The poetry blog world has been buzzing with POD publishers and bloggers talking about Amazon’s strong-armed tactics to get the little guy to use Amazon for POD printing. This would take business away from POD publishers and take money away from writers.

Reb Livingston and Shanna Compton are following the POD news rather closely, so I’ll be keeping an eye on their blogs for updates.

Evidently, there’s a “boycott Amazon” movement on Facebook, which I plan to investigate.

Collin Kelly blogged on the VRZHU blog about this POD mess and mentioned that many of his book sales did NOT come from Amazon. He had better luck with individual readings:

My first collection of poetry, Better To Travel, was self-pubbed with iUniverse back in 2003. Yes, I had sales on Amazon, but the majority came from bookstore orders and hand-to-hand transactions at readings. When Slow To Burn was published in 2006 as a limited edition, it was only sold online at MetroMania Press’s store and at my readings. All 300 copies sold out in just a little more than a year. Even better was that the profit split between me and the press made each of us a tidy sum. Who can say that in poetry these days?

There’s hope, yes?

He also points out that there’s a prestige factor with having a book available on Amazon. I agree. However, I don’t see why that’s the case.

Maybe this will end up being good. Good often comes from crappy situations.

We boycott Amazon. Eventually, they cave and we’re all suckered back in to their fold. Or they don’t cave, and we find better ways to distribute poetry.