msagara | Wherein Michelle is irritated

Someone on Facebook kindly pointed out that someone appears to be selling a used (!) copy of Cast in Silence on Amazon.com.

Cast in Silence doesn't exist as a new book yet. It doesn't exist as an ARC yet. It barely exists as a finished manuscript, because I am still working my way through the AAs mentioned a couple of days ago.

The "merchant" in question is asking how much? Guess. The answer is here.

I'm not entirely sure what he -- or to be fair, she or they -- hope to gain from this, and mine is not the only "used" book offered for sale at this price. The other one thirty seconds of perusal turned up is Maria Snyder's also as yet unpublished book. I cannot imagine that anyone--besides a publisher--would pay 1,000.00 for a book of mine, let alone one that doesn't even exist.

So. Just in case you're curious: He isn't selling an ARC. Because it doesn't exist. He isn't, as far as I can tell, selling anything genuine. If anyone asks you about this, please pass it on, or point them here.

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Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

shannachie.livejournal.com

It makes me almost envious. I have problems selling my finished books...
I assume time travel accounts for the high cost, though.

From: (Anonymous)

There is no FRAUD going on here - there was a database error during a database merge that caused a few ISBN's in my multi-million book inventory to get corrupted. When that file was loaded into an Amazon server, it listed some books for sale that I do not have. A built-in safety measure increased the price of these items (items for which my inventory management system cannot verify the existence of in any of our warehouses). The prices were raised up high enough to prevent anyone from ever considering buying the items, then when a live person (not an automated inventory management system) verifies the error in the inventory, that suspect item will be removed from our master database.

There has been many accusations about these books that were accidentally offered for sale, some pretty wild accusations I might add, and I am disturbed that no one ever thought that TSCBOOKS (me) may have simply made a mistake.

I am not a cheat or a con artist, as this post has stated, I am an honest business man trying to run a large book company. If I was attempting to defraud anyone by selling them books that I do not have, would it not make more sense for me to offer these books for sale at a price that someone might actually pay? No one would pay $1000 for one of these books, especially one that obviously is not available for sale yet. This is the very reason why the price is set so high when a potential system error is detected -So No One Will Buy That Item.

You should reconsider how you look at the world - the most obvious reason for all of this commotion is "A Mistake". Most of the posts here are taking the assumption that bad intention were the reason for these books being offered for sale. Not a single person offered the idea that someone or something at TSCBOOKS "might have made a mistake". Why do you think it had to be something bad that TSCBOOKS did? Is that more exciting to you? I apologize if this was a simply, boring, unintentional computer error, but that is exactly what happened.

Please forgive me for having a computer error. Please note that our database safety systems instantly prevented anyone from buying these books (at least anyone that would not spend $1000 for a book that is probably worth less than $5O). Not a single person has attempted to buy any of the books in question yet, and I am fairly sure that no one will ever try to do so. If anyone would attempt to buy an item that I determine I dont really have, their order would be cancelled immideatly, their payment would immideatly be refunded and the sale canceled since the item is unavailable.

Please let me know if there is any immediate action anyone would request I take in regards to any of these books in question - please post a response on this web site.

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this.

TSCBOOKS

From:

rolanni.livejournal.com

I am not a cheat or a con artist, as this post has stated, I am an honest business man trying to run a large book company. If I was attempting to defraud anyone by selling them books that I do not have, would it not make more sense for me to offer these books for sale at a price that someone might actually pay? No one would pay $1000 for one of these books, especially one that obviously is not available for sale yet. This is the very reason why the price is set so high when a potential system error is detected -So No One Will Buy That Item.

I'm sorry, sir; you are in error. I know for a fact (having received the check) that my readers will pay that much money for one of our books. I expect the rest of the (several) writers affected by your "system" have readers who would also pay that much money in order to get their anticipated new book months "ahead of time."

If this is in fact your "system" I respectfully submit that it's ...rather silly. And more than enough trouble for you. Maybe you ought to find another one. Like, filtering by publication date.

Sharon Lee

From:

motteditor.livejournal.com

No worries about terseness. I didn't consider it that way at all; just information I didn't know.

Hurrah for Angel, though.

From: (Anonymous)

And I want to say thank you again for letting me read the prologue of House Name last Confluence.
**insert copious amounts of praise and fawning here**
And I will try my hardest to attend Confluence again this year. You really are a riot. :)

Michael

From: (Anonymous)

The problem was an erroneous ISBN uploaded into an inventory database - it just happened to be that the ISBN submitted did actually exist, it was the ISBN of this yet to be released book. Your suggestion was excellent. For now on, I will filter my inventory files for any publication date that is in the future. This will ensure an error like this never happens again. I have had many minor errors in my inventory as do most large booksellers. When distributed inventories as large as mine are managed, the chance of errors increases with each passing day. Thousands of updates happen every hour, a simply transposed digit in an ISBN causes a new phantom item to be entered into the inventory.

When this happened in the past (rarely I might add), the result phantom book was already released for sale and was available with a lot of sellers anyway - that caused no commotion. This current error affected an entire file, and the phantom items in my inventory turned out to be books that were not yet released. This has caused a lot of commotion, and I sincerely apologize for that.

Thank you for the Publication Date Filtering Idea, I am going to add that filtering method to my database

TSCBOOKS

From: (Anonymous)

On eBay, almost 100% of the customers leave feedback for every purchase they make.

On Amazon.com, only about 10% of the customers leave any feedback at all (this is an accurate statistic -I can find its source/reference if you so desire).

A well known statistic in the retail industry is: A unhappy customer is 10 times more likely to talk about their experience (or leave negative feedback) than a happy customer (who would be leaving a positive feedback). (I can cite a source for this statistic as well - if so desire)

Accounting for the ratio of (item sales/feedback posted) on Amazon, and considering the Happy customer vs. Unhappy customer feedback post ratio:

An Amazon seller with 90% positive feedback has similar performance rating to an eBay seller with 99% positive feedback. Do not compare apples to oranges - the 2 feedback rating systems are completely different (and both are just as effective, if you understand how they work).

From:

msagara.livejournal.com

On Amazon.com, only about 10% of the customers leave any feedback at all (this is an accurate statistic -I can find its source/reference if you so desire).

I, at least, would be interested in seeing the source or reference. On ebay, customers don't always leave feedback, fwiw. But the feedback system on ebay serves a distinct customer purpose. As a consumer, I check the feedback ratings, and I also check the complaints listed as negatives, to see what the problems were or are.

And at this point in time, given the accuracy issues already being discussed, and the nature of the complaints in the negative feedback for the particular seller, I would not buy from him. But I am currently writing a longer post on some of the issues that have come up, which will hopefully be up shortly.

From:

msagara.livejournal.com

If you don't receive feedback quickly, don't be discouraged. Most Amazon sellers receive feedback on 10% - 20% of their sales. Please know that leaving feedback is an individual's choice, not a requirement for using our site. Amazon.com cannot compel buyers to leave feedback.

Is what the Amazon.com site says. However, it also states:

We focus on negative feedback ratings as a percentage of total feedback ratings (the "Negative Feedback Rate") as an indicator of seller performance. Our very best sellers have a close to 0% Negative Feedback Rate.

Since your rating is calculated only as a percentage of feedback received, why don't we assume that the people who didn't leave feedback are neutral. They don't care either way. This leaves the very happy and the very annoyed. Your amazon.com score therefore deals with either end of the spectrum, however if a customer is dissatisfied, and a resolution can be worked out between you and the customer, the negative rating can be clawed back, or further feedback can be left.

What this tells me as a consumer, when I'm perusing ratings and reasons for them is what you do when things don't work out smoothly or perfectly. This is also what I get from ebay listings of the same.

So for me, 9% of the feedback received is unhappy with either product or lack of receipt. Which is 9% of the 10% that responded, which is still too high.

From:

cyprinella

My experience as a buyer leaving negative feedback was that the seller was refunding me at the same time I was leaving the feedback and I didn't know. Once I realized this, I deleted my feedback. HOwever, I could not go back and leave a more positive note.

One thing about amazon feedback that's worth checking is what comment was left. I've seen people leave negative seller marks on the editorial content of the book, not the seller's performance. But generally that's only really an issue for low-volume sellers.

From:

fyrna.livejournal.com

FWIW, the guy's explanation makes sense. Artificially increasing the prince to $1000 for an erroneous entry is not the most brilliant idea--the system should filter out such entries and instead report an error some other way--but I can well imagine someone programming the system that way because it's easy and they don't realize it could cause serious problems later on. I might use a trick like that myself if I were working on some unimportant scripts, but it's not something appropriate for a production system. Detected errors shouldn't make it into the output in a production system, they should be caught and reported elsewhere.

Wrt filtering, it seems to me he hadn't realized that as-yet-unpublished books would enter the system, so there wasn't even the thought of code to handle that. The system just detected "an error" and this was its (admittedly very poor) way of handling it.

From:

msagara.livejournal.com

His entry makes partial sense to me, but his explanation of what caused the problem doesn't, oddly enough. I did write a longer post (and bump up his letter), in which I address this a bit.

From:

wolfsilveroak.livejournal.com

Whatever works.}:P

I'll settle for flogged publicly. Heh.

From:

wolfsilveroak.livejournal.com

Shh! I just got The Hidden City yesterday.}:P

I'm still reading Hunter's Death. LOL

From:

motteditor.livejournal.com

Whoops! I'm so sorry. I figured we were safe for spoilers for that one. Glad I didn't give away anything too big.

Enjoy Hunter's Death. It's one of my favorites of the series.

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