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who are all those other sellers on Amazon.com?

Amazon screen shotWe’ve been helping our clients, like School Choice International, print their books on demand via Lightningsource, and we’ve been asked about where all of those extra listings coming from? Are there gremlins who go in the Lightningsource warehouse and print the books at night? Actually, these are retailers who purchase the book via the Ingram book wholesalers at the standard wholesale discount (currently 55%). Most bookstores, online or offline buy their books from the wholesaler Ingram. The can then list the books in their catalog at any price that will be profitable for them, and if a customer orders, that book will be printed and shipped directly from Lightningsource… so no, no Gremlins have been printing our books.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under Q & A, POD, self-publishing, Book Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “who are all those other sellers on Amazon.com?”

  1. Cheryl Hendrick Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 2:02 pm

    Thanks for shedding some light on this Julie! In order to purchase from Ingram wholesalers, do retailers need a Pro Merchant account on Amazon? Technically, a publisher could have a separate Pro Merchant account which discounts Amazon’s list price in order to stay competitive with these other retailers - right? You would of course have to sell enough to offset the monthly $40 fee.

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