Since I gave Amazon.com an inadvertant plug yesterday, I'm going to make amends and mention a fairly new project from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. IMBA are the stores that -- unlike Amazon.com -- aren't doing their best to sell used copies of books for which the authors receive no compensation.

Mary and I do check Amazon.com rankings for amusement, and look at the reviews there. It is big, it's out there, and it has to be dealt with, but it clearly cares nothing about authors. We avoid linking to it.

IMBA, on the other hand, has, since the fall, been putting online Killer Books , selected monthly by mystery booksellers. As the site describes it:

Each month, the 60 quirky stores that make up IMBA submit their favorite recent reads to a rotating editor who then trims the list to five. The general rule is that the book must be published within a three month period....Every selection is a gem that otherwise might have gotten lost among the more than 100 mysteries published each month.

Pointing out a good, obscure book might lead to a few extra sales which might help the author write more books. That's a far cry from maximizing used book sales. Taken to the logical extreme, if Amazon.com keeps increasing used book sales, it could eventually make it impossible for new books to earn anything, in which case I'm not sure where the used books would come from, but I suppose Mr Bezos has that all figured out.