A few days ago I decided to sign up for amazon’s author central as I had heard some pretty good things about that program, it featured some interesting goodies and hey, it was free, so what did I have to lose, right? Well, it turns out that I had a lot to lose, thank you oh so very much, because almost immediately the response I got by clicking my name in one of my books was a nicer page… in which all of my recent work, the ones that were actually published by amazon’s own subsidiary CreateSpace, were missing. Still, I didn’t panic as there was a note saying that those books would be added in a couple of days, which they were. So far, so… well, I wouldn’t say that was ‘good’, but I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say it was ‘bad’.  In fact it was only when those books were added that things took a turn for the worse.

What happened was that the listing for Soulless, a book I had spent almost a year rewriting, defaulted to the old, out of print edition, though even after all this time amazon won’t list it as ‘out of print’, just as ‘out of stock’ (which is laughable for a POD published book, but that’s another story). I contacted them, asking them what I could do to fix that particular situation, and the reply I got amounted basically to ‘that’s the way our pages work, tough luck’… okay, not quite they did add a button that said that there’s a newer edition available, one I would have assumed would have been added by default when a new edition became available, but apparently it hadn’t been.

Also, as if their defaulting to the old edition weren’t bad enough, amazon had decided to link the old edition to the ‘look inside’ content of the new one… the fact that the content of both books is not the same is apparently irrelevant as far as they are concerned (to be fair, I have to say I’m not sure if this is a new development or if the problem had been there all along and I’ve just become aware of it as a result of this little SNAFU).

Anyway, back to the contact form I went. This time I clicked on the ‘I want to delete my Author Page’ option, as this seemed to be my only way out under the circumstances. Before I had even typed a single character that one had already gotten me a ‘he he, you are screwed’ message (okay, technically it read ‘In order to help customers better browse their favorite authors and find new ones, Author Pages are not removed’, but it amounted to the same thing). I wrote to them once more to try to explain once again what the problem was, and I am currently waiting for a response, but the thing is that, in light of the glowing reviews I had seen of that particular program, and how dismal my experiences with it have been in the short time I’ve been affiliated with it, I figured I might as well post this little heads-up, especially if you are trying to bring out a new edition of an existing title… or if there is even the smallest chance that you will someday have to do so.

Now to the obvious question: is this a real problem that is worth considering before signing up for this service, which does have some good things going for it, or is this just a one off fluke that is unlikely to come back to haunt most authors? Continue reading A nightmare in the amazon (beware of amazon’s author central) →