Several years ago browsing the aisle of Barnes and Noble I ran across a book title that caught my eye. It was classified as christian fiction, which I don’t normally read, but the title, and the overall idea of the book made me purchase it (yes this is when I use to purchased hardcover books). The book is titled ‘In His Image - (The Christ Clone Trilogy Book 1) by James BeauSeigneur. The book was an excellent read and I enjoyed it.
Flash forward a couple of years later and I realized I never finished out the trilogy but saw books 2 and 3 were available for my Kindle at $9.99 or under. I read both ‘Birth of an Age - (The Christ Clone Trilogy, Book 2)’, and ‘Acts of God - (The Christ Clone Trilogy, Book 3)’ and again enjoyed the fast paced original story of this series but this time in e-book format. Even if you don’t like christian fiction I can recommend these books as good old fashion thrillers and even disaster type books, but to each his own. I liked the books.
Now warp speed to last week when I was searching the Apple iBook store I happened to run across ‘In His Image’ in ebook format, however, I was shocked at what I found. The e-book was priced at $19.99 with the publisher being FaithWords and the Seller being Hachette Book Group. The second book was also priced at $19.99 but the third book was strangely priced at $16.99. I thought great more crazy greedy publisher pricing. I sent an email to Hachette Book Group with my dismay about their pricing and received an email back that just said ‘sorry you don’t like our pricing, thanks for writing’. Then I decided to try and write the author, James BeauSeigneur, and see if he was aware that his books were insanely priced.
After a few days I received a very nice email back from Mr. BeauSeigneur telling me he was aware of the pricing and that he is currently in the process of retaining the rights of his books back to himself and that the books would be published by him with new pricing and new cover art sometime in the near future.
It is nice to see that an author is willing to take back the rights to his work and try and sell them to his readers at a reasonable price. I can only imagine the lost revenue the author has had due to the publishers poor pricing of his works. Hopefully this move with stir other authors to do the same. Of course I have NO real insight into why the publisher had these books set at their current prices and exactly why the author is getting the rights back. I am sure there is more to the story then what I see on the surface. However, the bottom line is score one for the consumer. Hopefully this action will make publishers sit up and take notice that outrageous pricing doesn’t sit well with their customers and ultimately their creators (authors).
*note - my sensational headline is just a guess on my part. I needed a catchy headline :-)
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