From the "WTF???" Department...
Dec. 18th, 2010 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seawaspI happened to check Amazon's listing for Digital Knight.
Now, this is an obscure little urban fantasy novel that never even earned out its advance, and didn't do well enough to convince Jim Baen to either do a second print run or to do a sequel (admittedly, the market then was pretty bad).
It's out of print now, of course, so Amazon can't offer it directly; other Amazon-associated sellers can, of course.
What do I see in the options?
3 new from $55.05
16 used from $2.40
"FROM $55.05"???
Out of gobsmacked curiosity, I check to see what the "From" goes TO.
The other two copies are listed at $149 and $151, respectively.
GUH?
So I check the used copies; $2.40 is actually a pretty respectable price itself for a used book that only sold for $8.00 when new SEVEN YEARS AGO.
So there's a bunch at about $2.40, then some at $3.00... and then it ramps up at the end to $5, $20, and $55.00.
For a *USED* copy.
Holy Mother of Jebus.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-18 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-18 09:21 pm (UTC)What the folks running this scam do is, they scrape legit second-hand bookseller price lists and re-list all the books they can find at grossly inflated prices. They don't actually hold stock, but some of these scammers have millions of titles "in inventory" and advertised online. This ups their Google pagerank by making them look like a seriously well-stocked retail outlet, so when someone searches for a book title (that's in their list) they're one of the first vendors to come up.
If anyone is foolish enough to pay the ludicrously-inflated asking price for the book, the scammer sources a copy for a lot less, and makes a hefty profit on the deal. And it doesn't take many idiots paying $151 for a copy of "Digital Knight" that the vendor then pays $2.40 for to keep the scam artist in business.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-18 10:04 pm (UTC)I recognize every one of those names on the high sellers. They do the same thing on some stuff that I list for a small press. If I run out of the books on Amazon and on the other listing sites they will eventually delete their crazy priced listing. I list for 14, they list for 88 and change. There has been a few sellers on Amazon that would copy word for word descriptions of very odd books and try to sell them as if they have them which is actually against Amazon policy. You have to have on hand in order to list the item. But no one really gets in trouble. If their rating percentage goes too low they just open a new account.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-18 11:35 pm (UTC)Amazon had one seller listed it for over $100.
abebooks.com had several copies in the $6 range.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-18 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-18 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 09:43 am (UTC)Thanks to them, series uncomplete, because none elsewhere. = Thanks to them are none elsewhere.
How else is anyone to interpret that?
no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 03:03 pm (UTC)I have no idea what he might have meant if not what he said, though. (Or what typo there could be that changes what he said into what he might have meant.)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 03:42 pm (UTC)But if you want serious WTF, you'd have to read our interoffice mails. They generate a LOT of "WTF?!?" telephone calls!
no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 04:16 pm (UTC)One comment that I still don't understand is quite enough. :) (Though if you've got a post somewhere for entertainment value...)
My initial question was serious, I simply don't know how one's to blame for the other, so requested information on that, curious. (Online shopping is not my world.)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 02:10 am (UTC)At some point, I'd love to sit down and talk to you about how that book came about. It reads to me like it--or at least parts of it--might have originally been short stories that were then put together into a single volume. (Not a good or bad thing; just a thing.) Any accuracy to that?
Quite so...
Date: 2010-12-19 05:23 pm (UTC)2) The different parts of Digital Knight feel almost like completely separate stories, even though they're clearly in proper chronological order. Were these published separately as short stories?
In this case, the perceptions are correct – these were written as separate stories originally (especially "Gone in a Flash", "Photo Finish", and "Viewed in a Harsh Light"). However, as all of them are roughly novella length (the shortest being around 12,500 words and the longest well over 20,000), they had the common experience of being favorably read by publishers but ultimately rejected as being of difficult length.
A shorter version of Digital Knight, containing only the three portions described above in slightly different form, was offered online by Hyperbooks.com under the title Morgantown: The Jason Wood Files for several years (up through about 2002).
If I do produce a rewritten version (see next question), one goal would be to "smooth out the joins" and make the story a more coherent whole.
3) Digital Knight seems uneven. Parts of it seem to be smoother than others.
This is true, and it's because – as one can deduce to some extent from the answer to the prior question – the stories were not written all at the same time or even in a close sequence. The ideas behind the first three written ("Gone in a Flash", "Photo Finish", and "Viewed in a Harsh Light") were conceived about ten years before the stories were actually written, and the first – "Gone in a Flash" – was written around 1987. "Photo Finish" was written in 1989-1990, and "Viewed in a Harsh Light" was completed sometime in 1995. The other three portions were all written in a two-month span at the beginning of 2002, because Jim Baen liked the three stories but the total was only about 60,000 words, and he wanted at least 100,000 words.
Thus, DK is made up of a total of six stories, or sections, written in two rather separate sequences, one starting in 1987 (with concepts dating back to 1977) and one in 2002. I did a lot of writing in the intervening years, so my style and, presumably, skill changed significantly in that time. Muddying the waters for a reader, of course, is the fact that one of the brand-new sections ("Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies") was sandwiched in between the two oldest.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 02:52 pm (UTC)http://www.webscription.net/p-107-digital-knight.aspx
no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 05:24 pm (UTC)When I finish my rewrite of DK I'll have Baen take it off the Free Library, but until then, I'll leave it available.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 11:10 pm (UTC)Used book prices
Date: 2010-12-20 05:40 am (UTC)BLACKSAD, a graphic novel published in this country by Dark Horse comics, was going from the used book/reseller types for $100 in September. This for a graphic novel that sold (hardcover) for around $29 (and a second edition was printed, I believe, in October, just before I picked up my copy).
I see no reasonable explanation for this sort of craziness; all I can do is point out to you that your work is not a unique case of this phenomenon.
Re: Used book prices
Date: 2010-12-20 10:02 pm (UTC)But most of us don't get to write "Snow Crash" or "A Game of Thrones" or "Harry Potter", and our books aren't worth anything like that much.
Re: Used book prices
Date: 2010-12-20 10:17 pm (UTC)Go figure!
Re: Used book prices
Date: 2010-12-20 11:21 pm (UTC)Re: Used book prices
Date: 2010-12-21 12:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-21 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-24 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-30 12:19 am (UTC)I still wouldn't pay a hundred bucks for it.
.... I may scrape up fifty if I can mail my copy to you and get it signed and mailed back though...
no subject
Date: 2010-12-30 12:37 am (UTC)Thank you SO much for the kind words.
All it costs you to get it signed is double postage: one postage to get it to me, and a self-addressed stamped envelope inside the first one with the book, that I can mail it back to you in. Let me know if you want to do that, and I'll send you an email with my mailing address.
Unless you happen to be somewhere near where I'll be at various times, in which case you can just hand it to me. :)
There are two other Jason Wood stories that I posted online, and I intend to do a rewrite/expansion of Digital Knight now that the rights have reverted to me.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 02:10 am (UTC)For that sort of awesome, I could be willing to separate from my book for a while.