Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Need help waking up Amazon's price match again...

Publishing and Marketing
#1

So, for whatever reasons Amazon uses to determine things, they’ve stopped price-matching my ebook Six Impossible Things and have it back at 99 cents. 9_9

If you guys have a minute to do me a quick favor, please go to the Amazon page above, and under the section “Product Details,” there’s a link to “tell us about a lower price.” Click that, put in the price as 0.00, and provide one of these links to the free book on B&N or Kobo:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/six-impossible-things-renee-carter-hall/1111649453
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/six-impossible-things-1

It should also be free on iBooks, but I don’t have the direct link for it, so if you use iBooks, you could always provide that link instead. I don’t know which ebook retailers Amazon pays the most attention to price-wise anymore, but I’m hoping if enough people do this with whatever links, this should get it back to being free on Amazon.

Thanks very much in advance. :slight_smile:

#2

Amazon currently says your link to “Impossible Things” is null-- a dead URL. Tried three times, in Firefox on an Apple.

#3

sigh That’s what I get for copy-pasting from FA, that truncates how the URLs are displayed. >_< Thanks for telling me. Here’s the actual working link:

I corrected it in the previous post – as well as the B&N link, which had the same problem.

#4

And it’s back to free again. Thanks, everyone!

#5

Looks like it’s back to 99 cents again, so help is appreciated again (see original post). At this point, I’m getting very tempted to just let Amazon keep it at 99 cents, remove all the Amazon links to it from my website/blog, and tell people to get their free copy from Smashwords, but we’ll see.

#6

I was only allowed to poke it on Amazon UK…let me know if that does anything helpful :slight_smile:

#7

I don’t know if it’s ever been free on Amazon UK or not, so that’ll be especially nice if it hasn’t. Thanks. :slight_smile:

#8

There have been rumors that Amazon is going to start doing something about the people who use price matching to do permafree on their systems. One rumor was that they were going to stop matching to 0, the other was that they were going to stop carrying stories that did it.

Don’t know if these are true or not, but it is something that’s been passed around the last few months, so I would say to keep an eye on the Amazon policy pages, in case they do decide to make any changes.

#9

Thanks for the heads-up. I don’t get their problem with permafree (since the storage of such works must be a drop in the bucket for them), but given that they don’t make any money off them directly, it’s not surprising they’d figure out some way to get rid of them, especially now that they’ve ditched their free cloud storage too.

#10

Looks like it’s back to free now (on the US site, haven’t checked UK yet). Thanks, everyone! :slight_smile:

#11

And it’s back at 99 cents now. I’m tired of dealing with it, so I think I’m just going to let it stand at 99 cents on Amazon and free on Smashwords. If people don’t want to deal with sideloading and absolutely have to have it direct from Amazon, they can pay 99 cents for that convenience, I guess. :confused:

#12

Near as I can tell, they’ve removed even the place where I can report a lower price. Want me to review it and point out the lower price elsewhere there? Or maybe even better, enter it as a “question”?

I’d offer anyway, but also have selfish motives. I currently have a book they don’t want to lower to free as well and may very well soon be posting a similar request.

#13

From what I’m seeing, the “tell us about a lower price” link is still there under Product Details. I didn’t follow the process through, but the window that opens looks the same as it did before.

#14

Sorry, missed it the first time. Reported!

If anyone wanted to report that

is free at

and

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/early-byrd-phil-geusz/1122232980?ean=2940152002782

I’d be grateful.

(I haven’t announced these books officially yet because we’re replacing the covers and the price isn’t “free” on Amazon yet.)

#15

Looks like “Six” is back to 99 cents again:

If anyone feels like reporting the lower price (free) from

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/six-impossible-things-renee-carter-hall/1111649453
iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/six-impossible-things/id543144862
Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/six-impossible-things-1

it’d be appreciated, to see if they’ll eventually put it back to free.

#16

I gave it a report, so hopefully it’ll pass through.

The perma free trick works less with Amazon these days because they’ve figured out that authors are using it to try to control the pricing, so that is what you’re bumping up against unfortunately.

Still, if it happens often enough it’ll eventually take hopefully.

#17

They should just go ahead and allow 1 title at a time per KDP account to be priced as free. It’d probably be fewer titles overall that they’re not getting money on, and a whole lot easier for everyone involved.

Anyway, here’s hoping. Thanks for the report. :slight_smile:

#18

I’m still trying to figure out if something’s officially changed in Amazon’s price-matching policy, but everything I’m getting is so anecdotal, and I tried looking on the KDP forums for info there, but every thread about permafree books just degenerated into people arguing over whether you should give stuff away. 9_9 One person said you couldn’t do permafree after March 1, 2015, but someone else asked where they got that info from and there was never a reply. (Besides, I know they were still doing it after that date, based on Six’s price being matched last May.)

Really helpful forums over there. Lovely atmosphere, too. [/sarcasm]

I found one suggestion on a writer’s blog that you should use the “help” feature to contact Amazon directly and ask for a price match, and that that’s far quicker than the “report a lower price” option – but then I also read elsewhere that Amazon has removed books or even threatened to shut down people’s accounts for price-match requests, so at this point I don’t know what the deal is, and I can’t find anything dated recently enough to depend on the information.

shrug Unless anybody knows anything different, I guess I’ll leave well enough alone at this point…

#19

I second your take on the forums over there.
When I put the first in my indie series on price match free, I just had people report that they’d seen it for less elsewhere and then put in 0.00 for price. It took awhile to kick in, but hasn’t dropped out yet. (knocking on wood a lot here).
I would be afraid to try the help line method, but then, I’m a real chicken about stuff like that.
And the rumors are diverse and many. :slight_smile:
I suspect we’ll see on March 1 when the panicky social media storm starts.