The Nickronomicon-avoiding Amazon

Like many, I am suspicious of the claim that Borderlands Books was killed by San Francisco's new minimum wage law, especially given that the bookstore's profit was all of $3000 last year. That's one trip and fall or roof leak or bad Christmas season away from closing down anyway. But amazon's discounts and ubiquity—and its ability to run sweatshops in the US and to do an end-run around German laws by recruiting neo-Nazi security for their warehouses—undoubtedly did a number on Borderlands.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of the copies we've sold of The Nickronomicon have come via amazon, specifically Kindle. This is not unusual in print-on-demand land, where bookstore orders are virtually nil. (Borderlands was pretty much the only brick and mortar bookstore in the US carrying it, and they just got a few copies, which sold right away thanks to you guys calling in.)

So here's just a list of places other than amazon (and now Borderlands) where you can get a copy:

directly from the publisher, with its handy Paypal button. And you also get a chance to support small business—publishers usually surrender anywhere from 30 to 55% of the cover price to distributors and bookstores. Buy my book direct, then Innsmouth Free Press gets to live to publish again.

Smashwords, which sells an epub file. Epub works on all sorts of e-readers! Epub, yeah!

Powells! The famous Portland, Oregon Powells. I suspect they actually have zero copies but will quickly contact Lightning Source and zip one off for you, which is what Amazon was doing anyway with its own Createspace POD program. (Lots of POD titles double-dip between the two services, mainly because the book often shows as out of stock or delayed shipping if it doesn't have a Createspace edition. This form of double-dipping is called Plan B.)

BN.com. Your neighborhood Barnes & Noble will not have copies, but BN.com has e-copies for NOOK, and also will run off an LSI copy for you lickety-split. B&N is now the mere 250-pound chimpanzee in the room as compared to Amazon's 800-pound gorilla.