Friday, March 9, 2012

Amazon nightmare

I wanted to alert writers to a potential problem on Amazon. I was delighted, as a result of starting a small ad campaign on Goodreads, to get hundreds of potential readers interested in my book, and I even got a request from a reader in the US who wanted to include my book in their book club. Yay! The only problem, the reader noted, was the somewhat steep $85 price tag on Amazon.com. Yikes! My book is supposed to sell for $12.99! But sure enough, when I went on the site there was a third party re-seller offering my book for $85 and no mention of my $12.99 price tag. After many e-mails and calls I discovered that the problem originated when I asked CreateSpace to send me copies of the PDF's for my book so I could convert it to e-book format. Instead of sending me copies they pulled the whole thing and left the status of my book as "incomplete", making it impossible to order. Then the third party re-sellers stepped into the vaccuum and began charging what they liked. There are now 4 sellers on there doing the same thing. This is really scary. I am now having to re-start the process again with CreateSpace, which hopefully won't take too long, and I have contacted each of the re-sellers to ask them politely to charge what is appropriate for my book. The sad thing is that I have probably already lost hundreds of sales, and my Goodreads ad campaign, which produced many potential readers, probably killed off any interest once the readers got on the Amazon site. Amazon does not take responsibility for what third party sellers want to charge, so there is no protection. As a self published author, it is hard enough to make one's name out there and find readers, but when this sort of thing happens also, it is heartbreaking. Just wanted to let people know about this potentially horrible situation that happened through no fault of my own!