This incident really speaks poorly of Amazon that they won’t own up to their mistake.

Amazon’s search engine is designed to list things by price if they meet the other search criteria. If a book is cheap or free, that, automatically, gives it preferential billing. Amazon’s free e-books are mostly books from the major public-domain projects, that is, Gutenberg and Hathi Trust, which they were forced to list as free, in order to pre-empt the people who were automatically copying thousands of titles from these projects, falsely claiming copyright, and selling them at substantial prices. Obviously, there is a sizable population of people who tell Amazon, “show me some vampire novels,” or words to that effect. Amazon quite correctly shows what its records list as free vampire novels, on the sensible grounds that if the reader doesn’t like the book, he isn’t out of pocket. It would appear that Amazon’s error resulted in certain authors getting free publicity, which Amazon would not have given them if they had charged substantial prices.

When I typed “vampire” into Amazon’s search engine, it brought up a whole series of books, which were all e-published, with no indication that they had been published in paper, and which were all priced at zero. I would not be surprised to find that Amazon’s price comparison program was designed to scrutinize only those books which were not published in paper, and it may have systematically picked off all the people who listed their e-books with both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I suspect that many of these authors accepted the situation, having gotten far more free downloads than they had ever gotten sales.

There are mail-order bookstores which specialize in remainders, eg. Edward R. Hamilton, whose customers are accustomed to browsing the cheap stuff. Obviously, there is a market for remainder-browsing.

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A great many novelists would do better to simply put their books up on websites, without prematurely burdening themselves with the baggage of commerce.

Here is something interesting I turned up:

C. B. Rykken, _Highroad to Carthage_.

http://www.2carthage.com/

The story is set in 455 AD, the year the Vandals sacked Rome. Faced with a barbarian threat from outside, the Roman leaders are mostly concerned with plotting to assassinate each other. The populace is half-starved. The army is unpaid. Both are unpredictably dangerous. It is rapidly becoming a real question of who are the civilized men and who are the barbarians. The heroine, Adriana Marcella, is the estranged wife of a Roman official. Under the mask of a proper Roman matron, she has a strong tomboy streak. Having angered a powerful courtier, she is on the run. She meets Wolf, a Vandal captain who has gotten left behind as the Vandals withdraw after sacking Rome. Wolf is one of the many bastard sons of the Vandal King Geiserich, the product of a one-night-stand. Brought up as a monk, he has been expelled and sent into the army after having killed a man, more or less justifiably (*). They flee across southern Italy together…

(*) The runaway/evicted monk turned soldier is a recurrent device, going back to A. Connan Doyle’s The White Company. It enables the writer to plausibly introduce a character whose thought processes are not too dissimilar from those of the reader.
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I found this book in a rather roundabout way. Readers of Techdirt will be aware of the Baen Free Library. Baen Books, a major publisher of computer books and science fiction, has a practice of putting its books up on the internet for free at just about the time that paper copies are turning up in local used bookstores at prices of a dollar or two. At that level, of course, mail order cannot compete, nor can new bookstores located in high-rent shopping malls. So Baen doesn’t really lose anything by making the books available for free. This is something of a special case, because people who read and write science fiction tend to be computer whizzes, and vice-versa. They are more comfortable thinking in internet terms than the people associated with other genres of writing.

Fiction writers tend to be more than usually resistant to the idea of using the internet. When they are talking about royalties, they are talking about virtue, not about the practicalities of earning a living. An academic author will pay a couple of thousand dollars to get a book published, for good and sufficient reason. A fiction writer will put a vast effort into door-to-door salesmanship in order to be paid a couple of thousand dollars in royalties, even if he could have made much more money working as an electrician. The professional authors’ associations are full of people whose literary earnings are in the hundred-dollar range. Jerry Pournelle, past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, estimates that there are only about twenty people actually making a living by writing science fiction, and the same is presumably true in other genres. So the pursuit of royalties is very much a case of the tail wagging the dog. I have a certain professional interest in this question as the author of a computer program designed to do for online novels what blogging software does for blogs. A novel is a book of at least twenty chapters, and possibly as many as two hundred (_War and Peace_), which presents special problems of page navigation. I wrote a program to address this problem. This gives me a certain interest in persuading good novelists to publish on the internet without going in for counterproductive copy protection and so forth.

At any rate, I was trying to find out if anyone was taking the “free publishing” approach outside of the computers-and-science- fiction area. I didn’t find very much, but I did turn up _Highroad To Carthage_. C. B. Rykken formerly ran a small academic press, A-R Editions, which publishes critical editions of classical music composers. In short, unlike many novel authors, he was not looking to turn his novel into a career, and he had spent his life working in a literary profession. He seems to have completed the book in 1992, and I suppose he must have sent it through the usual “agony hall of the publishers and agents.” In 2000, Rykken published the book, after a fashion, through Xlibris, which I suppose I would describe as an “eyes-open vanity publisher,” the kind that doesn’t pretend to be able to place books in bookstores, but at least gives a means to distribute them by mail-order. However, in 2001 the internet became available, and Rykken went for it, with no apparent mental reservations. I have read about half of _Highroad To Carthage_, enough to judge that it is good, solid craftsmanship, by which I mean, as good as, say, the works of Parke Godwin or Catherine Christian, and nearly as good as those of Rosemary Sutcliffe or Robert Graves. It is that last one percent of quality, of course, which makes the difference between someone who can make a living as a novelist, and someone who cannot. You can still make a living as an academic scholar without getting tenure at Harvard, but the situation is somewhat different in novel-writing.

http://www.amazon.com/Highroad-Carthage-C-B-Rykken/dp/0738861154

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I found Highroad to Carthage listed in a kind of online equivalent of the book department of a thrift store, with good stuff and the worst kind of junk promiscuously intermingled.

http://newfreebooks.com/

I found this site with the aid of a librarian’s website.

http://librarianchick.pbwiki.com/

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Another book I might mention is:

Dana Blankenhorn, _The Chinese Century_

http://mooreslore.corante.com/archives/028588.html

This is a “roman a clef,” written during the 2004 Presidential election, by a well-known computer journalist and blogger. Since he already had a blog, he naturally used it to post his evolving novel.

Regardless of whether or not this author sues, I doubt I will even remember his name.

However, if I were an author, this would make me seriously reconsider self-publishing anything through Amazon.