Oh for the Love of God….
One of my books, Komenagen: Slog, was flagged for some minor “quality issued.” There was a list of 30-some things, and they took it off-line until they were fixed. Some were legit typos (pealed vs peeled, for example, or a missing word in a phrase). I fixed them in the doc, uploaded them, marked them as fixed, thought I was done.
Nope. A while later it still wasn’t there. Then it still wasn’t. I checked thought I had done everything. Sent off an email asking for help, it wasn’t a lot of help, but… Anyway, twiddle a bit, then wait a few more days, get busy, forget about it, come back a week later after someone prompts me to looks, get frustrated, and tell myself – OK, go through it all by the numbers. still looks like everything is there. Then I see one small red thing on “pricing.”
Ummm…. what?
Looks like every time you do ANYTHING on any of the three main sections, front data, content, or pricing, you have to go through and approve all three even if you are not changing anything on one or two of them. Because I didn’t tell it “yes, I want the same damn pricing I’ve had for four years,” they didn’t publish the typo corrections and put it back online. I should have caught it earlier, but….
I got a notification from Amazon that there is an update and I did not know it was forced on you, so I blindly updated. It i a bit scary though (what if they want and push more substantial changes next time/in some other book)?
Anyway, is it just typos, or something interesting as well? The update said
The updated version contains the following changes:
* Duplicated text has been removed.
* Text that was missing within a section or chapter was added.
* Typos have been corrected.
Some hints whether and where to look for the “missing text added”?
Pretty much just typos, like “pealed” vs “peeled” or a missing word in a phrase that the eye just sort of skipped by. A few things they wanted to correct were deliberate, like “topcap” being a correct technical term they wanted to replace with “top cap”, and a name. But pretty generic stuff. If you notice any typos, let me know and I can fix them. By all means re-read it and let me know if I accidentally “corrected” something and deleted a page 🙂 (don’t think I did, but…)
And, of course, if you have not already done do, please leave a review at Amazon.
Thomas brings up a valid point. Think it will be used in the future to edit concepts un-liked by our overlords?
Get you locked into a contract. Then bureaucratically make you rewrite things un-liked?
The concept is certainly in line with the extortionist Chinese communist propaganda handbook. It’s the model most used in Holloworld, (my name for Hollywood.) these days.
Yes, that made the news a while back when Amazon remote-deleted one particular “unauthorized” edition of… 1984.
Applied to contracts, if it didn’t have a proper audit trail, it could be rather a problem.
That is why I leave “airplane mode” enabled and transfer all documents via a USB cable, rather than use “whisper-sync”.
Thanks.
As for review, I rated, but I don’t like to leave reviews on Amazon in general, and I have usually nothing new to say. Is there some benefit for you in number of reviews?
I don’t know the guts of Amazon’s algorithms, obviously, but in general the more reviews a book has the more “respectable” it is, and the more likely an undecided buyer will take a chance on it, or find a particular search word in the reviews they care about. If you see two book, and one has four 5-star reviews, and nothing else, but another similar book has only a 4.5-star rating but a thousand reviews, which is more likely a good one to take a chance on? Even if there is nothing “new” to say, if someone is looking for a particular type of book, reading a couple of thoughtful reviews that don’t just say “great read!” but explain why someone really liked it, what it’s strengths (or weaknesses) are relative to other books on the market, helps make the sale. It also gives me feedback on what I’m doing right, and what I might spend more time on improving.