WALMART SHAFTING SARAH PALIN…
Now I recognize that Walmart executives did not sit around some conference table and nefariously plot how best to rip off the former governor of Alaska, but I find a certain perverse pleasure in knowing that that is, in some small way what is going to happen.
There’s a price war brewing between Walmart and Amazon that bodes ill for starving novelists like myself, but there is a more immediate bit of collateral damage to consider.
As of this morning, Walmart and Amazon have targeted 10 books slated to figure high on holiday gift lists and priced them at $8.99.
The titles affected include Sarah Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue; John Grisham’s short-story collection, Ford County; Stephen King’s Under the Dome; Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, The Lacuna; and the latest installment in the Alex Cross thriller series by James Patterson, I, Alex Cross.
Although Wal-Mart, Amazon and other retailers like Costco, Target and even pure bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble typically discount best sellers, they usually don’t take more than 50 percent off the list price. Wal-Mart’s move, and Amazon’s reaction, signaled a new threshold in price cutting for books and left publishing insiders wondering how low it would go when the beleaguered industry is already worried about the effect of $9.99 e-books and a slowdown in book sales over all.
Yes, Amazon is the other player here, but Walmart is the company that started, and now escalated, the fight, and must bear the greater share of responsibility for what follows.
Authors receive advance payments for books that they are then expected to pay out at a rate of somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of, not the cover price, but of the sale price of the book. If a book does not earn out its author’s advance — in Palin’s case a reported $7 million — the publisher may ask for the extra money back.
Palin’s book retails at $28.99. Of each such sale she might earn as much as $4.35, but at $8.99, Palin’s reward is slashed and could plummet to as low as $1.08. At the full price, Palin needs to sell more than 1.6 million copies to earn her advance. At the lower price, however, the earn-out soars to an astronomical and all but unreachable 6.5 million copies.
Of course all the other authors face the same possible fate, but given the association between Walmart and the far-right base of the Republican Party, how much more likely would those wishing to read Palin’s book be to buy Going Rogue from Walmart?
I’m thinking very.
[...] hand don’t talk to each other, unintended consequences arise. Last week Walmart instituted a price war with Amazon that is shaking publishing. Price wars are not good in the short term for investors [...]
[...] wrote earlier about the price war between Walmart and Amazon (and now Target) over the sale price of the hot [...]
Sarah Palin is a good leader. i can say that because she did some projects in alaska that helped lots of people .
Shalom Jeanna,
First, thank you for stopping in, for reading and, most importantly, for taking the time to share your views. We build community when we enter the conversation.
Second, that should be all the more reason for you to be upset with Walmart for taking money away from Palin.
Third, what projects, specifically, is Palin responsible for that helped lots of people?
B’shalom,
Jeff
[...] month it was the books, taking food out of Sarah Palin’s children’s mouths and crushing my hopes to ever become obscenely rich and obnoxious as the [...]