poesyartist's Posts

I am having the same problem. There are (at least) two major problems with Blurb’s approach to sales from the site.

(1) Buyer has to register an account to buy a book. I know of no other ecommerce site that makes that as a requirement. It’s a barrier to buyers continuing with the purchase decision.

(2) Your so-called “pricing” is confusing buyers of my book. They don’t understand why your stated price is different than what I show on my storefront, and I get calls about that. Once I explain your price is my cost, they said they understand, and then they go on to ask if they could just buy directly from me, in part because of (1) above and also because of high shipping cost. I end up buying a quantity of books and selling directly.

Your book cost information should be available to book authors only (by signing in to their account), and to those who register an account to explore using your printing services. Buyers should not be required to register an account.

So, bottom line is, your site fails as an ecommerce site. And because I have my own website (www.poesyart.com) that affords a better opportunity to display and discuss my book, I find the only value Blurb offers is book printing. Whoever is in charge of ecommerce needs to completely review the approach to selling.

Is there a better way to revise a book (e.g., to fix a typo) than having to treat it as a new book?

Using Booksmart, I loaded the existing book and made the change, then uploaded the revised file to blurb (with exactly the same title of course). It got treated as a new book such that I then had two books in my bookstore, the revised one and the now-obsolete one. So then I marked the obsolete one “private” so no one would stumble across it and order it. I then remembered that I had sent email out regarding my book with a link to my book at blurb, and now that link pointed to the obsolete version. To address that, I changed the title of the obsolete book to include “obsolete, see new version” to warn that potential buyer. Not a great title anymore, but I wanted to steer book buyers to the correct version. And of course I also needed to update my website “badge” code to point to the new book.

All this is an outcome of not being able to revise a book. Did I miss something, is there a way to replace an existing book file at blurb with a new one such that all links remain correct and such that I don’t have to have an obsolete book in my bookstore?

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.)