Amazon—the Kafka Version (a rant)
Selling books in Canada is sometimes needlessly challenging.
On April 19, one of our books (Trigger Fingers by Adam Rodricks) was selling like crazy on Amazon Canada. It was #1 in all sorts of relevant categories, and #203 countrywide. It's really tough to get into the top 500.
On April 20, Amazon Canada decided to make the book "currently unavailable." They were supposed to have it as "available for advance orders." Sales of the book stopped immediately, of course.
The author contacted Amazon. I contacted Amazon, as did one of my staff. The distributor contacted Amazon. The printer contacted Amazon.
Total brick wall for everyone.
At one point, one of the Amazon people told me, “We can’t do anything because we can’t reach the publisher.” I pointed out that I AM the publisher and had been trying to reach anyone relevant at the company for days. She had the grace to sound embarrassed. But wasn’t able to help me.
I asked a publisher friend how she’s managed to solve such problems: She replied:
“They do it to everyone from you, to us, to Penguin Random House. It drives me insane. [Long technical rant deleted] They maybe fix it or not. It has been BRUTAL for the past 18 months +++”
Adam Rodricks, the author, posted on my Facebook page:
So disheartening.
I'm the author of the book in Greg's post. Firstly, I want to thank Iguana for leaving no stone unturned to get the book back in stock. I can't even begin to articulate the range of emotions from learning I hit #1 in 3 categories ... and then "sold out" with no back order button.
The book’s launch was April 28, and our distributor’s efforts finally worked that morning. The book’s rank had dropped from 203 to 72,529. But at least it was on sale for the launch.
Of course, Chapters/Indigo doesn't have it listed yet. And may never list it. C/I often fail to list Canadian-published books. No, we don’t know why. For our books, they literally only have to put the link that our distributor provides them onto their website.
Grrrrrrr.
Also, as usual, Barnes and Noble had the best deal among the big sites — a 25% discount for online pre-orders. They list the books quickly, keep them listed, put them on sale often, and send them to their customers promptly.
But of course few of our customers shop there. They’re not Canadian.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/trigger-fingers-adam-rodricks/1141338010?ean=9781771805582