with a long spoon

One of life’s realities – along with death, and taxes – is that Am**on is the first port of call for a lot of folk when it comes to buying books. Yes, there’s been a heartening rise in the number of publishers and bookshops selling online, and websites like hive.co.uk and bookshop.org provide the convenience of online shopping while also supporting local bookshops, but for some folk the brand recognition of the international behemoth trumps all.

Today, we raised the prices of our books on Am**on by £1.00 across the board. Why? Because they’ve raised their costs to us (for books they never even handle) and because the postage allowance they provide lags further than ever behind the actual cost of postage. This means they take almost 30% of the cost of, say City Baby, simply for hosting the details. We hold the stock, we post the book out. It never goes near them.

Faced with a choice between using their platform, and missing out on sales (which wouldn’t be fair to our authors) we use their platform. Our books just cost more there than if you buy via this website, direct from your local bookshop, or from the other online platforms we flagged up earlier. Where you buy is entirely up to you, of course.

But we sup with the devil with a very long spoon.