We don’t know why Amazon has stopped discounting books published by independent authors and publishers, but it has. If you look in the Kindle Store or the greater Amazon bookstore, you’ll see that those nice red discount prices have disappeared from a great many titles. We can speculate on why, but it’s just that: speculation. The real reasons are only going to be discussed in Amazon board meetings.

The bottom line is that all of us – authors, publishers, and readers – are at the mercy of whatever Amazon decides to do pricing-wise. I’m not saying Amazon is “bad,” as I’m sure they’re trying to do whatever is best for their bottom line. But the bottom line for you and me is that customers are being asked to pay higher prices for books that have often been very inexpensive to start with, and authors and publishers are making less money (and it wasn’t a lot to start with, in most cases).

Right now, the only two avenues to getting discount prices for Kindle and print for self- or small-press publishers and authors that I see are publishing through Mobipocket for distribution to the Kindle Store, and Lightning Source, Inc. (LSI) for print. It looks like Amazon has discontinued its discounts across the board on titles published through its own direct services, including the Digital Text Platform for Kindle, CreateSpace, and BookSurge. Curiously, Mobipocket is owned by Amazon, but titles published through them to the Kindle Store are still being discounted – hopefully that will continue.

The downside is that for Mobipocket-based sales for Kindle, sales are registered through Amazon’s Vendor Central, which is pretty clunky and doesn’t give an ongoing tally of sales – monthly reports only. And LSI is more expensive ($212, I believe, including an ISBN) to set up; but it has wider distribution – including B&N – and the author/publisher has control of the retailer discount.

As a consumer, a lot of that may not mean anything to you, so let me show you the difference in a way your pocketbook will clearly understand. For the Kindle, there are two versions of my novel In Her Name (Omnibus Edition) now available in the Kindle store. The one published through Amazon’s DTP is currently priced at $8.99 – with no discount. The version distributed from Mobipocket is now priced at $7.19, which is 20% off. As a consumer, which are you going to want to buy? And if you had a choice between two different books that had similar appeal and the same list price, but one is discounted 20%, which are you going to get? All things being equal, the cheaper one, of course!

So, the beat goes on. Or beating, whichever you prefer. But these are some things I thought that you should be aware of, whether you’re a consumer or author/publisher.

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