Book Hijacking

Have you ever had a friend, family member or other person say they bought your book, and they say they bought it yesterday, but you have had no sales yesterday? So are they lying just to be nice? Or are they trying to just make you shut up, so they lie to you?

Chances are they are telling the truth and your book has been hijacked.... Legally.

Calling this a scam is really not the "right" word for it, as anyone can sell anyone anything for any price. How is that for a sentence? So what happens is this. There are people out there who create a simple business, and that is they sell books. Harmless sounding yet those in this industry take millions of dollars from readers every year, and how they do it is where maybe the word we should use is not scam, but lets call it dubious at best. So how does this dubious sales practice work?

Be careful of where you buy books at. You might be paying more than retail, and feeding a dubious dragon.

So this is what these book sellers do. It is actually pretty simple and although not illegal it relies on several things.

• They lie to you, making you think they stock the book!
• They make you think that they are the ones shipping the book!
• They make you think they stock thousands of titles. THEY STOCK NOTHING!

In fact these book sellers most of the time operate out of basements and one room offices. They operate legally under LLC's filed with odd letter based names like ABC Services etc, (Not real name, just an example). They have PO Boxes that they call Suites. So you the end customer think that they are legit sellers, with massive wharehouses with tend of thousands of books. So that is how they trick you into trust. So this is what they do that makes this just plain not honest.

So they operate both large stores online and social media. We will start with their social media such as Facebook. Now each of these sellers operate pretty much the same, usually the only difference is how they handle their social media pages. Usually they will have comments open, that shows you they welcome input. However, they delete any comments that are not positive and ban the person posting. They usually will be constantly usually updating their social media about books IN STOCK, using deceptive wording like "our wharehouse" has everything we well in stock and what they do not tell you is they use POD operations like Amazon POD srvices, and they have really nice stores, so when you purchase from them their online store is the place you pay. Now this is where the crappy business practices begin.

So they will put a book up, lets call it PUBLISHING 101. Now PUBLISHING 101 has already been up online for sale on places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and even the publishers website for a few weeks. Now all of these places are of course legit, and some of these places have the ability to search for recent titles, and these people search for all books under the recent tabs. They then add those books to their website and list them as IN STOCK and this is how the "dubious" sales practices operate.

• On amazon the book is 12.99
• They place the book on their site for 16.99
• Someone buys the book from them.
• They buy the book from Amazon.
• Have it shipped to you from Amazon.

So you get the book in a few days, are very happy and if you wonder why your package is coming from amazon, and look it up and put 2 and 2 together and realize you just got taken for a few bucks you of course go to their socials and make a comment saying HEY WHY YOU DOING THIS? They nuke your comment, block you and move on with their day. Since their website has literaly hundreds of books, and some of these operations have thousands, they sell a lot of books making maybe 3 or 4 bucks on a sale. Some of these operations sell hundreds of books a week, or even a day. The math is in their favor.

So who do you complain to? The answer sadly is no one as it is legal. They can sell "their" books for whatever they want to. Now you can report them to Amazon however they are not violating any of the Amazon policies, nor are they breaking the law. So what in reality are they doing.

• Yes they are being deceptive.
• Yes they are pretty much lying to your face.
• Yes you are being tricked.
• Yes they know exactly what they are doing.
• And yes they know they are wrong.

Be careful of upsetting that dubious dragon.

Sooner or later places like this will be legally challenged and eventually the laws will change that in some way rign in these sellers.