First, please, I need to say that the person who helped me this morning was outstanding! They were awesome. I hope someone buys them a really yummy lunch today because they deserve it. Amazon Customer Service was A-1..today.
I’ve still been having problems getting Amazon to understand my little ISBN situation. They’ve still got “Prodigal Son” listed wrong. This is a process. Ok. I get it.
Something that’s not supposed to be a Big Process is updating your covers. That’s supposed to be easy-peasy. It won’t let you do anything, paperback wise, until you view the file…including the cover….and approve it. Then it does to Amazon’s grinder and you either get published or they kick it back to you for one error or another.
While dealing with the “Prodigal Son” issue, I noticed another issue and it was one I had for a couple of YEARS actually with “The Heart of War” but, back in those Dark Ages, one could not get in touch with Amazon without a security clearance or something.
The cover.
And the back cover.
Wrong.
Totally wrong.
A little voice way in the back of my head said: You better check the other covers.
And I said: Oh, they’re fine.
No, they’re not. Said that voice as it grew a bit louder. Rising Son is also wrong.
Yeah, I know, I fixed it. It just hasn’t gone through yet
Ummhummm.
Ok, fine! I’ll look, don’t get huffy.
I opened Rising Son. It was still wrong. But what really caught my eye was the back cover. That little image below the front cover.
Ummm…excuse me? That hasn’t been the back cover for….
Years?
Shut up. Oh, yeah, wait, thank you.
Hmmmm.
I went to every single one of my paperbacks. Every single back cover was ancient. No lie. Like this one, some of them hadn’t been (supposed to be) used in years. But there they were.
Sitting there. Making ME look horrible. The front covers are awesome but if you go to buy a paperback I look the schmuck who doesn’t know what they’re doing. No one is going to think that Amazon screwed the pooch here. Right? You’d blame the author too…wouldn’t you?
As I went to every single paperback I got to The Heart of War, which I’d had those problems with for all those years. Oh, yes, the back cover is wrong…BUT…
Ummm…excuse me? What is THAT?
I have never, not for one single second, sold t-shirts on Amazon. I have never uploaded a mock up of a t-shirt to Amazon. Certainly not with this old cover. BUT…Way Back When…I did have these t-shirts for sale on my site only. Now, I couldn’t try to buy this thing. It’s just a weird picture sitting under the front cover with the wrong back cover.
Today, in the Age of AI, one can readily talk to the machine in order to solve their problem. If the AI can’t do it…OMG….it kicks to ….a Real Person.
Say what????
More than anything else, at that point, I really had to know how that picture got on my product page.
The AI kicked me to that Real Person and they were so nice! Like I said, just awesome and by the end of the conversation I told them so. We went through every paperback one-by-one and that wonderful person did their thing on their end and…within 3-5 business days…the right covers should be showing up.
At that point, to the General Public, I may look…better?…more intelligent?…like my book might be worth reading?
WTF?
Yeah, I know, my bad for not keeping a closer eye on it but most of all for trusting the El Jefe would hold up his end. Can’t trust that guy for nothing.
We got to The Heart of War and this t-shirt, which should be gone…in 3-5 business days. I explained that I never uploaded that picture, in fact, I cannot upload that picture. The only image I can upload on my end for the product page is the single product image. That’s it.
So….just for kicks, my nice Customer Service friend…how did it get there?
This is what the nice Customer Service person said:
It might be the technical glitch from our end, i will take it as a feedback and forward it to the team, Sorry for the inconvenience.
That’s one funky ‘technical glitch’. Don’t you think? Oh wait, is that Back in The Day, when Amazon was stalking indie authors? I mean that from the bottom of my heart, they stalked us….everywhere we went online. They scanned our ‘fan pages’ where we struggled to build a ‘base’ so we could ‘get out there’ then cross referenced our ‘fans’ with their account holders and ditched all of their reviews….that we worked so hard to get!….because those people were considered our actual friends. I shit you not. I lost so many wonderful reviews because of that.
While they were stalking us they were all over our websites every single day glomming as much info as they could.
Is that when El Jefe picked up the t-shirt image? I have no idea how it would otherwise just show up on my Amazon page.
Of course, the nice Customer Service person wouldn’t know so I didn’t say anything like that to them.
So, a little advice from Aunty Moon to you; go check your paperback covers. Especially if your paperback sales are kaka. Like mine. Now I can see why. It wasn’t the price, as we’re so often told, it was the crappy old back covers hanging out there like swollen sore thumbs. That is not my fault. That’s on El Jefe. It’s probably silently costing you sales.
Lisa Beth Darling 