Looks like calling Amazon’s customer service atrocious and sending them a link to yesterday’s blog post did the trick. Last night I got an email — that seemed to be from an actual person! — that Oregon, Elsewise had been approved, and my documentation for my publishing rights was sufficient. I even got an apology for the “inconveniences.”
It’s interesting, though, that I had to start getting nasty before anyone with more than two peas for brains (or possibly anyone at all?) took a look at my case and realized how I was being sent in circles for nothing.
Lessons to take away from this rather nerve-wracking experience:
Whoever or whatever is on the other end of emails from the Amazon Content Review Team does not answer questions, so it is futile to ask them. Answering questions is beyond the scope of the Artificial Non-Intelligences (or ANIs for short).
Being tactful and diplomatic is unnecessary when dealing with ANIs, and may even be detrimental.
If at first you don’t succeed, don’t try again. ANIs will keep spouting blocks of text back at you in accordance with certain keywords found either in your email or the documentation you sent as proof of authorship.
If your case concerns a collection of short stories with a different title than any of the stories in the collection, you’re up sh*t creek to start with, and should escalate as soon as possible. ANIs have a fixation with the book title, and are incapable of understanding the difference between book title and story title.
Trying to address the illogical demands of the ANIs will only lead to grief. I’m not quite sure what it was in yesterday’s email that triggered an end of the runaround, but the threat of bad publicity probably doesn’t hurt. “Atrocious” or some other negative adjective in connection with “Amazon service” may also help in getting out of the vicious circle of contradictory demands in the varying text blocks.
I hope the next time something like this happens to me, I’ll remember to take my own advice!
Oh, and in the midst of all this kerfuffle, I actually sold 2 copies of Oregon, Elsewise — probably more than all of last year. 🙂
For a surprisingly long time, Amazon has been surprisingly nice to me. When I request changes and / or additions to my categories, the changes are made much faster than they used to be, and when a category is turned down, the reason makes sense. When I write to price match a book to make it free in order to promote other books in a series, the response has been prompt, and on occasion I have even been wished good luck with my sales.
Now, unfortunately, I find myself in another skirmish with Amazon, this time over my short story collection Oregon, Elsewise.
I had the story collection on sale for 99c, and last week, I finally got around to changing the price back to $2.99. A few days later, I received the following email from Amazon:
Hello,
During our review, we found that your book contains interior and/or cover content that’s available from a different publisher. We need you to confirm your publishing rights before the book is made available on Amazon.
Oregon Elsewise: Eight short stories of an Oregon that never was by Nestvold, Ruth (AUTHOR) (ID: 6316799)
To publish the book(s), reply to this email and send documentation and/or verification showing you hold rights to the content. Please submit any documents you have, along with an explanation of any previously published books within 5 days. If we do not receive the appropriate documentation, the book(s) will be unavailable for sale on Amazon.
Acceptable documentation may include: • A letter from the previous publisher reverting rights back to the author • A signed copy of the agreement between you and the author • A signed copy of the agreement between the author and the previous publisher • A signed letter from the previous publisher indicating that they do not object to your edition • Documentation showing the previous publisher holds nonexclusive rights
Examples of documentation we cannot accept include: • A personal statement by you that you have the publishing rights • A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed • Contracts that have not been signed by all parties • Ghostwriter agreements or contracts • Private Label Rights documents
Need help with what to send us? For more information about how to confirm your rights and frequently asked questions (FAQs), visit Help: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200672400
If you have questions or believe you’ve received this email in error, reply to this message.
Thanks for using Amazon KDP.
Given the obvious boilerplate email, I could only guess at what someone or something at Amazon was objecting to in my extremely modest short story collection. I’ve gotten a couple of objections from Amazon like this before, and they usually had to do with stories that were available in archives of online magazines. For that reason, I came to the conclusion that the problem was with my short story “The Leaving Sweater,” which (at the time of this writing) was still in the archives of Strange Horizons.
I scanned the original contract for “The Leaving Sweater” and sent the jpgs to Amazon as an attachment to the following email:
Dear Amazon Representative,
I am attaching a scan of my contract with Strange Horizons for my short story “The Leaving Sweater.” This contract makes it clear that Strange Horizons had exclusive rights to my story for only 60 days after first publication in 2007. They continue to have non-exclusive rights to my short story, which is why it is still available on the Strange Horizons site 15 years after the first publication. I can, however, also request that the story be removed from the site, if you deem that necessary. But since “Oregon Elseweise” is not in KDP Select, I assume “The Leaving Sweater” can remain on Strange Horizons.
From this contract, it should be clear that I hold the rights to my short story and it can be republished in my collection, “Oregon Elsewise.”
If this is not the story for which you needed publishing rights information, please let me know, and I will scan whichever contracts you need and send them to you.
I hope this clears things up.
Sincerely,
Ruth Nestvold
No such luck. Here’s the answer I received from Amazon:
Thanks for your message regarding the following book(s):
Oregon Elsewise: Eight short stories of an Oregon that never was Nestvold, Ruth (AUTHOR) : 6316799
We’ve reviewed the information you provided. Based on our review, we’re unable to confirm that you hold the necessary publishing rights.
The information you provided is insufficient because of the following concerns:
• The title of the book listed on the document(s) does not match the title you entered in your KDP account • The document(s) does not list the author of the book • The author of the book listed on the document(s) does not match the author you entered in your KDP account
• The model name listed on the document(s) does not match the book details you entered in your KDP account
In order to publish the book(s), reply to this email within 5 days and provide us with further documentation and/or verification showing you hold rights to the content.
Please reply to confirm your publishing rights within 5 days. Otherwise, the book(s) will be unavailable for sale on Amazon.
By this time, my husband and I were already beginning to argue whether there were any real people behind these emails, or if they were only generated by AIs. I was still hopeful there might be an actual person or persons dealing with my case, and I answered with the following email:
Hello,
I don’t understand this response. My book “Oregon Elsewise” is a collection of several of my short stories, previously published in various venues, which I list under “Credits” in the manuscript of the book:
“If Tears Were Wishes” first published in Abyss and Apex, January 2008.
“The Leaving Sweater” first published in Strange Horizons, June 25, 2007
“The Old Man and the Sneakers” first published in Farthing, April 2006
“The Other Side of Silence” first published in Futurismic, 2006.
“Sailing to Utopia” first published in Flytrap, May 2006
“The Sea Gives, the Sea Takes Away” originally published in a revised version as “A Debt to Collect” in Northwest Passages, 2005.
“Story Hunger” first published in the collection Story Hunger: Short Fantasy Tales About the Power of the Word, 2013
“The Tiresias Project” first published in Futurismic, July 2004
I do not have a contract for “Oregon Elsewise” (the complete collection) because that is the name I came up with for this collection of my short fiction. I have already provided you with a copy of the original contract for “The Leaving Sweater,” which is addressed to me, Ruth Nestvold, and clearly states that I am granting Strange Horizons first publishing rights to my short story, “The Leaving Sweater,” exclusive to Strange Horizons for a period of 60 days.
If “The Leaving Sweater” is not the short story for which you require further publishing information, please let me know which of the above stories you need the original contract for. None of them will include the title “Oregon Elsewise,” however, because that is only the name for this individual collection, not any previously published fiction for which I have a contract. There is no story in the book entitled “Oregon Elsewise,” which you will see if you look at the book more closely.
I would greatly appreciate it if you would take a closer look at this matter. It is not unusual for authors to give collections of their fiction a completely new title, and not merely “The Leaving Sweater and Other Stories.”
Thank you in advance for looking into this. I hope it can soon be cleared up. Please let me know if you require copies of my contracts with Abyss and Apex, Farthing, Futurismic, Northwest Passages and Flytrap, in addition to the contract I already provided from Strange Horizons.
Sincerely,
Ruth Nestvold
Sounds fairly convincing, right? Nope. Here’s the next boilerplate, hard-to-decifer email I received from the Amazon Non-Intelligences (artificial of not):
Hello,
Thanks for your message regarding the following book(s):
Oregon Elsewise: Eight short stories of an Oregon that never was Nestvold, Ruth (AUTHOR) : 6316799
We’ve reviewed the information you provided. Based on our review, we’re unable to confirm that you hold the necessary publishing rights.
The information you provided is insufficient because of the following concerns:
• Documentation or information explaining the edition previously published on Amazon has not been provided. • Documentation has not been provided to confirm you are the original author of the content. • Documentation has not been provided to confirm that the author granted you rights to publish the content. • Documentation has not been provided to confirm that rights were reverted to the author from the previous publisher
In order to publish the book(s), reply to this email within 5 days and provide us with further documentation and/or verification showing you hold rights to the content.
We’re unable to accept the following documentation to confirm publishing rights: • A personal statement by you that you have the publishing rights • A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed • Contracts that have not been signed by all parties • Ghostwriter agreements or contracts • Private Label Rights documents]
Please reply to confirm your publishing rights within 5 days. Otherwise, the book(s) will be unavailable for sale on Amazon.
If you have questions or believe you’ve received this email in error, reply to this message.
Thanks for your cooperation, Amazon KDP
Sara Amazon Content Review Team
Sara! A person! Isn’t that the name of an AI? husband Chris says. No, that’s Siri, says I. Same difference, says husband Chris.
But writer Ruth still has not given up completely. The short stories in question were originally published so long ago (over fifteen years), that most of the contracts were in a hybrid digital / print form. The publisher sent me the contracts per email, asked me to print them out, sign them, and then send the signed copies back.
Given how long ago the original publications were, some of the contracts were in hard copy in boxes in the attic. But I dug them out, scanned them, and sent them with the following email to Amazon:
Hello,
I am attaching copies of the remaining contracts for the short stories contained in my collection “Oregon Elsewise.” Some are scans of paper contracts, others PDF files. In all the contracts it is made clear that after a period of exclusivity from between 60 days and 18 months, all rights reverted back to me. None of the short stories were published after 2008, which means I now hold all rights. For “Story Hunger,” which was not previously published elsewhere, I have scanned a rejection letter as proof that I am author of the content. In addition, I have written to the editors at Strange Horizons and asked them to remove my stories from their archives, as per my contracts with them. Hopefully that will keep such problems from happening in the future.
If this documentation is not sufficient to prove to you that I have the publishing rights for the short stories contained in my collection “Oregon Elsewise,” please remove it from Amazon. The short story collection sells a couple of copies a year at most, and it is not worth my time to continue to pursue this matter.
Sincerely,
Ruth Nestvold
It was not sufficient. Here is the final email (for me, at least) I received from Amazon:
Hello,
Thanks for your message regarding the following book(s):
Oregon Elsewise: Eight short stories of an Oregon that never was Nestvold, Ruth (AUTHOR) : 6316799
We’ve reviewed the information you provided. Based on our review, we’re unable to confirm that you hold the necessary publishing rights.
The information you provided is insufficient because of the following concerns: • Some documents are missing valid signature is missing from one or both parties • Some document(s) does not list the title of the book
In order to publish the book(s), reply to this email within 5 days and provide us with further documentation and/or verification showing you hold rights to the content.
We’re unable to accept the following documentation to confirm publishing rights: • A personal statement by you that you have the publishing rights • A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed • Contracts that have not been signed by all parties • Ghostwriter agreements or contracts • Private Label Rights documents
Please reply to confirm your publishing rights within 5 days. Otherwise, the book(s) will be unavailable for sale on Amazon.
Publishing books without holding the necessary publishing rights is against our content guidelines and may result in the suspension or termination of your KDP account.
If you have questions or believe you’ve received this email in error, reply to this message.
Thanks for your cooperation, Amazon KDP
Daniela Amazon Content Review Team
And now it’s Daniela. (Another AI? How am I to know? None of my questions are ever answered.)
And as if the rest weren’t enough, I’m also being threatened with the termination of my KDP account. But I have no idea what else I can possibly provide to prove that I’m the author of the short stories I wrote — stories that I included in a collection I mostly created for my friends and family, since I grew up in Oregon, and that I dedicated to Nancie Fadeley, the significant other of my father, and my substitute mom.
So if my bad luck holds, it might even be the beginning of the end of my writing career. All because of a collection of my short stories that never earned me more than a few dollars.
I’m sitting here listening to a yellow jacket determined to commit suicide in one of my wall lamps, and wondering why Amazon seems so hell-bent on annoying its authors these days.
This weekend, August 5-6, Patty Jansen is hosting another big 99c promo with 100 books in various science fiction and fantasy genres. I entered my boxed set of Looking Through Lace, Books 1 & 2, and was accepted. Only now it looks like my book won’t be on sale — at least not on Amazon. And it’s anyone’s guess if I will have to take the book down or not entirely (on Amazon), for reasons no one has seen fit to provide me answers with.
But let us start at the beginning, shall we?
Early this week, I lowered the price of the Looking Through Lace boxed set everywhere it was available, just like I always do for a promotion. Price changes went through fine — except on Amazon. Instead, I got this:
Hello,
Thank you for publishing with Amazon. Copyright is important to us – we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has his or her books sold by anyone else. To publish your book, please respond with documentation confirming your publishing rights within four days:
Looking Through Lace Boxed Set: Books 1 and 2 by Nestvold, Ruth (AUTHOR) (ID:7106553)
Acceptable documentation can include:
– If you are the author and you are republishing your book after your publication rights have been reverted to you, a signed reversion letter from your former publisher
– If you are the author and you are publishing under a pseudonym, a copyright registration using the pseudonym
– If you are not the author, a signed contract between you and the author granting you the rights to publish the book in the territories, languages and formats you have selected
– If you are not the author, an e-mail from the address listed on the author’s (or their agent’s) official website confirming that you have the rights to publish their book in the territories, languages and formats you have selected
– If you are a literary agent, a signed contract between you and the author or an email from the address listed on the author’s official website granting you the right to act on the author’s behalf with respect to the book
Documentation we cannot accept includes:
– A statement by you that you have the publishing rights without verification by the author/copyright holder
– A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed
If you publish books for which you do not hold the publishing rights, your account may be terminated.
Thank you,
Amazon KDP
I wrote back, asking why they were requiring confirmation of publishing rights for a book that had been published with them for over a year and a half. I listed some of the publishing credits of Looking Through Lace and explained why I still had the rights to my own novella, which was originally published in Asimov’s in September 2003.
Instead of any answers, I got almost exactly the same email, with one small change at the beginning:
During a review of your KDP submission(s), we found that content in the below title(s) has been previously made available on Amazon. Copyright is important to us – we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has his or her books sold by anyone else. To publish your book, please respond with documentation confirming you have the necessary publishing rights within four days:
Looking Through Lace Boxed Set: Books 1 and 2 (ID: 7106553)
Please provide any documentation or other evidence that proves you have retained rights for the book(s) listed above.
This, of course made me even more frantic. I could hardly imagine that anyone was trying to steal my novella, since it wasn’t exactly selling like gangbusters. Most of the time it just sits there, selling a few copies a month, except when I do some kind of promo. But why would Amazon keep insisting I prove my rights to my own work if someone hadn’t tried to steal it? And why wouldn’t they respond to my questions and tell me what was the specific problem so that we could clear things up? None of what they required as “acceptable documentation” applied to Looking Through Lace or the boxed set.
Every time I tried to write them to try and find out what was going on, I got one of the above canned responses, about a half-a-dozen in all — and me becoming increasingly aggravated.
Finally it occurred to me (no help on Amazon’s part) that this weirdness regarding Looking Through Lace might have to do with the fact that it was recently reprinted in a new anthology, Galactic Empires. I sent them the PDF of the contract with Neil Clarke, and pointed out the clause indicating non-exclusive rights.
They haven’t sent me any more stupid canned emails since. But they also still have not gotten around to lowering the price of the boxed set for the promotion. I used to be a huge proponent of Amazon, but since the page flip controversy, I’ve changed my ways — more and more with each passing conflict.
I feel like I’m in a Kafka novel — which, incidentally, is not by me. 🙂
Starting Out as an Indie Author made it to a “hot new release” in the publishing and authorship category on Amazon! It’s dropped out again now, but at least I got the screen shot to prove it last night before I went to bed. *g*
And I did no advertising to get there — it was all mailing list and friends sharing the news. So a huge thanks to all of you!
Probably the biggest German site for indie authors, Die Self-Publisher-Bibel, recently did an extensive test of sales rankings on Amazon with books published deliberately for that purpose. They wanted to test three basic assumptions about sales algorithms used by Amazon:
– Price influences sales rank
– Enrolling in KDP Select influences sales rank
– The dynamics of sales influence sales rank
The results are eye-opening. Fortunately, they have also published an English version on their site. I highly recommend it to anyone involved in self-publishing:
As I mentioned a while back, in September I embarked on an experiment: splitting my almost 200,000 word monster book Yseult into episodes and making the first one free.
The problem was, Amazon wasn’t cooperating. The book was free on iTunes, B&N, Google Play, you name it — but no matter how many times I clicked on “tell us about a lower price” and how many people I asked to tattle on me, the price refused to budge, sitting there stubbornly at 99c. I published the first two episodes within days of each other, but when I had so much trouble making the first book free, I didn’t bother putting together the last two.
Yesterday, I finally got fed up at how long it was taking for Amazon to price match, and I wrote them directly.
And lo and behold, it worked!
I don’t know if it is also free in other countries or only in the US (my experience has been that it takes much longer for other Amazon stores to catch up). But at least if you’re in the US, and you have not yet read my (first) doorstopper, you can now get Part I for free. Here the details:
Yseult the Wise and Yseult the Fair, mother and daughter, are members of the proud race of the Feadh Ree, the Old Race in Eriu. New ways and a new religion are coming to their land, and despite all their magic, they may be powerless to stop it.
“Yseult: Two Women” is the first of four parts from the bestselling historical fantasy novel “Yseult: A Tale of love in the Age of King Arthur,” a retelling of the tragic love story of Tristan and Yseult. Yseult is a princess of Ireland, a land on the fringes of Europe, a land that had never been conquered by Rome. What would her life have been like in that pagan land before the advent of Christianity?
This book is a re-imagining of Yseult’s youth, never part of the legends — until now.
BTW, even if you already have read the complete novel, you’ll be doing me a favor if you download anyway. It will help the book rank higher. 🙂
When you publish an ebook through Amazon’s KDP dashboard, you are allowed to select two categories, such as Fantasy/Historical or Fantasy/Epic. But not all of the browse categories on Amazon are available through the dashboard. I’ve written before about how important it can be for sales to get into the right categories here and here.
Much of what I wrote in those posts, however, is now obsolete, at least as far as strategies on how to get into obscure categories is concerned. But it is still true that for the sake of visibility, it’s important to be in categories where the competition isn’t as strong (unless you’re selling hundreds of copies a day, that is). Some of the subcategories for ebooks that aren’t options in the dashboard are wonderfully intimate little niches that will keep you book visible even with a much lower sales ranking. Because if your book drops out of the top 100, it is officially dead (believe me, I know).
But whereas once you had to write Amazon directly in order to be listed in the categories, now you need to use keywords.
When you publish through KDP, one of your options is to type in seven keywords. Little information is given as to their purpose, and it is easy to underestimate how important they can be. In the KDP help pages, however, there is extensive information on which keywords to use to get into various categories that can’t be chosen directly. Here are some examples that in my own experience have proven useful:
Of course it makes no sense to aim for a category just because there isn’t as much competition. But if you can find some niche categories where your book would fit, I highly recommend using keywords to get into them. It just might give your book the edge it needs.
Once again, a vendor on Amazon has outdone itself, and is offering my collection of SF short stories with Jay Lake, Almost All the Way Home From the Starsfor only 999,11 Euros! Since I don’t know how long this incredible deal will last, I took another screen shot:
I only wish I could sell it for that …
I wonder what bots were at work this time to come up with such an incredible opportunity.
I posted yesterday about the new KDP Select “Countdown Deals” and my decision to give it a whirl with my YA short story collection, Dragon Time. It took a while, but the sale is now live:
Also, I am very happy to announce that today Amazon finally price-matched Gawain and Ragnell, and it is now permafree. Download! Tell your friends! Send links to everyone who enjoys Arthurian fiction! *g*
I want to thank everyone who tattled on me and helped to make this novelette free. Cross your fingers for me that it helps with sales of the other Pendragon Chronicles books. 🙂
I published my first ebook, Yseult, in January 2012, pretty much simultaneous with the introduction of KDP Select. I opted in and set my first promotion for a mere week after publication — and I didn’t have a clue how lucky I was. I got a couple of quick reviews as a result of review copies I’d given away, and my brand new little baby (or rather big fat hunking baby — the hard copy book comes in at over 600 pages) got picked up by no less than Pixel of Ink, which at the time was *the* way to ensure that a freebie promotion would be successful.
Back then, using free days with KDP Select was an excellent way for a new indie writer to gain exposure and (after the free run) sell books. That first month as an indie publisher, I sold 242 books. I added more titles, mostly collections of my previously published short stories, and by spacing regular free runs across all my titles, I could increase my visibility as a whole and ensure that I continued to sell books.
But then Amazon made a couple of “corrections” to how free downloads were counted towards popularity and sales rankings (the infamous “Amazon algorithms”), and they hid the top 100 free book listings on pages that didn’t as easily show up when browsing. Free days became less and less effective as a marketing tool, to the point where it now is basically useless, unless you have a simultaneous ad running on Bookbub (which is very pricey).
Nowadays, you have to pay to give books away.
As a result, I and many, many others have been pulling out of KDP Select. Why have your books exclusive to Amazon when it doesn’t do you any good, right? Now Amazon has introduced something new to make Select more attractive to writers again: what they call “Countdown Deals.” This is how it works:
– Your book can be discounted for up to seven days. The duration of the sale is visible on the book’s page on Amazon, as well as the regular price, so that readers can see that they really are getting a “deal.”
– Your royalty rate remains the same even while the book is on sale. So instead of getting only 35% on a book marked down to 99c, you get 70%. The income is still naturally quite a bit less, but if it results in increased exposure, it’s worth it. And it certainly beats giving your book away.
– Amazon has set up a dedicated “Kindle Countdown Deals” page at www.amazon.com/kindlecountdowndeals – but of course there is no guarantee your Countdown Deal will get listed.
I don’t have many books in KDP Select anymore, and those that I do are basically there because I forgot to take them out, or I’m too swamped to upload them elsewhere. But hey, I’ve decided to give it a whirl, see if it’s any better than free days. Amazon has made it quite easy to set up a promotion. Here’s a screen shot of the first page of my books:
On the dashboard, you click on “Manage Benefits” and then just fill in the details for your sale. I decided to go with a seven day, single price 99c sale of my short story collection Dragon Time to test the waters, starting tomorrow Nov. 4 and going to Nov. 10. You can also have a sale where the price gradually returns to normal. For example, for my Dragon Time sale, I could have increased the price halfway through the sale to 1.99 if I had wanted to.
It will be interesting to see what good this does, if any. I’m suspecting the exposure won’t be enough to make KDP Select attractive enough to return to, at least not for most of us. But we’ll see — starting tomorrow.
I will naturally report my results when the promotion is over.
Ruth Nestvold - Indie Adventures 