Notes From The E-Trenches
A funny thing happened to me on the way to work the other day. Well, I work at home, but the story sounds better if I'm going somewhere.
After a few weeks in the Top #500 on Kindle, my novella "The Frozen Sky" jumped into the Top #250. At the same time, a typo appeared in the Product Description. When I tried to log into my Author Central page to erase this spontaneous bit of garbage, I found myself locked out of pages I'd once controlled at will with no more than the touch of an "Edit" button.
Meanwhile, "Sky" hit the Top #200, then #150, and hung there for two days. 
"What the heck is going on?" I asked myself, who answered, "I dunno, dude, but I like it!"
After a great deal of go-around, here was the scene. "Sky" sold nearly 2000 copies over the weekend — all with that ugly typo in the Product Description.
Meanwhile, you guys know I'm totally OCD. My editor at Ace called me "Mr. Clean" because my manuscripts arrived in pristine condition. So while I was thrilled by the awesome spike in activity, I was also hammering the customer service reps at Amazon to correct the typo.
I learned that the hunk of gibberish you can see in the middle of the second paragraph is called an ASCII error. Amazon's software had introduced it to the text when they locked it down prior to sending out a massive email promoting "The Frozen Sky" and five other 99-cent sci fi titles, and, the cloud being as vast and powerful as Hal, no one was actually sure how to talk the cloud out of the typo it had created.
How much do I love that? I wish they'd give me a typo and a promo every day, ha ha.
My hero proved to be a mystery man whose only handle is Bert G.
Bert G. called me at my house! On the phone! In person! He got my machine (I never answer the phone; I'm working) and said, "Hello, this is Amazon calling for Jeff Carlson about The Frozen Sky."
It was like the first time an agent called when I was a wide-eyed novice with big dreams. Holy smackerel. With a mix of excitement and wonder, I grabbed the phone and said, "Who is this?"
Bert G. had my home ph# because it's buried in the contact info of my KDP account. He'd taken the initiative to step into the back-and-forth of emails between myself and other customer service reps, breaking the cycle of a new autobot answering each response. Then he personally oversaw the process of correcting and upgrading the Product Description with its fancy new slug in bold, which you can see on its Kindle page today.
Love it.
So I wanted to say thank you in public. Sir, you are the man. That kind of personal attention is unspeakably cool, and I hope your bosses know it.
Bert G., sleep well tonight!
