Shelf Awareness - 18 October, 2012
Amazon is a successful book retailer, but "cracking
the publishing business hasn't been as easy," the Wall Street
Journal reported in its examination of Amazon Publishing's track record to
date, citing as an example Penny Marshall's recently released and highly
publicized memoir My Mother Was Nuts: "In its first four weeks on
sale, it has sold just 7,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen
BookScan. By comparison, actor Rob Lowe's memoir, 2011's Stories I Only
Tell My Friends, published by Macmillan's Henry Holt & Co., sold
54,000 hardcover copies in its first four weeks."
Conceding that celebrity memoirs are never guaranteed bestsellers, the Journal
noted that an equally relevant factor "in the book's poor sales is its
severely limited availability. It wasn't stocked in the 689 stores of Barnes
& Noble, Walmart or Target. Some independent booksellers don't stock the
title either. Nor is the digital book for sale in e-book stores operated by
Sony, Apple or Google."
Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books stores in southern Florida, the
Cayman Islands and New York, said his bookshops will special order Amazon
titles for customers, but "I don't want to be a showroom for Amazon."
B&N's boycott "has hurt Amazon's publishing efforts in other
ways," according to the Journal, which said the "number of
big-name books signed by Amazon Publishing New York has slowed significantly
this year.... Whether the company can regain its momentum with authors depends
on how it responds to the boycott."
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