Amazonian Hell??

Now why does things always have to be complicated when it is even a simple task?

Guess a little background would be in order. Well I'm sure you know from my previous posts that I've recently release a book on shaders “Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists”. The book was release on May 26th, so it mean it has technically been on the shelves for about 10 weeks. But wait, it's not listed on Amazon.com? The interesting thing is that it is listed on all the regional amazon sites such as Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk. What is going on???

So after poking at my publisher, it appears that the main Amazon site has been having issues with their electronic feed system (EDI) and haven't been able to properly process those entries from many publishers for a at least a few months. Of course, being proactive, I've tried to contact Amazon myself to see what was going on. After several automated responses, i finally got someone who confirmed the problem and said that it should be fixed in the next few weeks.

This is all fine but i was wondering why they couldn't just pull the description from one of the regional sites and use that until the get a proper feed in to update the data. But apparently, even though everything is the same up to the ISBN number, its not their procedure. But yet some newer, higher profile books still were getting listed in the meantime.

I know my book probably means nothing when you compare it to a best seller like Bill Clinton's book. But still as an author who believes that Amazon is a big share of my potential market, I find it frustrating that little effort was done on their part to fix the issue.

Well the latest news is that the issue is not fixed and my listing should appear this week. Guess we'll see how this goes :)