Amazon’s e-book pricing hurts international customers

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Cora

David Gaughran, an Irish indie author living in Sweden, offers this must-read post about Amazon adding a two dollar surcharge for international e-book customers. This two dollar surcharge applies to e-books purchased in all countries except the USA, UK, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.

I knew that Amazon charges 15% VAT for e-books purchased in the EU, because I noticed that the prices for Pegasus Pulp books on the Amazon UK and Amazon Germany sites were higher than the prices I had set. How Amazon arrives at the 15% rate I don’t know, because it does not match the VAT rate either in Germany (7% on books as well as food, pet food, cut flowers* and hotel accommodation, 19% on everything else) or the UK (no VAT on print books, but 17,5% on e-books, because e-books are not considered books in the eyes of the British law). And if you live in the EU and believe that charging different VAT rates on print and e-books is unfair, here is a petition to the European Parliament you can sign.

However, while I knew that Amazon charges 15% VAT in the EU, I did not know about the two dollar surcharge Amazon demands from e-book customers outside the eleven countries listed above. Most people inside the “favoured eleven” don’t know this, because we only see the regular list price (plus VAT, where applicable).

Like David Gaughran, I believe that this two dollar surcharge for international customers is deeply unfair. Especially as the very same international customers are already hit disproportionately by shipping costs, a situation that will probably get even worse now Amazon has bought the Book Depository, the only online bookseller to offer free worldwide shipping. Never mind that unlike with physical shipping, there are no extra costs to delivering e-books overseas.

I also feel bad for people outside the favoured eleven countries that have bought Pegasus Pulp e-books. I know of at least one customer in Italy, there may be others.

As for the solution, at some point Pegasus Pulp e-books will be available at Smashwords, which does not charge customer two dollars for daring to live somewhere else than in certain favoured countries. I’ve held off from uploading my books to Smashwords so far, because Smashwords still only accepts Word files (formatted in a very specific way) rather than mobi or epub files, which means that after investing a lot of work into formatting my e-books to make them look as good as possible, I will have to reformat the stories once again to get a product that does not look nearly as good. Nonetheless, at the moment Smashwords is the only way to get into the smaller Diesel, Kobo, Sony, etc… stores as well as into the Barnes and Noble Nook store, because Barnes and Noble is still not open to international indie authors in another case of random regional limitation. I will see if I can get into the Apple iBookstore on my own – a distant relative and former translation client now works for Apple‘s marketing department, so I have an in.

In the long run, I will probably also offer my e-books for sale right here at the Pegasus Pulp site. However, this requires a bit of research regarding shopping cart functions, the terms of service of my ISP and how the VAT issue works when selling from my own site. I’d probably have to draft AGB, that is Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen or general business conditions in English, which are required for online stores.

Anyway, I would like to apologize to all international customers for the higher prices, but that is outside my control.

*Nobody really understands why cut flowers are considered so essential to the lives of the German people to merit a reduced VAT, but for some reason they are.

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Cora becomes internet famous – and some indie publishing links

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Cora

My main blog at www.corabuhlert.com experience a huge visitor avalanche and got as many views in two days (and one of those days is not yet half over) as in the previous three months. The reason why is explained here and here.

Alas, so far my sudden internet fame has only resulted in slight sales increase.

And now for some indie publishing links:

Kevin J. Anderson discusses e-book pricing. Found via Jay Lake.

The Toronto Globe and Mail wonders whether the rise of e-books will influence the way stories are told and written.

Tobias Buckell posts some intermediate result of selling short stories as 99 cent e-books.

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Indie publishing links for the weekend

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Cora

Shape No. 8, the latest Pegasus Pulp e-book, launched yesterday, so check it out.

And now for some indie publishing links:

Dean Wesley Smith also responds to that Wall Street Journal article and also dispells the myth that a traditionally published book is automatically a book of high quality. The important point here is that there are many reason why a manuscript is rejected and a lack of quality is just one of them.

Paul Jessup offers some cautionary notes on the possibilities of e-publishing and mourns the gradual death of the advance among small e-publishers.

Justine Musk, whose blog Tribal Writer offers a great mix of creativity and marketing focused articles, has a post which among other things states that the answer to the question indie or traditional publishing might well be “both”.

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Our latest e-book

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Cora

I’ve got another short story available in e-book form.

Shape No. 8 coverCourier duty is not really one of spy extraordinaire Carrie Ragnarok’s top ten assignments. Ferrying an object from point A to point B – that’s stressful, but not very exciting. Not even if the object in question is Shape No. 8, a hideously ugly and extremely expensive sculpture by obscure Bulgarian artist Vassily Bagdanorowsky worth 2.8 millions dollars. But an unexpected mugging can spice up even the dullest courier job…

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For more information, visit the dedicated Shape No. 8 page.
Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon UK or Amazon Germany.

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The Header Image Explained

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Cora

In case anybody is curious about the header image, it is photograph of a bookshelf in my parents’ living room. I picked the photo for the vintage bookclub editions with their ornamented leather spines, which simply look a lot prettier than the random paperback assembly on my own shelves. And since the books are obviously forty to fifty year old books in German, it is not very likely that someone might mistake them for the actual books offered for sale here at Pegasus Pulp.

From left to right, you can see three books by German writer Otto Flake, who is forgotten nowadays (due to sympathizing with the Nazis) but was a bestseller in the 1920s and 1930s and admired by writers as famous as Heinrich Mann and Kurt Tucholsky, The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson (who also collaborated with Joseph Campbell of hero’s journey fame), several novels by Louis Bromfield (my Mom was a big fan), the Mogador saga by French writer Élisabeth Barbier, the most famous novel by Nicolas de Crosta, two novels by the politically problematic Clemens Laar (another Nazi), a whole bunch of books by Utta Danella who is one of the most popular German writers of the postwar era, The Bastard by Brigitte von Tessin and – only half glimpsed – The Story of San Michele by Swedish doctor and writer Axel Munthe. On the far left, you can also see a dancer figurine that once belonged to my grandma.

By the way, I find it deeply troubling that the biggest German bookclub (their editions are ubiquitous at used book shops and flea markets) was reprinting works by writers who had been Nazis (it may be possible to excuse Flake as an opportunist, but not Laar. Nicolas de Crosta’s novel about the glories of old Prussia is somewhat suspicious as well and the Internet has almost nothing on him) well into the 1950s and 1960s. Especially since many of the younger readers of those days probably had no idea that they were reading former Nazi writers.

My Mom was stunned when I told her that she had books by Nazis on her shelf. She told me that many of the books had been “pick of the month” books pushed by the book club – that’s why she bought them. The books themselves left no impression on her, since she couldn’t remember anything about them.

Still, Germany’s biggest book club of the postwar era – and coincidentally the foundation for one of the so-called Big Six (hey, it’s an indie publishing blog, so I can bash the Big Six on occasion) – was actively pushing books by potential Nazis.

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Some responses to that Wall Street Journal article

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Cora

Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes a great response to that Wall Street Journal article I linked to yesterday.

David Gaughran offers another great takedown of the Wall Street Journal piece. He also has a series on indie publishing for international writers that is well worth the read.

I’m not sure whether Elizabeth Ann West’s rant is a direct response to the Wall Street Journal article or simply a blanket response to the many similar articles that are popping up in many of the more traditional media outlets.

Mike Stackpole takes on the crap issue as well.

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The mainstream media discovers indie publishing and is not amused

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Cora

The explosion of digital indie and self-publishing (no one seems quite sure what to call it yet) has also caught the attention of the mainstream media, as evidenced by a couple of articles that have appeared recently.

At the Guardian, Harriet Evans worries about the lack of editing of many self-published e-books.

Meanwhile at the Wall Street Journal, Eric Felten worries about readers drowning in a sea of self-published crap once all the gatekeepers of traditional publishing are gone. The concerns about spam e-books are valid, but Eric Felten goes overboard condemning indie authors. And whatever he thinks of Amanda Hocking’s literary qualities, plenty of people love her books.

Joe Konrath responds to the Wall Street Journal articles and others like it here

Besides, there are plenty of reasons why books and stories fail to find a home in traditional publishing and “It’s crap” is just one of them. Books are not published because a previous book by the same author did not sell as well as hoped. Books are not published because a genre or subgenre is considered dead. Books are not published because they don’t fit into existing genre classifications. Books are not published because they are too short or too long. Books are not published because it is believed that books by women or writers of colour or writers from outside the US/UK/Canada don’t sell. Books are not published because it is believed that books set outside the US or at any time period other than the English Regency or with protagonists of colour or explicitly religious protagonists or non-aristocratic heroes don’t sell. Books are not published because a character violates some kind of taboo. Books are not published because they have a first person present tense narrator or because the plot is non-linear and so on…

Are many unpublished books unpublished for a reason? Of course. Sturgeon’s Law applies to indie e-books as well, though the percentage of crap may be closer to 95 percent. But you’ve still got the other five percent.

Never mind that not all authors going the indie route are untried amateurs. Plenty of writers are reissuing their out of print works. There are authors who were dropped by their publishers and some, like J.A. Konrath or Barry Eisler, who simply prefer the freedom and higher royalties of indie publishing.

Besides, the good stuff will rise to the top, while the crap will quickly and quietly vanish.

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The Pegasus Pulp flyer makes its debut

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Cora

Because I attended a literary event, namely a newleaf poetry reading, tonight, I printed up a couple of Pegasus Pulp flyers to distribute at the reading. That is, I did not hand them out (because bothering audiences at somebody else’s event is wrong), I just put a pile on the bookstall.

A few of them were picked up and at least one person asked me if I was “the Cora from those flyers”. The leftover flyers went into the newleaf bookstall box with all the magazines and posters and bookmarks and other promo stuff for future events.

I don’t actually think that I will sell a lot of books via those flyers, but it is nice to have something to hand out during physical events. Never mind that having an actual catalogue – even if it is only a trifold flyer I whipped up in MS Word – makes Pegasus Pulp seem a lot more legit.

I have some observations about the reading itself up at the Cora Buhlert blog and there will also be a formal write-up at the newleaf website at some point.

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The Pegasus Pulp Launch

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Cora

The Pegasus Pulp launch was a lot more successful than I could have hoped for, because I sold nine books (and made approx. five dollars) on the first day. So far, Rites of Passage seems to be my bestseller.

The amount of attention Pegasus Pulp has been getting on its first day was largely due to Sherwood Smith who plugged Pegasus Pulp on her livejournal. Thanks a lot to Sherwood and to everybody who bought the books.

I also printed up copies of the Pegasus Pulp flyer I designed to distribute at the newleaf Summer Season reading tomorrow.

Finally, Rosario let me know in a comment that the sample she had downloaded for Outlaw Love seemed unusually long for a short story. I downloaded the sample myself and didn’t have any issues. However, when first uploading the e-books I accidentally clicked the wrong category for Outlaw Love and had to go back to edit it, whereupon Amazon promptly put the e-book on review again, so any issues might have been caused by that.

If anybody else notices any formatting issues or typos, please let me know. It is my aim to make Pegasus Pulp e-books look as good as possible, but mistakes happen.

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Open for Business

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Cora

It has taken a while, but Pegasus Pulp is finally open for business. If you want to know more, visit out About us and FAQ page.

You can also visit Cora’s website and blog for regular updates.

Finally, we are launching with the following three e-books for sale:

The Other Side of the Curtain, a thrilling spy tale set in East Germany in 1966

Outlaw Love, a tale of hangings and lesbian bandits in the Old West

Rites of Passage, a coming of age story set in a pirate society on a world with two moons

Buy our books at Amazon.com, Amazon UK and Amazon Germany with more formats coming soon. If the books are not yet live, please be patient and check back tomorrow.

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