A little hitch

So I went out to amazon today to see if anyone has left me a review on Bitten. When I was there I noticed that the search couldn't find the book with "in the kindle store" as part of the search. I thought that was odd, so I ran a broader search under all departments and found it. And yes, it is definitely an ebook listed with the KDP. I'm not really sure why that's happening or how to fix it. Hopefully some changes I'm about to mention will set everything straight.

I decided to click on the "look inside" button while I was at the books page. That's when I noticed something even more annoying. There was tons of awkward spacing that hadn't been there before. Or at least it hadn't shown when I previewed the work during the publishing process.

That kind of unprofessional look is embarrassing for me, and readers shouldn't have to put up with it. I can only hope it didn't show up that way on people's kindles.

So I went back through the annoying procedures that amazon uses for self publishers. They had changed it since I published Entrhalled, and I can only say that they made the whole process more aggravating. I believe they were trying to make self publishing easier by making the writers do less of the conversion. However, their site had not been updated with proper directions as to how they wanted me to send my work to them (in fact, alot of the site pointed back to other pages that no longer existed because they were a part of the old system). Instead a huge emphasis was put on paying other companies that work for them to do all of the conversion for you.

Maybe I'm cheap, maybe I'm stubborn, but I refused to do that. Clearly something went wrong.

So, now I have gone back through all of that and found that yes, they do want the work in html formatting instead of .doc (like was implied before). So I have republished Bitten. Once again, it looked fine when I previewed the conversion. I can only hope it will stay looking nice. At least their webiste makes sense again. I wonder if I just hit them at an awkward phase while they were changing out their systems...

To make a long story short, Bitten has been modified and will be back on Amazon in about a day. And if this didn't work then I will fire off angry e-mails to amazon...seeing as how I would like to continue selling with them I guess I will have to be polite about it.

My appologies. I can only say that when I did the conversion myself for Enthralled using Mobipocket I never had any problems like this. It was a more complex yet easier life then. When anyone with a basic understanding of technology could self publish. For a while there I would have sworn that they were purposely making my life more difficult so that I would be forced to work with one of their subsidiaries. Only time will tell if I was right.