Sunday, May 24, 2009

Amazon Kindle Version BEWARE! A Book Inside, How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Story…Fair?

Wow, authors, beware of submitting your title as an Amazon.com Kindle title! I’ve just received a poor review of my book A Book Inside, How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Story based on guess what? POOR EDITING and a “sample” page! I am shocked to say the least.

Apparently, through the download of my “perfectly edited” book, the text changes radically and the book appears completely juvenile! The “reviewer” downloaded a sample page (which one I don’t know)and wrote a negative review based on that one page and the poor editing as it appeared through Kindle’s version. As most authors know, one poor review such as this can destroy a promising writing career. Authors, don’t let this happen to you. If you have submitted your book for Kindle—get out now and save yourself!

Please let me know if you have had a similar experience as I would like to inform other authors of Kindle associated issues before they unintentionally and permanently sway their writing future.

Also, if you HAVE read my book and DID enjoy and learn from it, PLEASE leave a positive review on Amazon.com for me; it would be much appreciated!

As always, thank you for visiting my Blog!

11 comments:

Susan Helene Gottfried said...

The reason we haven't put the Demo Tapes out on Kindle (yet) is because of the formatting. We're still trying to figure it out properly. Granted, it would help if we'd give more attention to it, but... you do what you can, ya know? And so far, this has NOT been easy.

Carol said...

Thanks for sharing Susan. I have since posting removed my book in the Kindle version.

Susan Helene Gottfried said...

Good luck figuring out the formatting!

Patricia Rockwell said...

That is a problem. I assumed the Kindle folks would figure this out BEFORE they posted a book on Kindle, but evidently not. I will be careful when downloading and will think twice about even getting a Kindle now.

kathcom said...

I'm sorry to hear that Amazon is letting this happen. They have a responsibility to authors to get this right before soliciting submissions.

PoetsEspresso said...

I'm still taking chances with some of them there, seeing as not risking a book to reviews leaves it without being "visible" in a sense, and because if people look into it they'll see which reviews were well thought out and which were ones like you experienced who judged quickly without investigating enough to know... which I guess they would fit into "troll" category of commenter?

Carol said...

Thanks all! I do agree that without reviews we don't sell many books. It is unfortunate however, that a HUGE and very profitable organization such as Amazon.com (who also relies on reviews to sell more books) can't see the importance of distributing a professional product and displaying legitimate reviews.
Thanks for all your great comments!

Elisa said...

You have to convert your Word document to html format. It should be ok then.

Kathryn Magendie said...

I haven't heard of this, but admit I am not savvy about Kindle - my book is on Kindle, but also admit I don't pay much attention to that part of Amazon!

Anonymous said...

Since Amazon does not "solicit" manuscripts, it really is the responsibility of the author to check the HTML conversion before posting material to the Kindle site. Amazon is fairly clear about that fact that all material will be in HTML, and gives tips on how to save .doc files and others so as to have the best chance of getting a good conversion.

Also, Amazon/Kindle provides the entire conversion in a preview window that allows the author/poster to review the material before agreeing to post it.

Mario said...

Hey Carol,
Wanted to let you know that I started tracking your book sales through Amazon.com on NovelRank: http://www.novelrank.com/asin/0615199240

It's still a beta site, but figured it couldn't hurt to give you a sneak preview!

Cheers,
Mario Lurig
Author, http://www.phpreferenceobok.com/