The price authors submit for publication is a Suggested Retail Price (SRP). Online retailers like Chapters and Amazon can price books to their discretion, and while listed prices will usually reflect what is submitted, sometimes retailers will list it for higher.
- Note: the royalty amount is always based on the SRP, regardless of how a retailer prices the book. For example, if the royalty is $5 on a book with an SRP of $20, the author will still receive $5 in royalties no matter whether the retailer sells the book at $30 or $10.
Ingram makes your book available to over 39,000 retailers, and some of these retailers will also list your book on Amazon, which are known as third-party resellers. You can find out which resellers are listing your book by clicking on the “# used from… ” or “# new from… ” links underneath the listed prices to the right of the cover image on your book's Amazon retail sites.
Major retailers will generally select prices that are very close to if not exactly your suggested retail price. On the other hand, most third-party resellers listing on Amazon will sell books at inflated prices, in order to increase the retailer cut they will receive if someone buys the book from them.
Sometimes on your book's Amazon listing, a third-party reseller may be listed as the default seller rather than Amazon itself, as shown in the image below. In this example, the book's SRP may actually be $19.99, but a reseller's inflated price is being shown instead.
Amazon refers to this as the “Buy Box” and there is a constant, automated competition between retailers to have their listing displayed there, which is based on a combination of clicks, purchases, and reviews. So it is not a glitch or something Tellwell can control, it simply means most people have clicked on, purchased, and/or reviewed the book that was listed by the retailer currently shown next to “ships from and sold by” in the “Buy Box” on the right.
This often happens when a reseller is the first to list a book, rather than Amazon itself. With time, you should see customers choosing to purchase the book through the lower price offered by Amazon, and the listing should show "Ships from and sold by Amazon".
- See also: Why is my book out of stock on Amazon?
The bottom line is that third-party resellers may list books at varying price and shipping cost points, and Tellwell has limited control over book price, shipping cost and availability on retail websites. Remember, the actual retail price shown on any website does not change the royalty agreed to with Ingram or KDP based on the suggested retail price(s) – because all retailers place their orders through the distribution channels (Ingram or Kindle Direct Publishing) included in your publishing package.
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