Selling this book for $9.59 would have the same effect on our bottom line as opening the cash drawer and handing a customer a $5 bill for no reason. 
What happens when you buy a book from us at full price:
1️⃣ just over half goes back to the publisher to pay for the book
2️⃣ of the rest, about half goes to pay employee wages
3️⃣ the remaining half of our share goes to rent, marketing, donations, cat care, maintenance, etc
1️⃣ just over half goes back to the publisher to pay for the book
2️⃣ of the rest, about half goes to pay employee wages
3️⃣ the remaining half of our share goes to rent, marketing, donations, cat care, maintenance, etc
It’s safe to say that when you buy a book at full price from us, around half of that money stays in Lawrence. When you buy it from Amazon, basically none of the money stays here.
When a book is sold below cover price, the part of the proceeds that takes the hit is the “stays in Lawrence” part. So selling Crawdads at $9.59 would mean we wouldn’t even fulfill obligation 1️⃣, and we’d have a $5 shortfall before we could even start on 2️⃣ or 3️⃣.
Amazon can pull this off because they have lots of other revenue streams like the incredibly profitable Amazon Web Services. Trust us, we do not have other multi-billion dollar revenue streams.
We got into the book business because we really love books. We think they’re important. We believe in the exchange of stories and ideas. We do not want to be forced out of the book business by a technology/data company’s retail experiment.
We’re of course aware that, for many people, spending $30 on a book is difficult or impossible. Public libraries and used bookstores offer low or no cost access to books and they contribute to communities in ways that Amazon doesn’t.
