't use the service.

Here's a list of over 100 sites reporting on the story. Visit the post at Easy Author Websites to add yours to the list.