My love/hate relationship with Amazon
by Christine Kling
So from one week to the next, you just don’t know if Amazon is your best friend – sending your book sales into the stratosphere – or your apparent enemy when they seem to try to purposely and maliciously hide your books in the wilds of Amazonia.
I recently wrote here about my fabulous results after a Kindle Select promotion. Since Circle of Bones was selling so well, I decided to try to get my rights back to my four Seychelle books, two of which hadn’t earned out and all of which were not priced to sell very well as ebooks. My former agent had been a whiz with contracts, and I was able to prove that according to the terms of my contract, Random House was required to return those rights due to poor sales. End result, I got those rights back with minimum hassle.
[image error]After editing the texts for all the scanning errors, and getting the new cover art, I re-published Surface Tension under my own imprint, and two days later Cross Current went live. I’ll be slowly working on the editions of the last two books in the series over the next month.
The problem was, however, that these books were not out of print. The Random House Kindle editions were live right up until I was ready to put mine up, and their books were priced at $6.99 and $7.99. Because Amazon will price match with any digital editions out there, I really had to scour the web from Kobo to Diesel to Nook to find all the places those books still appeared and ask that they be removed.
But then when Surface Tension did finally appear in the Kindle store, there were no reviews. My new edition wasn’t linked to the 16 reader reviews that had been there for years. So again, I hit the keyboard and fired missives out to the Kindle Direct Publishing support people asking them to link that book, as well as the second book I had just published.
Then it happened. They got the books linked to the reviews somehow, but in recreating these links, they somehow managed to make the presence I had built on Amazon get totally screwed up. The sales of Circle of Bones suddenly screeched to a near halt. I think it lost all those links it had forged out in the world of “people who bought this also bought this…” On my Amazon author page, it doesn’t show the covers of my new Kindle editions, in fact, it only shows paper books for all the entries. When I do a search for Surface Tension in the Kindle Store, it only shows the audio book – not the Kindle edition, and when I search for Cross Current, it finds nothing at all. And what’s the key word for good ebook sales? Discoverability!
So, while I loved Amazon last month, recently I’ve been making use of my fluent ability to swear like a sailor when referring to my retail giant friend. I hope we’ll get back on better terms soon because I have scheduled another Kindle Select give away for this weekend. If you are interested, the Kindle edition of Surface Tension will be free Saturday, April 21- Monday April 23, and you can access it just by clicking the link on any one of those days.
And do you want to help me get back in Amazon’s good graces? Then tell all your friends about this free ebook, post it on your Facebook pages, and retweet something like this:
Christine Kling’s #boating suspense novels keep you turning the pages. SURFACE TENSION #free for #Kindle 4/21-4/23 http://amzn.to/surfacetension
I’ll need your help because I won’t be able to work at getting the word out myself. I will be off in the Exumas and beyond with questionable Internet, as the proposed schedule is to depart Sunday morning on Wild Matilda to sail directly to Luperon in the Dominican Republic if this weather window holds. I’ll activate my SPOT when we leave, so you will be able to follow me here: http://tinyurl.com/talespinner.
Fair winds!
Christine
Author of CIRCLE OF BONES
Available for Kindle
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