Now You See Me...

So I've had what can only be described as a very trying week. Basically, Kevin Hardman vanished with respect to some parts of Amazon's publishing ecosystem.

I won't go into detail (because it's hard to understand unless you self-publish on Amazon), but it starts with the fact that there are certain things that authors can't do on The Great 'Zon. For instance, Amazon used to allow authors to list their books in up to ten different categories. However, you couldn't list them in all those categories yourself;  you could do about three, and you'd have to ask Amazon to add the rest for you. These days, Amazon limits you to a total of three categories (although, if your book was already in more categories than that, they don't force you out of any).

Anyway, I asked Amazon to make one of those only-Amazon-can-do-it changes with respect to some author stuff. No one can explain what happened, but it essentially wiped Kevin Hardman from some of their systems - mostly in relation to ads. Thankfully, it didn't appear to affect my books - everything was still available - but as an author, I vanished from certain parts of Amazon. 

The worst part was that no one at Amazon could explain what happened. Moreover, every division blamed someone else: the ad people said it was a KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) problem; KDP said I needed to talk to Author Central; Author Central told me I needed to get with the Amazon ads department. (And round and round we go...)

Of course, this isn't the first time I've had something go haywire on the publishing front. Several years ago, one of the Kid Sensation books ended up in some weird, unrelated category, like basket-weaving. No one at Amazon could explain how it happened, but they also didn't know how to fix it. Eventually, the system just seemed ot sort it out, but it took a long time. 

In this instance, after numerous phone calls and online chat sessions with all of the relevant divisions, someone finally agreed to elevate the issue instead of continuing to point the finger at another branch of the Amazon family tree. Now to be fair, Amazon customer service is usually pretty good and I typically don't have a problem getting issues resolved. But as you can imagine, this one was incredibly frustrating. It all started last week, and maybe a day or so ago it finally got resolved. As with my book that ended up in the wrong category, no one actually did anything; the system just seemed to sort it out on its own. 

Regardless of how it happened, I'm glad that things are back to normal. And to be clear, I did get some writing done. I was frustrated and distracted (and that'll probably be evident when I do my read-through), but managed to continue advancing the ball within the Kid Sensation universe.  Unfortunately, these things happen - but thankfully not often, and with no permanent effect (thus far...).