Yesterday I received an order from Amazon.com for 286 copies of the book about the Panasonic Lumix LX5 book.  This order came through the “Amazon Advantage” program, which lets smaller publishers send books to Amazon for Amazon to sell directly. This can be a useful program, except that Amazon requires a hefty discount for the books it buys.  In my case, this discount means that I lose money on every copy of the Lumix LX5 book that I send in. Anyway, I don’t have 286 copies of the book, so I filled the order partially, with the 12 copies I had available, and shipped them off yesterday.  I don’t need to send books to Amazon this way, because the books are being printed by the print-on-demand company, Lightning Source, and they supply all the books Amazon needs.  I wanted to send in this one shipment, though, to see if it has any effect on the pricing.  Maybe with the heavily discounted books, Amazon will charge less than the list price of $24.95, which I think may be holding down sales.  We should see in a few days, after those books arrive at their destination.

I’ve been able to focus more of my attention on finishing up the book about the Leica D-Lux 5, and I may be able to have a final version ready within a week, if all goes well from here on. I would like to have it available at least in PDF form before Christmas, and that seems like a realistic possibility at this point.

I have stopped selling books on Amazon.co.uk as a third-party seller, because several other sellers are offering the LX5 book there at a reasonable price, so there’s no need for me to do so, and it’s expensive to ship the books from here in Virginia to the UK and Europe; I only get paid the UK rate for those shipments.