Someone is playing the system, but don't spend a hundred bucks on one of my books

If you want to buy one of my books, I thank you! If you're patiently waiting for Sexton Sand (Sexton Chronicles IV), I thank you.
   My books are for sale in paperback, hardcover, and file download at Lulu.com. The prices are good and Lulu has deals on the books often.
   But the other day, I discovered my books are for sale at Amazon in hardcover. The problem? They shouldn't be. My books are for sale there as Kindles or paperback.
   Some third-party vendor is buying my hardcover books from Lulu and selling them on Amazon for $148-$190. Don't pay that much. You're not doing me any favor, and you're not doing yourself any favor by doing that. I put the caution out there because someone did buy one of my books for that kind of money. I'm flattered he thinks it's worth it, but...

I think the third-party vendor will be handled quite easily by Amazon. I learned the hard way that Amazon scours the internet for the lowest possible price on a book. If it finds a price lower than the one they offer, they reduce the price. They did that with Storm Clouds Over Sexton when I raised the price for the Kindle version. They'll do it, I'm sure, for the hardcover copies of the Sexton Chronicles.

In fact, now that someone bought a copy of Return To Sexton for a whopping $173. Amazon pulled the listing. I'm glad they did. I never wanted the hardcover to be for sale on Amazon anyway, but that's a different topic for a different day.

I do want you to buy my books, of course. See the links at the bottom of the page. Click them and they'll take you to the best price on the books, directly from the source. Buy the books and we'll both feel good. They're quality tales. Yes, I want to sell books to you, but I don't want to see you get ripped off.

I'm excited about a couple of things...

I'll mark this first one in my calendar because it makes me happy for reasons I don't fully understand: Someone, somewhere in the United Kingdom bought Green Goblin for their Kindle. The Sexton books have been up on Amazon UK for a couple of months with no sales, and I was beginning to wonder if any of my stuff would sell on Amazon there. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Green Goblin was my first sale in the UK. They're waaaay ahead of the US in terms of recognizing and treating Wernicke-Korsakoff disease.

I'm also excited, for different reasons, about Smashwords.com. Smashwords publishes eBooks in all formats. I uploaded all three (to date) Sexton Chronicles books as well as Green Goblin, and Smashwords converted them to epub, kindle, Sony Reader, Palm Reader, PDF, RTF, and other formats I don't remember at the moment. You can buy/download books from there and read samples there. 

The other thing Smashwords did for me is made the Sexton books easy to find with a simple Google search. The books appear with all kinds of URLs that lead to free samples, and ultimately to the books. Very, very cool.

If you have an electronic reader, take some time to check out www.smashwords.com And it won't hurt my feelings any if you buy one, or two, or four of mine while you're there!