European Ebook Buyers
May 13th, 2011I’ve titled this post “European” only because those are the book buyers I’ve actually corresponded with, but it’s for everybody outside Amazon’s major markets of the USA, Canada, UK, and lately Germany.
Here’s the situation: if you live on the European continent and you want to buy a book from Amazon, you get directed to the USA website, where a hefty fee is added to the price of the book. For my latest book, The Dread Hammer, the price goes up from $2.99 to $5.74–a 90% mark up. This hardly seems fair.
If any of you reading this are from other parts of the world, please let me know if the same situation applies.
I’m told this mark up doesn’t happen on Smashwords, but I haven’t put most of my books on Smashwords because of formatting issues.
So I’m very pleased to announce that early this summer, very likely at the end of June, my books will be available through a writers cooperative called Book View Cafe. If you buy through BVC, then no matter where you live you’ll be charged the same price, and the books will be available in multiple formats–and will be properly formatted!
I’ll be blogging more on BVC as my launch date gets closer, but in the meantime, please go check out the current offerings from Book View Cafe.
Posted on: Friday, May 13th, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Categories: Publishing.
May 14th, 2011 at 1:08 pm
I looked at Book View Cafe; I like that they take credit cards (I don’t do Paypal, the only option on Smashwords), but felt uncomfortable that BVC didn’t seem to have a physical presense. I deduced that they’re probably in the UK, but handing my card # over to an unknown country doesn’t seem to be a lot safer than avoiding Paypal.
May 14th, 2011 at 3:03 pm
BVC is member-run. Most members are in the USA, but not all. And Paypal does the credit card processing for them, just like on my own website. Paypal accepts regular credit cards. I haven’t had any complaints from book buyers about the payment process. In my experience, they’ve been fine.
May 17th, 2011 at 2:15 pm
“Tech Heaven” is $8.04 on com and £3.47 ($5.69) on co.uk, which is 41% higher.
May 17th, 2011 at 2:25 pm
I just checked on the UK price, and that is the list price plus 15% VAT.
The markup at the .com store is pretty discouraging–but they’ll all be available at BVC in about a month and a half.
Thanks for getting the book, Tord!