Are New Conservative Book Titles Being Surpressed?
I had a weird experience yesterday.
I went to my local Barnes & Noble looking for Ann Coulter's new book "Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole". It was just released on Monday, so I expected to have no trouble finding it, since she is a best selling author with a national radio following, making it a no brainer to stock enough copies to fill the demand.
Indeed since the same readers tend to purchase each new book from the "big names" in conservative media, each store should have a very accurate idea of what's its sales will be for this category (assuming they aren't deleting their past sales statistics to save disk space).
So what happened when I got to the store? Why I was told that all the copies had already sold out. Of course there was no empty display in sight nor any empty space on any shelf or table at the front of the store where "Adios, America" might have conceivably been on display.
When this has happened before with titles from Mark Levin and Michael Savage, I was always able to order the book to be shipped to my house at the discounted online price and pay for them in the store with cash. Before that, one used to be able to get the discount while having a book shipped to the store to avoid find a soggy box on the door stoop during a storm, but of late the rule has been that you have to have it shipped to your house to get the better deal. When that policy was changed, they introduced their "must ship to your door for the better price rule" but at least they let you buy it at your store, so your Barnes & Nobel outlet would be credited with the sale.
But yesterday, I was told that a new policy is in effect that store managers have no power to wave. If you go to their store looking for a book they don't have, and you try to order it, you will now get charged the 39% higher (in the Coulter book's case) In-Store purchase price even though you don't get to read the book until however long it takes them to fulfill the order unless you wait until you get home to buy it online leaving the company with no way to know that you had patronized their brick and mortar store (making it more likely that it will be closed by the chain).
I must not be the only person this sort of thing is happening to since many of the authors with talk shows have started long campaigns to encourage their listeners to pre-order books and phone in to report deliberate miss-shelvings, lack of availability and other dirty tricks, all of which suggests the scary possibility that the book stores are trying to suppress sales of these titles or at least space them out enough to prevent them from achieving best seller status for political reasons.
If multi-time bestselling authors with national radio followings can't get their titles to be given a fair shot at sales what hope would a first time author like me who doesn't have a syndicated talk show have in the traditional book distribution channel? What are my alternatives? How can I break into this closed market?
I went to my local Barnes & Noble looking for Ann Coulter's new book "Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole". It was just released on Monday, so I expected to have no trouble finding it, since she is a best selling author with a national radio following, making it a no brainer to stock enough copies to fill the demand.
Indeed since the same readers tend to purchase each new book from the "big names" in conservative media, each store should have a very accurate idea of what's its sales will be for this category (assuming they aren't deleting their past sales statistics to save disk space).
So what happened when I got to the store? Why I was told that all the copies had already sold out. Of course there was no empty display in sight nor any empty space on any shelf or table at the front of the store where "Adios, America" might have conceivably been on display.
When this has happened before with titles from Mark Levin and Michael Savage, I was always able to order the book to be shipped to my house at the discounted online price and pay for them in the store with cash. Before that, one used to be able to get the discount while having a book shipped to the store to avoid find a soggy box on the door stoop during a storm, but of late the rule has been that you have to have it shipped to your house to get the better deal. When that policy was changed, they introduced their "must ship to your door for the better price rule" but at least they let you buy it at your store, so your Barnes & Nobel outlet would be credited with the sale.
But yesterday, I was told that a new policy is in effect that store managers have no power to wave. If you go to their store looking for a book they don't have, and you try to order it, you will now get charged the 39% higher (in the Coulter book's case) In-Store purchase price even though you don't get to read the book until however long it takes them to fulfill the order unless you wait until you get home to buy it online leaving the company with no way to know that you had patronized their brick and mortar store (making it more likely that it will be closed by the chain).
I must not be the only person this sort of thing is happening to since many of the authors with talk shows have started long campaigns to encourage their listeners to pre-order books and phone in to report deliberate miss-shelvings, lack of availability and other dirty tricks, all of which suggests the scary possibility that the book stores are trying to suppress sales of these titles or at least space them out enough to prevent them from achieving best seller status for political reasons.
If multi-time bestselling authors with national radio followings can't get their titles to be given a fair shot at sales what hope would a first time author like me who doesn't have a syndicated talk show have in the traditional book distribution channel? What are my alternatives? How can I break into this closed market?
Are there any local bookstores left in your area?
Maybe its time you vote with your dollars by going elsewhere and let Barnes and Noble learn from the experience of lower sales.
When we are betrayed by our leaders or our favorite vendors we must take our support elsewhere or there will never be any improvement.
(I know you have already considered this, and also the option of buying from many online vendors.)