I’ve published four books, three with a mid-sized indie press, the kind with a national distributor and a booth at Book Expo America. The run I have had, or am having, is a lucky one. So when I talk about buying my own books for a penny off of Amazon, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, at least in this regard.

Instead, think of it as one of the many fucked-up aspects of the book industry and bookselling in general, and why the fact that things are going to change shouldn’t scare you, but instead get you excited.

Right now, if you went to the Amazon page for my latest book, you will see that there are used copies of my book selling for $0.01. If you follow that link, you’ll see that there are three vendors that sell “Like New” copies for that rock-bottom price. “Nearly Perfect, A Never Read Store Copy!” reads one listing. You see them all over Amazon: used, good and like new copies of books for sale at the price of a penny; or, in their parlance, $0.01.

Any author published by mid- to large-sized authors, it seems, is susceptible to the penny-dump. I don’t know exactly why this happens, but here are my guesses:

• chain store returns by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, which some merchants swoop down and buy at a cut rate before the copies are pulped
• overprinting by the publisher
• bookstores going out of business
• publishers going out of business
• massive book theft by pirates on the interstate highways by enterprising bargain booksellers
• satellite drones
• my book sucks
• low sales
• low demands as a backlist title

The real explanation has to be in this list, and I think it has to do mostly by the first couple of options. Maybe pirates, too.

UPDATE/ADD: Richard Nash, the publisher/editor for my most recent book and first two, offers his take in the comments. “Early early on, review copies are the primary source of used. Later on, it’s the remainder market.” Then he does some of this thing called “math.” My first two books, he points out, each weigh about 8 ounces, which can be shipped for $2.07 first class large flat. “Include handling and envelope and they’re making a buck a book. Which isn’t bad,” he writes.

Writers love to watch their online listings. First, there’s watching the rankings that can be ginned up by a one-day spike. Then noticing, sometimes within days of being listed, used and like new copies of their books for sale by some seller, like, in the middle of Michigan. And last, watching the price of their book go down, down, down, until it reaches the ultimate bargain basement price level save it being offered for free: one penny.

“Welcome to the one penny club,” someone–another writer, no doubt–writes in the comments of baseball announcer Ken Levine’s blog after marveling at how his book was being sold for $0.01.

“A penny for my thoughts? It makes me feel cheap,” nonfictionist Dinty Moore writes to me on my Facebook page.

How does a place that sells books for a penny make any money? That we know the answer to, or at least the internet seems fairly certain. It’s all in the scale and the postage. A penny book isn’t a penny book, you see. After you buy it, it has to get shipped.

“Penny Sellers who sell books for a penny or just a few cents have a Pro-Merchant account and sell mass quantities of books,” reads an article at this Work At Home blog. “They make bucks selling books on Amazon in the shipping fees. They collect the shipping fee from Amazon, which is a little more than what it costs to actually ship and they make a tiny profit off of each book. It is a tough business, and only for those who can sell a ton of books.”

The dreadful penny thing is definitely an Amazon-specific phenomenon. Discount online seller Half.com has a minimum book charge, at least according to one site, but Amazon can go as low as you can go. Martha Moffett writes about her experience of seeing her first novel on sale for a penny, and goes where I do not want to go: thinking about all the work one puts into a book, any book, and seeing it sold for the price of a Swedish fish at a five and dime.

“Don’t know what’s worse,” novelist Tobias Seamon writes on my Facebook, “that it’s being sold for 1 cent or that it’s ranked 1,693,336 at that price.”

I’m not going there. I just can’t.

***

Here’s the next set-up, beyond the penny books thing. The contract for my latest book specifies the following in a section called “Author’s Copies”:

Publisher shall deliver without charge 20 copies of each edition of the Work published by Publisher to the Author, and shall permit the Author to purchase additional copies at a discount of fifty percent (50%) from the retail price. Such purchases must be pre-paid by check or credit card.

I ran out of my Author’s Copies in about within five days of receiving them, and that was me being miserly. I told  my own mother to buy her own copy. Looking back, I should have asked for more–perhaps a tidy 100 would have been a start–but I didn’ t have an agent and my advance was small potatoes.

But think about that 50% author’ discount. My book’s retail price is $14.95; the online vendor price still hovers around $10 a year and a half after its release. My discounted author copies cost around $7.48, and would have to be bought from the distributor in amounts that make sense for them to make an order (50 copies stick in my mind) and then there would be shipping. For the sake of argument, let’s call the per-book author discount price at an even 8 bucks.

Then I look at copies of my book for one frigging cent. I asked myself: Self, I could sell these fuckers at a profit. Maybe these penny people would become my de facto wholesaler?

Late last year, I ordered a Like-New penny copy to see what it looked like, if it was re-re-sale-worthy. I wondered if the vendor noticed who was ordering it–the same name as the author’s–and then figured they were too busy shipping hundreds of other penny-books to care or feel sorry for me.

A couple days later, a copy arrived, and it was in good shape. I had gotten a copy of my own book for 4 bucks.

Weeks before going off to the AWP bookfair, I ordered 8 more copies from the penny places. I sold them all. For five bucks.

“I want you to know,” I told one of my customers as she gave me a five dollar bill, “that I am making a dollar off of you.”

As I inscribed the book, I explained how I had bought the book for a penny. She didn’t seem to care.

“The person paying that price is probably a dabbler in your work, not a hardcore fan,” Richard Nash reminds me, again in the comments below. “Odds are, if they like it, they’re paying full price the next time.”

“I love them .1 books,” post and educator Kenneth Carroll writes, again on my Facebook. “Helps me out when I”m doing community (i.e. poor) programs with youth.”

Maybe by bringing my penny-books to the right readers at a modest profit, I’m doing community work of a kind. Either way, I don’t feel cheap. It all seems to make sense, since nothing in the economics of the mainstream-ish publishing industry makes sense these days. Or did it ever?