I am Astounded by the Incompetence That I am Seeing….

Time for a major rant, and one that is not only overdue but richly deserved….

My biography of Ulric Dahlgren has been available for sale for about six weeks now. In spite of that fact, none of the big box booksellers have it in inventory. Amazon says it hasn’t been released. So does
Barnes & Noble, and Borders says it won’t be available until December 30. December 30? Say what?

Donald Thompson at Touch the Elbow asked publicly where his book is today on the blog, which is what triggered this post.

This is my 15th book. I also have published about ten books as a publisher. At this point, I know a little bit about marketing and how distributors work. My publisher claims that he selected his current distributor because of its record of success selling books on Amazon. I can’t begin to imagine what that success might be, because it’s become painfully and abundantly clear to me that the distributor hasn’t done a damned thing to sell my book. It has not done anything at all to see that the book is available for sale to the general public, or I wouldn’t have gotten the same result from the three big-box book retailers.

I would call this distributor useless, but that would be an insult to all useless things in the world. Rather, I prefer to call them grossly, rankly incompetent, probably liars, and worse than useless, because they surely haven’t done a God damned thing to do that they were contracted to do. If I knew the name of this useless outfit, I would gladly tell all of you, in the sincere hope that you will all either bitch to them or avoid doing any business with them.

I deeply and sincerely apologize to each and every one of you who has tried but failed to buy this book as a result of the overwhelming misfeasance of this so-called distributor. I wish that there was something I could do about it, but there’s not. All I can do is to suggest that you either buy the book directly from me, or from Edinborough Press, because I don’t what else to suggest.

To say that I am frustrated doesn’t even begin to do it justice.