Alice in Amazonland (with apologies to Lewis Carroll)

A cautionary tale for anyone who uses Amazon to publish their titles in paperback, whether independently or through a publisher. If you have only ever used KDP then there shouldn’t be any problem, but for anyone who uses, or has used, a third-party printing service, this could be a bear trap waiting for you.

If you are a small publisher, then this is definitely something of which you should be aware.
 
Now, as we know, Amazon are a huge global internet supplier, not just of books but for pretty much anything. If they were a High Street (or Main Street if you prefer) outlet they would be present not just in very High Street in Europe and North American, they would be present in villages in the middle of Borneo that no outsider has ever seen. That’s how big they are.
 
So, you would think that they would have simple processes in place for the resolution of issues. You would be wrong to think that.
 
Several of the authors we represent used to publish through another small publisher. I’ll call them Fabulous Publishing for the sake of anonymity. A couple of years ago the owner of Fabulous Publishing decided he didn’t want to be a publisher anymore and closed his company down. As part of the close-down, Fabulous Publishing unpublished all the titles they had listed on Amazon (and on other etail sites).
 
Fabulous Publishing also returned the publishing rights for the titles to the authors, so they could go elsewhere to be published, if they wished.
 
Some of those authors went to a publisher we’ll call Selfishgenie Publishing, because we don’t require anonymity. Yes, we signed them and published their books, both as ebooks and as paperbacks.
 
But Fabulous Publishing used a third-party printer to print their paperbacks. We’ll call them Wonderful Printing. They are a big company; they know what they are doing. When Fabulous Publishing closed down, Wonderful Printing contacted Amazon and told them that the relevant titles were no longer available as paperbacks through them and asked Amazon to “de-list” them.
 
You would think that would be the end of the matter – but if it was, you wouldn’t be reading this blog because I would have no story to tell.

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"And that is where we hit our first speed bump."

​You will be familiar with Amazon Marketplace. This is where small traders sell goods using Amazon’s platform as their sales channel, for which Amazon receives a slice of the action. There’s nothing wrong with that, it makes good sense to “sweat the assets” as it’s known in business.
 
But one of the things those small traders sometimes sell is second-hand books. And that is where we hit our first speed bump.
 
Because a trader was selling one copy of a title by one of our authors, we couldn’t sell any of the paperback of the same title that we had published. Until that second-hand copy was sold, the listing showed the paperback as being the one published by Fabulous Publishing. But you couldn’t actually buy a brand new copy of Fabulous Publishing's product because it was no longer being printed by Wonderful Printing.
 
We submitted a complaint and were told by Amazon that the trader selling his second-hand copy was entitled to do so and until that copy had been sold, all the publishing details for the paperback version of the title had to remain as "Fabulous Publishing" and our brand-new paperbacks couldn’t be displayed.
 
That was it – we couldn’t sell any of this title as a paperback until Joe Shmo from Nowheresville had sold his second-hand copy.
 
The only way out of this was for our author to buy the second-hand copy so that the listing could be changed.
 
So, problem solved.

"So, we went back to Amazon and asked them to fix it."

​No it wasn’t. The listing for the paperback was still showing as the one for Fabulous Publishing which, as already established, isn’t available. While our edition was available but couldn’t be purchased because of this ridiculous "through the looking glass" situation.
 
So, we went back to Amazon and asked them to fix it.
 
Their reply was that they couldn’t take instructions to fix it from us. It had to come from Fabulous Publishing who, of course, no longer exist. Fortunately, the former owner of Fabulous Publishing is a personal friend and was happy to help. He contacted Amazon with details of not just that title, but all the other titles that he had published as paperbacks and asked for them to be de-listed. ​(But imagine if there was no way of contacting Fabulous Publishing anymore? We definitely dodged a bullet there).

The reply he got surprised him. Because the sales channel for the paperbacks had been set up by Wonderful Printing, on behalf of Fabulous Publishing, they couldn’t take instructions from Fabulous Publishing either. Only Wonderful Printing could make the request.

"This time we really were in a dead end."

So, (the former) Fabulous Publishing contacted Wonderful Printing, who contacted Amazon. Amazon told them how to delist the titles.
 
But when Wonderful Printing tried to follow the instructions, Wonderful Printing were told they weren’t authorised to do so. This time we really were in a dead end.
 
So, we here at Selfishgenie Publishing still can’t publish those paperback titles formerly published by Fabulous Printing.

"So Amazon are lying to their customers."

And Amazon’s response? Basically they are saying that Wonderful Printing are the problem, even though I have seen the emails that show clearly that Wonderful Printing have done everything asked of them.
 
If you go onto Amazon to try to buy a copy of the paperback book, it shows that there is one in stock. This is normal for “Print on Demand” (POD) books. But if you click to buy it and put it in your basket, you are then told it is “temporarily out of stock”.
 
No it isn’t temporarily out of stock. The product sold by that publisher is permanently out of stock. So Amazon are lying to their customers.
 
Meanwhile, Selfishgenie publishing, who would gladly sell you a copy of the book, is unable to do so. This is the Alice in Wonderland world of Amazon for you.

"But we need your help."

​The biggest irony of all, and the one that Amazon fails to see, is that while we are down this rabbit hole where neither we nor our authors can make any money by selling the paperbacks - neither can Amazon! Yes, we are using Jeff Bezos's resources and he is getting nothing out of it.

Is it case closed? Not quite, we hope. But we need your help.
 
If you think that Amazon are behaving like a bunch of clowns, then please help by sending this blog viral, so that the whole world can understand what an intransigent bunch of idiots actually manage Amazon.
 
My thanks to the real people behind both Fabulous Publishing and Wonderful Printing for their help in trying to resolve this issue. You know who you are and I owe you a drink.
 
And if anyone with half a brain at Amazon is reading this and can get us out of this mess, you’ll find our email address on our “Contacts” page. I’ll be happy to provide you with copies of all the correspondence.

But do not despair. You can still get most of our other books in paperback versions if you want them. To find out how, click on the "Books" tab at the top of the page.

PS. To be absolutely fair to Amazon, about 10 days  after publishing this blog, the issues described above were resolved and the paperbacks we publish are now being correctly displayed on the relevant sales pages.

It would have been much better all round if they had been resolved before our patience snapped and we resorted to blogging about the problem, but we got there in the end.