Who Moved My Button? Amazon. Amazon did.
Were you aware that Amazon.com, on occasion, will do wholesale removal of the “buy” buttons from books published by imprints the site is warring with? Me either. But this history of the tactic from the Writer’s Guild is fascinating:
The Battle of Britain, Part One
The first reported use of the buy button weapon was in the United Kingdom. Early in 2008, Amazon removed the buy buttons from hundreds of Bloomsbury titles. Bloomsbury is a major British publisher, publishing authors such as William Boyd, Khaled Hosseini, and J.K. Rowling. Amazon and Bloomsbury resolved their differences on undisclosed terms, and the lights went back on for all of Bloomsbury’s books.The Battle of Britain, Part Two
The second use of the buy button weapon in the U.K. that we know of came later that year, when one of the world’s largest publishers, Hachette Livre UK, took the hit. The publisher’s CEO, Tim Hely Hutchinson, wrote in a letter to authors, “Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at our expense and sometimes at yours.”
In response, The Writer’s Guild created Whomovedmybutton.com. The service immediately notifies authors (or anyone) when Amazon makes status changes to any of the titles you are monitoring.If you are an author with a book on Amazon, it’s highly recommended you use this free service.
RELATED: via Awl commentor Moff, this story about Amazon Fail:
“But no. Instead, we got the Foot-Stompingly Petulant Friday Night Massacre: One minute the books were there, the next they weren’t. And everyone was left going “huh?” Was it a hardware glitch? Was it a software bug? Was it a terrorist act in which renegade Amish attacked Amazon’s server farm and poured jugs of hard cider into the machines, shorting out the ones holding Macmillan’s vasty inventory? No! It was one corporate entity having a big fat hissy fit at another corporate entity…”