An Amazon update

August 31, 2011 Amazon

A breakdown of last night: Amazon don’t think there is anything wrong with the listing. So far their support people have all taken one look and escalated it, only for me to get a email back from the technical team this morning that the listing is “fine”. My thoughts were unprintable.

Not shown as an ebook, not in the Kindle store, and you can’t purchase it. That’s not fine.

I phoned Amazon.com (£2 a minute – ouch). They could see the response, and the still-broken product page. The support operator was very helpful and is escalating it along with a note that the first response was wrong.

Unfortunately it will still be broken when the book is featured on 1st September, because the department that should have fixed it yesterday is closed. Republishing won’t fix it because the problem is with the ASIN. I cannot really see a way to recover this, because no matter where you send people they still look books up on Amazon.

And Amazon wonder why I won’t print publish with them.

Here’s a very fast update, ten minutes later: they made it worse. To my great surprise the listing claims the book (presumably printed) is published by Amazon and ships from Canada. This is when I start looking at lawyers, as the print rights have never been sold.



Update 14:00: The publisher got onto them. Amazon have emailed back and are confused as to why there is a problem with the page. Let’s see:
– Customers can’t buy the book
– The copyright info has been stripped.
My screenshot has been sent to Amazon, with details and links. I’m sure I’ll find this very funny in a few months time, but right now it is driving me mad…
…mainly because this time last year they did almost exactly the same thing with Fire Season.

My apologies once again to anyone affected. Amazon in Autumn seems to be a bad combination for me.