Unaware, perhaps, that they no are no longer reaping rewards for their creator, used hard copies of my novels find their ways into online used bookstores and resell and resell.  I am all for recycling, in theory, but not in this particular. Neither publisher nor author gets a cut of used book sales.  What an author can do is buy up all the used copies, which are sometimes priced as low as a penny, and resell them at a higher price.  I have tried my hand at this, but I make a lousy bookseller. I refuse to bubblewrap, doublebox or otherwise over-package books the way Amazon does (they seem to think books are potentially able to explode if jostled in the post), and I don’t get orders in the mail very quickly. Although it might be of some benefit, I’m not too keen on spending a lot of energy learning how to be a bookseller as well as a writer. Gone are the days when some publishing-house intern with nothing better to do took care of things for the pampered writer.  These days most authors, be they with small or large publishers, have to do a lot of their own PR, dealing personally with book stores and reading groups.  I don’t want the added responsibility of resale management. Continue reading →