Very cool suzzer and a hell of an accomplishment. Will be buying a copy once it’s available. Agree that the cover looks great.
ETA-wow I should keep reading. it’s available(for pre-order)!
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How the heck would someone ever find that book to read if they weren’t a member of an obscure internet message forum filled with proud non-readers?
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Good question. I spammed all my friends and family. I think a lot of them are pre-ordering. It probably doesn’t take much to get a book on these specific category lists.
I figure you get a bump like this from friends and family for your first book. But there will be much less excitement for the second book, like the second moon landing.
Also we’re offering retailers a 53% discount, which is almost as high as you can go. Apparently that makes Amazon promote the book much harder (but I make less $$ of course).
I make $3.22 of the $24.99 sale price. I’m with a hybrid publisher (basically self-publishing, but with standards). If I was with a traditional publisher, I’d be making 50 cents per book. And traditional publishers no longer do any marketing, book tours, or anything. Also they could make me cut my book and half, and/or not even release it. The advance is the only thing they do, and I don’t even need that.
You should run for Congress and have your campaign buy a few hundred thousand books to give away.
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Can’t wait to read this
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Well this is frustrating. Everyone who pre-ordered the book on Amazon in is seeing some date like July 24th. But if you order it now, it supposedly comes in a week.
There was a problem where all the retail sites were showing the book as unavailable. So we had the printer (Ingram Spark) rebroadcast the metadata, which is apparently all they can do. That fixed the issue overnight, but apparently not for existing orders, which are still showing that they won’t be delivered for a month.
My book is at the mercy of two giant companies with basically no customer service interacting over some opaque broadcast system. Oh yeah, and Amazon wants you to use their printing service, so they have no incentive to fix things.
My buddy just told me he never pre-orders for this exact reason.
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Probably not the case here at all but lots of kickstarter types slow play the preorders forever since they have the $ already and will take new $ and fulfill those first. Scammy ones ldo
Googling reveals this might be common between Ingram Spark and Amazon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/comments/1atwy75/coordinating_a_presale_between_amazon_and/
I did exactly what you’re planning, and I’m going to advise you NOT to do pre-orders on Amazon through Ingram. The reason is that Amazon and Ingram don’t get along. There are a lot of things that can go wrong between those two parties and neither of them will talk to you to fix them because they will always blame the opposite platform.
In my case, I lost dozens of pre-orders that Amazon cancelled without warning and without telling me. I only found out because readers got an email from Amazon saying it was cancelled and they reached out to me to find out what was going on. I have stopped doing physical pre-orders entirely for this reason and focus mainly on ebook pre-orders now.
If anyone itt pre-ordered on Amazon, you might try canceling then just ordering again. A couple of my friends did that and it bumped the estimated delivery day up from July 24th to June 29th. Hopefully too many cancellations won’t put me in Amazon jail or something.
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And the fun continues. Amazon will get back to me in 2-4 business days to tell me why my book is blocked on Kindle.
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I have a feeling it’s going to be because I used some pictures off the web, even though I credited them. I did pay for the rights to use some pictures, and got permission for others, and I paid for a poem. I basically paid or got permission for everything I could.
But apparently with books you can’t use anything unless it’s in wiki-commons (then maybe) or the original creator has been dead for 70 years.
I’ve tried a half-dozen different ways to get a hold of some of these people. And with some pics it’s impossible to find the original source even with reverse image searches.
Kinda ridiculous how the web is everyone stealing everyone else’s content. But with a book you can’t tell someone’s story by using a fully credited picture, and you tried very hard to get a hold of them, and you know they would be ok with it if you could get a hold of them.
Books are fucking hard
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It’s much much stupider than I thought. It figured out that the Kindle version is like the paperback version. But can’t figure out that they’re both by me, even though the name is the same, the metadata is the same, and until yesterday both formats were showing side-by-side on my author page.
I’ve been trying to link the Kindle and paperback version for weeks, but the site wouldn’t me. And now their brilliant AI has decided I’m plagiarizing myself.
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Damn sorry to see these struggles for your book. I hope it works out for you. I look at it like a good book is only delayed until it’s finally out. A bad book is forever.
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Thanks. So far the paperback is doing well. I have 166 sales, which is more than my entire over/under for the book going in. I definitely have some buyers that I don’t personally know IRL or online, which is really wild.
Retail sales have started arriving this week. The first confirmed delivery was to my friend in Germany, naturally. Some people whose preorder was saying end of July are starting to get their books early. But some still say end of July.
I’m fine with the delay as long as the books eventually get there. But some authors on reddit have complained that when this happens to preorders, the order eventually gets canceled after months, which would suck.
I am still in Kindle jail, waiting for the content review team to get back to me within 5 business days. The Kindle had only sold 3 copies anyway, one of them to me. Luckily I hadn’t started any eBook promotions yet.
I just found two typos in Chapter 39, which is pissing me off. But I’m not changing anything until all the preorders get shipped. I think messing with the cover, contents and/or metadata might have been what delayed the preorders. I hope that if the reader makes it Chapter 39 they’re not going to put the book down in disgust.
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Update: still in Kindle jail, waiting my 5 business days for 13 days now. The bots are replying to themselves to extend the time 5 more business days. I replied to one email just to let them know I’m still alive. A day later I got a canned response saying 5 more business days.
Btw if anyone knows someone who might like my book (Bill Bryson fans are a good candidate), you can send them this link to read the first 4 chapters: Chapters 1 to 4 – Land Without A Continent - Matt Savino
On my website I make people sign up for the mailing list to get to this link. But I don’t really care about that. I just don’t want site scrapers getting access to it and it showing up in some AI-generated crap book (which I’m sure would cause Amazon to ban me somehow).
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When I try to order this from SOCIALIST Amazon.ca, I get a message “Temporarily out of stock.” Should I just order it anyway?
Yeah, it must be because I’m making some updates. But I’m waiting for one more tweak from the cover designer because multiple updates in short succession seems to fry out the whole communication system between Ingram Spark and Amazon. Everyone who ordered so far has eventually gotten their book.
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In another note my Kindle book is still blocked, and I’m getting close to giving up. What’s the point of even winning this if they can do it all over again at the drop of a hat?
This finally came after over two weeks of them saying to give them 5 business days to review my case:
From: Kindle Account Review <kindle-account-status+500Dp00000Oak77IAB@kdp-support.amazon.com>
Date: Sunday, July 7, 2024 at 2:55 AM
Subject: Amazon KDP/KEP Account Alert – Case #33667108Hello,
Thank you for the email concerning the status of your account.
After reviewing your response, we have reevaluated the Content Guideline violations relating to the titles in your account.
We found that you have published titles with misleading metadata (including cover), which creates a negative customer experience.
As a result, we are upholding our previous decision to terminate your KDP account and remove all your titles from Amazon.
If you have questions or believe you’ve received this email in error, please reply to this message.
If you would like to review our Content Guidelines, please visit:
Content GuidelinesRegards,
Amazon KDPNikhil
Amazon Content Review Team
My reply (I read one case online where asking for a US supervisor helped):
Hi Nikhil, can you please escalate this to a supervisor, preferably in the US, who can look at this case?
There is nothing misleading about my cover. My book is a travel memoir about a road trip through Mexico and Central America. The cover shows a scene of driving through Baja, Mexico, along with other elements that are in the book. It is based on an actual picture I took in Baja. The tree on the cover is a boojum tree, which looks crazy but really exists: Boojum tree - Wikipedia My friend X originally created the cover based on my idea, and then Y worked on it. It is not AI-generated.
Attached to this email is the cover I uploaded to Ingram Spark, which is now for sale as my paperback (ISBN #978-1959099727): Amazon.com
These are the original reasons my book was blocked in the email I got from you:
During our review, we found that the following book(s) causes a misleading customer experience because it impairs customers’ ability to make good buying decisions.
58315585 Land Without a Continent: A Road Trip through Mexico and Central America
Items that can cause a misleading customer experience include:
• Similarity of the contributor name to another author
• Similarity of the title to a previously published book
• Similarity of the cover to a previously published book
• Cover text or images that do not accurately represent the contents of the book
• Title or subtitle that do not accurately represent the contents of the book
• Similarity of the description to a previously published known workPlease tell me which other book my eBook’s title, cover, description and author name resemble? Because it can obviously only be my paperback book as shown above. I’ve searched for the book title and author, and the only hit is my book. I even did a reverse image search on my cover and the only hit was my book for sale on amazon.
I can provide any information you need to prove I wrote this book, and that I created the cover, and that there is nothing misleading about it or the metadata.
Please help me, this is all some kind of crazy misunderstanding.