Amazon struggles to get its books onto the bestseller charts

Books published by Amazon like the Penny Marshall memoir 'My Mother Was Nuts' have not seen strong sales.

Penny Marshall's memoir 'My Mother Was Nuts' wasn’t stocked in any of the almost-700 Barnes and Nobles stores across the country, or in Wal-Mart or Target stores.

If Amazon is the Hercules of the book world, the leviathan who overshadows all, then publishing is its Achilles’ heel.

Despite its almost mythical dominance in book retailing, Amazon has struggled mightily to crack the publishing business. While it sells millions of copies of other publishers’ books, Amazon can’t quite seem to get its own books off the ground and onto the bestseller charts, according to a recent Wall Street Journal piece that examined the online retailer’s publishing woes.

Case in point: Penny Marshall’s memoir, “My Mother Was Nuts.” The memoir by the actress and director was published by Amazon and was slated to be one of its biggest titles for fall. “In its first four weeks of sale it has sold just 7,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “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.”

Granted, there could be many reasons for the memoir’s failure to sell. “Marshall hasn’t been in the limelight for a while,” writes the WSJ, and, of course, not every memoir strikes a chord. But there’s one considerable culprit for the slow sales of “My Mother Was Nuts" and every other book Amazon publishes: “its severely limited availability.”

If readers wanted to find “My Mother Was Nuts” in a bricks-and-mortar store, or simply stumble upon it, the way some books are discovered, they would be hard-pressed to do so. The memoir wasn’t stocked in any of the almost-700 Barnes and Nobles stores across the country, nor in Wal-Mart or Target stores. Most independent booksellers don’t stock the book, and the e-book version wasn’t carried by stores operated by Sony, Apple, or Google. Just about the only place a reader is guaranteed to find the memoir is at Amazon.com.

That’s largely due to a deliberate boycott of Amazon books by retailers resentful of the mega-online retailer’s Herculean dominance of the books market. In a move called a “declaration of war,” Barnes and Noble announced early this year its decision to yank Amazon-published books from its shelves.

“Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms,” Barnes & Noble chief merchandising officer, Jaime Carey, wrote in an email in February 2012. “Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents, and the authors they represent.”

The tactical move was “an attempt to cut off access for the online books behemoth that [Barnes and Noble] says ‘undermined the industry’ by signing exclusive agreements with publishers, agents, and authors,” according to a February 2012 Chapter & Verse post.

Amazon is feeling the pain now: the Penny Marshall memoir is the first big Amazon title to be published since the boycott began. And though all retailers are not boycotting Amazon books, “the company’s status as a competitor is clearly a factor for some,” writes the WSJ. “I don’t want to be a showroom for Amazon,” Mitchell Kaplan, owner of three Books & Books stores in Florida, told the Journal.

Authors are taking note. After a string of deals with authors like Deepak Chopra, Timothy Ferriss, and James Franco in the spring of last year, Amazon, which entered publishing quietly in 2009, appears to be struggling to attract big names. The Barnes & Noble boycott, it seems, has slowed the number of big-name books Amazon has been able to sign.  

“It’s panic time,” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, told the WSJ. “The notion that a company as powerful as Amazon has such a tremendous amount of influence on what we read, how much money authors make, and the formats that books appear in is really scary to the book industry and other industries as well.”

In other words, the Herculean Amazon’s very strength has become its greatest weakness.

Husna Haq is a Monitor correspondent.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Amazon struggles to get its books onto the bestseller charts
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2012/1018/Amazon-struggles-to-get-its-books-onto-the-bestseller-charts
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe