Amazon glitch with paperback prices

[LilyBLily]

Saw this on another discussion board and checked. Multiple of my titles have bizarre low prices on the book pages on Amazon.com currently, like $5.04 and $4.19 when their prices on KDP are $13.99 and $12.99.

I reported them on the sales pages but now also will try a direct KDP or Author Central complaint.

For most of us, paperback sales are not a big issue, and apparently this is a glitch, not a nefarious plot against us. Still, since Amazon has a tendency to do massive glitches and then first fix the situation for the people who complain, maybe you all should check some of your paperback prices on the sales pages.

Edited to add: I did a live chat and they say they are working on the issue. At least they aren't denying it.

[notthatamanda]

I see stupid looking prices when they mark the paper books down to get rid of them and match the ebook prices to that. I've got a book that's ends in .21 right now.

[Bill Hiatt]

Yeah, I've seen isolate instances of this for a long time. The paperback price drops to a point below what the production cost is, so Amazon is losing money on every copy. I assume there a glitch in the discounting algorithm, but I can't be sure.

[Writer]

About half the books in my catalog aren't listed at the correct prices, but most have been increased. For example, I've got a $12.99 book they've bumped up to $21.73. Um, I wish, Amazon. Somehow, I don't think my readers are gonna pay that.

I've republished the books and will keep an eye out to see if that updates the prices. If not, I guess I'll have to email KDP.

[Bill Hiatt]

About half the books in my catalog aren't listed at the correct prices, but most have been increased. For example, I've got a $12.99 book they've bumped up to $21.73. Um, I wish, Amazon. Somehow, I don't think my readers are gonna pay that.

I've republished the books and will keep an eye out to see if that updates the prices. If not, I guess I'll have to email KDP.

That really must be a glitch. If your price had for some reason been too low (Amazon won't let you sell paperbacks at a loss), Amazon wouldn't have approved the price in the first place.

Also, Amazon always price matches down. I've never heard of it price matching up or raising a price for any reason.

[Writer]

That really must be a glitch. If your price had for some reason been too low (Amazon won't let you sell paperbacks at a loss), Amazon wouldn't have approved the price in the first place.

Also, Amazon always price matches down. I've never heard of it price matching up or raising a price for any reason.

Yep, it's probably a glitch and I'm seeing other authors reporting it too. All the books are priced well above the cost of print and none are being sold outside Amazon, so there's no apparent reason for the prices to have changed. Republishing didn't fix it, so now I guess I get to email them a long list of all the books needing their pricing corrected.

[She-la-te-da]

Been a lot of complaining about it over on the KDP forums. My guess is, something Amazon did ended up not working right. Doh. Like that's never happened. :D

[LilyBLily]

I gave Amazon a week to fix things. Last night I manually changed the prices on the paperbacks to the correct ones, first making sure I actually changed the foreign ones by a few cents and added an extra digit to the U.S. price before "fixing" it.

The result? None of the paperback prices have changed. They're still random numbers like $10.03, $5.21, and $5.55.

Meanwhile, I note that one of the books involved now has exactly the same wrong price as the print book: $4.18.

The glitch continues, and may be getting worse.

(Two days ago I also discovered that Amazon had reverted the regular price of another book to the sale price it had in September during my ill-fated BookBub event. Amazon did correct this price yesterday. I can't say for sure that this was Amazon's fault, since Kobo had not changed the sale price back to the normal one and I had to manually change it several days ago. Amazon may have been price matching.)

[Bill Hiatt]

I'm sorry to hear that. There is a lot of activity on the KDP forum on this topic (four or five threads, the last time I checked). It's been a couple days, but there were some people saying their prices were back to normal. The one I had that was off reverted to normal after a day or two. I take this to mean that Amazon is at least trying. Support responses have been mixed, but apparently, most of them acknowledged a problem and said it was being worked on.

Some people on the KDP forum were arguing that it might take a long time to find the source of the glitch because of how complex the code must be. I'm no programmer, but I couldn't help wondering if there isn't some simple routine whereby product pages communicate with some kind of database (or for self-published books, perhaps KDP dashboard data) to check prices. I guess there's no way to know.

I don't know if this is related, a separate glitch, or a decision to change the system on Amazon's part, but I notice it's no longer possible to just change prices (which I did easily only a few days ago). Now, there's an error message that tells me there's a problem requiring attention if I try to submit new prices, and I have to go back and resubmit all the earlier pages in order to make a price change. Sigh!

[alhawke]

Many of mine were being price matched up to Ingram's price. This is ironic because I set the Ingram price higher in order to avoid Amazon low-balling my books and then lowering the ebook price (I've had close calls with some of my paperbacks lowered down to $5). My paperbacks are no longer priced up. Some are still price matched incredibly low, though.

I don't know what's going on with Amazon. It's as if someone forgot their coffee one morning and it threw a wrench in the whole system. Can you imagine that? One wrong click and a million books are changed. Hmm... getting closer to dystopian, aren't we?

Amazon's been so wonky as of late. Fortunately I'm wide. Unfortunately, Amazon sells three times better than everywhere else.

[LilyBLily]

I'm sorry to hear that. There is a lot of activity on the KDP forum on this topic (four or five threads, the last time I checked). It's been a couple days, but there were some people saying their prices were back to normal. The one I had that was off reverted to normal after a day or two. I take this to mean that Amazon is at least trying. Support responses have been mixed, but apparently, most of them acknowledged a problem and said it was being worked on.

Some people on the KDP forum were arguing that it might take a long time to find the source of the glitch because of how complex the code must be. I'm no programmer, but I couldn't help wondering if there isn't some simple routine whereby product pages communicate with some kind of database (or for self-published books, perhaps KDP dashboard data) to check prices. I guess there's no way to know.

I don't know if this is related, a separate glitch, or a decision to change the system on Amazon's part, but I notice it's no longer possible to just change prices (which I did easily only a few days ago). Now, there's an error message that tells me there's a problem requiring attention if I try to submit new prices, and I have to go back and resubmit all the earlier pages in order to make a price change. Sigh!

I got that error message last night and simply refreshed the page and it went away. Try that. I did not have to go through all the rigmarole of reviewing every page. Also, Amazon claimed to have reviewed and made it live within an hour or so. But, as I found out, the glitch overrides what I can do manually.

[Bill Hiatt]

Yes, my attempt at a manual price change also failed. But Amazon did correct subsequently, which hopefully will happen for everyone else soon. I'm still not clear why this problem is so difficult to fix.

[Bill Hiatt]

Many of mine were being price matched up to Ingram's price. This is ironic because I set the Ingram price higher in order to avoid Amazon low-balling my books and then lowering the ebook price (I've had close calls with some of my paperbacks lowered down to $5). My paperbacks are no longer priced up. Some are still price matched incredibly low, though.

I don't know what's going on with Amazon. It's as if someone forgot their coffee one morning and it threw a wrench in the whole system. Can you imagine that? One wrong click and a million books are changed. Hmm... getting closer to dystopian, aren't we?

Amazon's been so wonky as of late. Fortunately I'm wide. Unfortunately, Amazon sells three times better than everywhere else.

That's interesting. This is literally the only time I've heard about price matching up.

I know a lot of people who use the KDP for Amazon paperback and Ingram for everywhere else. There are only two reasons to do that, one of which is to be able to sell a paperback on Amazon without having to add the extra money for a third-party distributor. (The other is so that the book always shows as in stock on Amazon.) It seems to me that if Amazon actually starts pursuing that price matching up on paperbacks, it will reduce the utility of using KDP for paper, probably leading to more people just using Ingram.

[alhawke]

It seems to me that if Amazon actually starts pursuing that price matching up on paperbacks, it will reduce the utility of using KDP for paper, probably leading to more people just using Ingram.

This is why I think it was just a glitch or error on Amazon's part. At first I thought they were doing it to make up some sort of manufacturing costs, but now it's back to pricing it low.

In the past, I've had the quality of my books be comparable with Amazon. Unfortunately, my newest release looks amazing by Ingram. The paper's thinner and the graphics are sharper. This is usually the consensus. Usually I hear writers are happiest with Ingram's quality.

I used to only release my paperbacks via Ingram. I stopped doing that after my first year publishing because the books would go "out of stock" on Amazon if sales were down. So now I publish both.

[LilyBLily]

I finally contacted Amazon again about the glitch, but this time around the CSR simply denied that the lower prices on my books had anything to do with the higher prices glitch. She said a third party site--not a pirate site--was selling my paperbacks at the lower price and Amazon had price matched. At the same time, though, she claimed that if the books sold on Amazon at that lower price I'd get the full list price royalty. I'm not sure that's accurate. Since sales of those titles in paperback are extremely rare, I decided not to argue further. I can't do anything if someone on eBay or wherever wants to sell my used paperbacks at a low price; they are within their rights to do so.

[Sleeping Cat Books]

For paperback sales of a KDP book, you'll ALWAYS earn the amount indicated in your KDP Bookshelf. Period. It doesn't matter how much the vendor sells it for. You'll get the amount shown in your Bookshelf. Note that if you have Expanded Distribution enabled, the vendor could be using that, so you'd earn the Expanded Distribution royalty amount, not the Amazon-direct amount. But it will still ALWAYS be the amount shown there.

"A customer might buy your book at a discounted price that's lower than your list price due to promotions, but it won't affect your royalties."
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834330