CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: Amazon’s Tucker-Disappearing Act.

According to an August 16 press release by All Seasons Press, Amazon received 7,523 copies of Tucker. On the book’s publication date, August 1, Amazon listed it as “Sold Out” within minutes. And yet BookScan, a firm that tracks book sales, reported only 3,227 sales of Tucker during its first week. Which raises these questions, as bullet-pointed in All Seasons Press’s release:

Did Amazon sell out of their 7,523 units almost immediately?

If so, why weren’t those sales reported to BookScan?

If they did not sell out their 7,523 unit inventory, why did they announce that the book was sold out and unavailable for sale?

Some other twists: Amazon fulfilled post-publication orders before shipping books to customers who’d preordered Tucker. And after describing the book as “Sold Out,” Amazon didn’t order more copies from the publisher; on the contrary—and quite incredibly—it “emailed many preorder customers to ask if they wanted to cancel their orders,” and required them “to go on a desktop, not the app, and proactively confirm they still wanted the book or the order would automatically cancel.”

In other words, Amazon made it easy for customers to cancel their orders and made it difficult for them to confirm their orders. What merchant eager to sell a product behaves in such a way?

One who puts political interests above their own shareholders’ interests.