Sci-Fi, fantasy and speculative Indie Authors Review discussion

I'm wondering if anyone knows why Amazon tinkers with the US selling prices. I priced my new novel at $4.99. Amazon sold a few for $4.91, and the latest sale was for $4.04. And, yes, my royalties drop with the price drop. Is this a glitch?--or something they do it for a reason?

Oh wow, I definitely need to know more about this. I'm getting ready to publish on Amazon right now.

Are you looking at the product page or your sales report? Sales report will show the amount charged after the delivery fee. If your book is in the 70% royalty pool, you have a delivery fee based on the size of the file. For most books, this is around ten cents. That would explain the $4.91. The lower $4.04 is a bit baffling and all I can tbink is that another outlet discounted the book and someone got the competitor price on Amazon.

I'm looking at the sales report downloaded from the sales dashboard. The columns are Av. List Price Without VAT (n/a because it's US) and Av. Offer Price Without VAT. Both show $4.04 and $4.91 for some sales, whereas most sales show $4.99. Av. Delivery Cost is 0.1 in all cases. You may be right about competitor pricing--maybe only in certain areas of the country--but even though I'm also on Smashwords, no one is supposed to be discounting, as far as I know.

It could also be a person from another country downloading off the U.S. site. That usually causes a royalty loss as "selected territories" cost more to deliver or convert the currency. That sort of thing.

Kara wrote: "It could also be a person from another country downloading off the U.S. site. That usually causes a royalty loss as "selected territories" cost more to deliver or convert the currency. That sort of..."

Hadn't thought of that. I'll probably ignore it unless the price gets too low, and then I'll ask them about it. The difference in royalties on the low sale was 68 cents--substantial if it becomes a habit.

The non US sales off .com should just drop the royalty to the 35% tier, unless that's changed. I haven't actually run across one of those in more tham a year. Lookimg at mine, my offer price occasionally drops by a penny, but that seems to be whenever I run a free promo.
I'd take a screen shot and send it to support for clarification.

Another thing to watch out for is price-matching. If you sell for less on another site, Amazon may drop their price to match, without telling you. There's a minefield in Google Play Books, if you publish there. They take your selling price and arbitrarily slash it by about 30%, which will feed through to Amazon if they make the connection. It's complicated out there.

Amazon continues to discount my book; the last one sold for $4.13. I sent them an inquiry, and indicated that I have not been informed of any other retailer discounting the book, and I'd like to know why they were doing it.

Okay, this is current sales? If so, where are you seeing this info? I thought you were reading the sales report from last month. My dashboard only gives me live updates of orders. I can't see what they sold for until the report comes out.

If you scroll down below the graph for the books ordered you see the royalty totals for the period from each marketplace. Below that is a button you can click on to generate a report. The report pops up on an Excel spreadsheet, and you can choose to view orders or royalties. When I view royalties it shows the prices sold and the royalties on each sale. I can confirm this for part of the period by scrolling back up and clicking on the Prior Six Weeks' Royalties. This shows the book selling at an average $4.99 from Jan. 18 to Jan. 24, and an average $4.96 from Jan. 25 to Jan. 31. This average will fall even lower when the first week of Feb. kicks in with the lower average sale prices.

How odd. I just generated a report and only one of my sales is odd. It indicates a 35% meaning it was a non US sale. The list price is $2.99 but it shows the average offer price to be $4.99, yet the royalty is $1.05, which is 35% of the list price. Everything else is either the same or adjusted for GBP, Euros, or CAD.
Your list price on Amazon doesn't show a discount either. This is rather strange. I hope they have an explanation.

The initial response I got wasn't too promising: it began, "Hello, Celia." Then it went on to describe how they were going to fix a problem with a book that wasn't mine--probably Celia's. But I did get another response at the same time, actually addressed to me and mentioning my problem. They said it would be routed to the proper person for a response. Maybe I'll find out what's going on--if THEY know.

So you could say, they're breaking your heart and shaking your confidence daily?

Sorry, I know the song is 'Cecelia,' but I couldn't resist.

Oh dear, now you've dropped than tune into my brain. It'll be there for a while!

Evil deed for the day is done.

I'm immune to that song.

But I've seen some pretty strange things on my amazon dashboard.

For example, I've seen cases where they'll report a sale in the US of one of my short stories...which is FREE! How can someone buy a free book from the US site for $0.99?

They did get back to me, but only to tell me that they're pleased to say that the price on Amazon is still $4.99. I told them where the problem shows up and sent them a screenshot of the prior royalties that show the markdown.

This is their response: "I hope this email finds you well. I'll be more than glad to assist you today.
I can confirm that the prices shown on the report are correct.What happens is the price of your book can change depending on some factors from the customer directly, that affects the average list price of your book; please allow me to explain a bit more about it.
Royalties paid under the 70 percent option are calculated off of your list price, unless we sell your book at a price below the list price to match a third party's price for a digital or physical edition of the book, or Amazon's price for a physical edition of the book. In that case, the royalty will be equal to 70 percent of the amount equal to the price at which we sell the book, less the delivery costs.
Your sales report will show the weighted average of the price at which we sold your book, so that you are able to determine the royalties due.
Our reporting does not specify what other sales channels price matches occur with, or the individual sales prices of each unit sold.
Please visit the link below for more details on the 70 percent royalty option: http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing..."

This appeared to tell me nothing. I answered with this:
"Your response told me a lot of things I already knew, but said nothing about why the US price of my book is being discounted, sometimes by nearly a dollar. I've already checked; the book is not being discounted in any other markets that I could confirm online, so that would seem to remove price matching as a reason. The only other reason for showing a sale price lower than the price I set is that many of the books were sold to foreign countries that have a VAT or other tax, and that the tax is being deducted from the price before computing the royalty. This is all well and good, but I have no way of confirming it. I contacted you in the hopes that you could confirm it, or explain it clearly. That appears not to be the case."

If it's the VAT tax, I'm wondering why it appeared only in later sales, and seemed to escalate as sales progressed.

Huh. If it says the sales were in the .com market and the royalty is 70%, they are US sales and not subject to tax. Sounds like someone has your book discounted somewhere. Richard's suggestion of Google seems the likely culprit if you distributed there.

Christina wrote: "Huh. If it says the sales were in the .com market and the royalty is 70%, they are US sales and not subject to tax. Sounds like someone has your book discounted somewhere. Richard's suggestion of G..."

I uploaded to only Smashwords and Amazon. Smashwords doesn't list Google as a distributor, and I checked all of the distributors they do list, and the price was where it was supposed to be on all of them. I checked Google, and found it impossible to search effectively, but I saw no indication that my book was listed.

Ken, something I noticed when I was glancing through the affiliates information - have you checked on AbeBooks? That seems to be an affiliate's go to site. And, does your sales report reflect the sales made through affiliate's links? That could also knock down your price. (Affiliates get between 4 - 10% of a sale from what I can see. I may be off, but probably not by far.)

I'm currently investigating the affiliate's program, but haven't gotten into all the nuts and bolts of it yet. Don't know how it affects the author's commissions.

K. wrote: "Ken, something I noticed when I was glancing through the affiliates information - have you checked on AbeBooks? That seems to be an affiliate's go to site. And, does your sales report reflect the..."

I checked and they list my books only in paperback. Their listing for the book in question is way above the price at Createspace. But I did finally get a decent response from Amazon, and it seems to explain it:
"I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused.
I've checked your account and see that some units were downloaded at the lower price.
Apart from US, customers from around the world like South Korea, Slovakia, Norway, Czech Republic, etc can visit http://www.amazon.com or connect wirelessly via the Kindle or mobile device to download titles from the Kindle Store.
If you're browsing in the Kindle Store from a location outside of the United States, you may see a price higher or lower than what you listed on the KDP website. This is the reason you are seeing the list price in the sales reports as $4.96. Please note that the price listed in the Prior Six Weeks' Royalties is average list price.
Please note, we only have 13 Kindle stores, US (Amazon.com), UK (Amazon.co.uk), FR (Amazon.fr), IT (Amazon.it), ES (Amazon.es), JP (Amazon.co.jp), BR (Amazon.com.br), AU (Amazon.com.au), CA (Amazon.ca), IN (Amazon.in), MX (Amazon.com.mx), NL (Amazon.nl) and DE (Amazon.de). While UK, FR, IT, ES, JP, BR, AU, CA, IN, MX, NL and DE store are for the UK, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Brazilian, Australian, Canadian, Indian, Mexican, Netherlands and German customers exclusively, US store is used by customers worldwide.
At this time, international customers can buy the Kindle books from Amazon.com only.
Therefore the sale will still be recorded on Amazon.com but the location of the sale could be anywhere.
All items available in the Amazon.com Kindle Store are listed in U.S. dollars (USD). The availability and pricing of titles in global Kindle Stores may vary by home country or region, including taxes and other operating costs.
Rest assured, customers in the US will be able to see the price as $4.99.
If you've any issue or need further clarification, please don't hesitate to contact us. We're happy to resolve the issue for you."

Ah...that would probably explain how "US" customers have bought some of my free stories for $0.99. They were probably international customers downloading from a Kindle device.

It does clear up a few things.