Author's *cost* is shown to buyers in bookstore along with price. Terrible!
If one uses the link from the “announce” email (or just goes to blurb and enters the bookstore), one arrives at the page where the book is offered, along with a link at the top of the page, “Pricing”! That pricing happens to be the author’s cost for the book. So the buyer gets to see markup. Worse, it’s very very confusing because it implies that’s the cost of the book to the site visitor, and of course it isn’t.
The ironic thing is that if the author signs into his/her account and goes to the bookstore, that “Pricing” link is not presented!
It should be the other way around … “not signed in” should price-to-author is not shown. After all, if you don’t have an account at Blurb, why should you get access to price-to-author info? And if you do have an account, you need access to that pricing.
How many times have you gone to a bookstore where they show you their cost for a book along with the price to you. Never. Blurb has made a terrible decision.
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It’s a tricky problem. A vast majority of non-logged in users that are looking at the Book Pricing page are authors just like you, that are either new users assessing our service or existing users that just don’t happen to be logged in. We would be doing a great disservice to all those users if we hid the pricing information. However, you make a great point about those that you’ve specifically invited to purchase your book. The good news is (after a quick look at our metrics) only 1% of users that enter our site via an author’s invite ever look at our pricing information—and that includes invites from authors that haven’t marked up their book’s price. That said, we are working on ways to create a more customized experience for those that are invited in this manner, including removing links to basic author pricing information. Thanks,
Jack
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I respectfully disagree about your disservice comment. I think you would be doing authors a *service* by taking steps to distance buyers from cost information. And I wonder how many authors use your ‘announce’ feature versus sending their own email themselves … because that’s where their address book is and where they would like to catch replies.
It could be argued you are doing authors a disservice by requiring buyers to open an account. It’s possible that some potential buyers might not do that and move on, whereas if the buying experience where less encumbered, that just might kick around in the bookstore and buy something. As an author, I wouldn’t mind signing in every time I come to blurb, no big deal. And hope that you will make the buying process as easy as possible and also cloak, so to speak, the cost information.
Thanks for considering my comments. (BTW, I’m not the author, I’m the author’s husband helping with techie issues.)
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I did use the announce feature. It was a bit of a hassle adding the email address one at a time because it had to be just the email addresses and to copy and paste meant that the persons names in my address book as well as their addys got pasted so wasn’t a straight forward process. Aside from that it would be nice if there was a comment section on the page where your book is displayed where someone who has bought your book could leave a comment about it. Cheryl
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I’ll not ever use the announce feature again if this is the case.
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