Any bookstore with an Ingram account (Ingram is the world’s largest book distributor) can pick up Ingram’s feed, and feature their inventory online. Amazon allows these firms to list “new and used” books for sale on Amazon.com. The fact is, unless someone truly has a used copy of your book for sale, these books don’t even exist yet. Only if somebody orders your book from that reseller will then they place an order for that book from our printer.
Many authors think these “used” copies represent real sales of their book that have occurred in the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. Amazon’s reseller listings do NOT represent copies that have already been printed and sold. We believe this is false advertising. Unfortunately, Amazon allows it.
These resellers may also advertise “new” copies of out-of-print books. When this happens, any unlucky buyer will likely receive a message later (days or weeks later!) from the reseller saying they can’t obtain a copy of the book. This, of course, make the reseller, Amazon, the publisher, and even the author look bad. It’s a shame that Amazon has so many resellers with errors on their website.
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