Yet More Reasons Amazon is Your Frenemy if You're An Author

 By now I've done sort of a series on how Amazon is your frenemy when it comes to selling books.  Sure they let you use their site and you make some money, but their incompetence, draconian rules (that they don't even understand), poor service, and lackluster tech can also screw you over.  Here's another case for the file.

If you "follow" authors on Amazon, you should in theory get emails when that author has a new book coming out.  Which for James Patterson or Stephen King might send you an email every two weeks.  Or for GRR Martin you might get one a year--and that's probably just an anthology he "edited" or a reissue of an old book.  I follow Eric Filler and it was always kind of neat to get a "New From Eric Filler" or "Coming Soon From Eric Filler" email to see what was being sent to my 2292 "followers" on Amazon.

(If you haven't already, you can check how many followers you have through Author Central.  For now anyway it's the first box under the menu.)

Looking at my AOL account where I get Amazon emails, I didn't always get a Coming Soon/New email for my books, but I got one or the other for most of them until April.  Then from April 12th until July 12th (when I complained) I got none at all.  Granted I didn't do any books the end of April or start of May, but by the end of May I had started putting out books again.  There should have been something, you'd think, right?

I knew it would be pointless, but in July when I really noticed it, I decided to email.  And of course someone in India gave me some stupid boilerplate email about how it can take "up to 60 days."  So I reply that it's been more than 60 days for some books.  And get back a silly reply that "he'll bring it up at the next meeting."  Yeah, right.  

Why this annoys me is that while I'm sure most of the 2292 "followers" are not actively following, that's still about 4.5 times the number of followers as my newsletter.  So obviously I'd like to be getting emails to those people so at least a few might buy my books.  Or read them through Kindle Unlimited.  Something to get me some freaking money.

What else annoys me is:  why is this a problem?  I doubt some asshat in India has to actually hand-key the email the way I do my newsletter.  It should be an automated process.  If it's not then you're doing it wrong, Amazon.  And obviously they were doing it, so why did they stop? 

And it's not just for me.  I've noticed a distinct lack of emails from other authors I follow.  Some of them release a new book every week and yet I'm only getting emails from Amazon about one of their books maybe once a month.  Meanwhile others I still get pretty consistently.  So there's obviously something fucked up on Amazon's end--again.  But because you can't ever talk to anyone who can actually help you, no one's ever really going to do shit unless someone there accidentally stumbles across it or maybe someone with more influence than me publicly shames them.

Really I think the only other possibility is if AOL just isn't delivering some emails; it'd be nice if I could compare notes with some other "follower" of mine to see if they're getting different emails.

The "60 Days" thing is pretty annoying too.  I mean 60 days after a book is out, it's pretty well dead, so there's not much point sending an email then.  It's like that for a lot of things.  Imagine if a movie studio said, "We won't promote your movie until 60 days after it's out."  That would be absurd.  And, again, it shouldn't be like someone has to go put it together from scratch and send it.

Anyway, I took one of their KDP surveys and said if they're not going to send these emails then they should just give authors the tools to do it themselves.  I suppose they'd say that some authors might use it to spam people.  But I don't need the actual mailing list; just give me a button through KDP to let me alert new readers when I have a new book dropping.  I mean isn't that the whole fucking point of letting them "follow" me in the first place?  So my loyal readers will know when I have a new book for them to read?

For a big-time author this isn't a really important issue because they can advertise in ways that will make people aware otherwise.  For small-timers like me it's nice to have a free tool to help spread the word.  As I always say, people can't buy something if they don't know it exists.

And while I'm ranting, Amazon's redesigned author pages are fucking garbage.  Like the KDP Reports, they're pretty annoying and virtually useless on mobile devices.  It's also so clumsy to use if the author has more than like 10 books.

Let's look at one who isn't me for a change.  I bookmarked Carl Hiaasen's page so I could check to see if he has any books on sale that I might want to buy.  So first you get this, which has a row of books but no prices, so that's no help:

Then it puts them up by "Popularity" as default and doesn't show every book.  Nope, you've got to go to "See All" and then guess what?  It kicks you back to the top and you've got to start over again!

But I do have to give them credit for recently adding a box to show only Kindle Unlimited, Kindle, paperback, mass market paperback, audiobook, or hardcover:

This is good for me when I just want to see Kindle options especially because authors who have been around for a while like Hiaasen, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Stephen King, or whoever will have tons of books in paperback, hardcover, etc and if you sort by price it'll bring up some ancient paperback going for $0.01 used or something.  This way I can select just Kindle and sort by price and it might not be 100% accurate but it's better.  Or if you have Kindle Unlimited you can just check the box to see those books you can read in KU.

On Hiaasen's page when I was browsing, I noticed something weird, which is a book they list as Hiaasen's but is clearly not:

If you look at the book's page it's clearly a completely different book by a different author.  But the paperback is an edition of Hiaasen's book.  Before you think the unknown author did something untoward, what happened is someone at Amazon (or the publisher) put the paperback of an edition of Hiaasen's Skin Tight as Skintight and so some glitch at Amazon then merged it with Skintight by this John Brackett instead of Skin Tight by Hiaasen, which is here.  

I've had similar problems with some of my books.  One day I noticed Naughty or Nice by Ivana Johnson suddenly had dozens of reviews.  I looked and saw the reviews were talking about a different book called Naughty or Nice.  I sent a message and they got that one untangled.  But for some reason they still have Shrinkage and The Swapping Edge tangled up so that there are reviews for The Swapping Edge on Shrinkage and Amazon tells me I bought The Swapping Edge in 2020 when it wasn't released until February 2022!

I have to think at some point (or multiple points) someone(s) at Amazon screwed up some code and a bunch of books got tangled together.  And since Amazon is too big to check its own work, it's up to authors and readers to find these mistakes.  Then getting anyone to actually DO anything about them can be a real challenge.

You really have to wonder how Amazon ever got to be one of the biggest retailers in the world with stupid shit like this.  But then this is also a humongous retailer that has used the same clumsy, asinine system of navigating multiple pages since pretty much the 90s:

I mean if you only have 4 pages to go through that's fine, but when there are hundreds of pages of results, this is almost impossible to go through.  Why not let people jump to a specific page?  Like on Vine, what if I want to skip to page 300?  I can't.  I'd have to go one-by-one through all those pages until I got there.

Why would I do that?  Because in that case it's largely sorted by release date so I might want to see some older things.  In other cases maybe you're searching for a particular book or song and there are a lot of results and you want to skip to an author/band that's farther down the list but not at the end.

The point being it seems like an easy fix but Amazon's hubris and complete lack of customer service and basic common sense prevents them from making even these simple fixes.  Someday maybe a new big fish will come along and finally swallow them, but until then us minnows are the ones getting turned into chum.

Tortured marine life metaphor!  Boom!