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Experience with Google Play Books
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by
Richard
(new)
Oct 24, 2014 04:22AM
I just went through the process of adding my books to the Google site, and found it very confusing and quite worrying. The lowest preview percentage you can put in is 20%, which seems quite high. Amazon is 10, and Smashwords defaults to 15 but lets you choose. Then I uploaded and filled in all the forms, but didn't click on 'publish,' but it seems the whole book is already available on Google Books. It shows a word-cloud and 'random' pages (but apparently very biased towards pages with illustrations), which could be spoilers for a person who'd not read the books. Then it's quite unclear whether it's selling the paperback or the eBook version. All in all, my bobulation is quite discommed.
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I profoundly disliked Google Books. Believe it or not, the site has improved significantly over the last year or so. Yes, it was that bad. It took me several attempts to straighten out eBook and paperback versions. That's not the worst of it, though. Google reserves the right to change your retail price without your knowledge or approval. If they decide to do so, they can and will offer a discount (I think it is up to 20%) in order to stimulate sales. While that may not sound like a bad idea, Amazon and other retailers pick up on it, and then lower your retail price to match. I found out when I saw some sales at Amazon for less than my retail price. Google ended up reducing my profit margin at Amazon and produced no Google sales as a result.
In my opinion, Google is just not worth the problems they create. I hate to turn my back on any retail outlet, but this is one I will only use for free books (individual short stories) in the future. I advise you to exercise caution.
Thanks, that's confirmed my fears. I noticed the price dancing about on Amazon earlier, assumed that was their initiative. I'll see what happens when they process my files.
Google Books tries to be wikipedia for all books ever published. So it will show some info even if it is not for sale; I have no clue how to remove your preview, but surely the google will tell you if you search their help.
Argh! They put them up, and totally ignored my prices. Set them both to the same price, so one was too cheap and the other was too expensive. The search function was completely weird, finding one of the books which has an unusual word in it (Feronia), but not finding my name or the title of my first book at all. I've removed them. The whole process was fraught with bugs and inconsistencies, and there is no link to get human help. Avoid.
I got some advice from a twitter contact (@pattyjansen), which led to a kBoards post, which provided the key to the bizarre and arbitrary world of Google Play Books. So I've re-entered my stuff, and will see how it goes. Some authors find they sell more there than on Amazon, it seems.http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topi...
