Another retailer makes me scream! 11th August 2010.

This blog is starting to sound somewhat repetitious. I can’t help it – the sequence of events over the last 24 hours with another of our retailers has almost reduced me to screams of frustration.

Firstly, they insist on the book blurb has to be restricted to less than 400 characters to fit on their database. Now, no other retailer we deal with has this kind of draconian limit, the next shortest I’ve encountered is something like 500 words!

As a result we asked all our authors to check their books on this particular web site and make sure they were happy with the contracted version of the original blurb we were using. Several said fine, but one lady, correctly asked for a change and submitted a revised blurb which as 398 characters long (I checked!). Guess what – the web site insisted it was still 5 characters too long so a quick flurry of transatlantic e-mails produced a version the web site accepted.

Now this web site uses two levels of distribution – the highest or premium distribution requires the book is checked before being included. This book was accepted in March, so you, like me, would have expected this to be a foregone conclusion – after all, the book hasn’t been changed at all – only the blurb that goes on the web site.

Imagine my surprise when they decided to reject it for premium distribution because of a formatting fault (which had been accepted once) and the lack of a table of contents. The reason for the latter is this site operates as a distributor and they are currently sorting out issues to make their book stock acceptable to this particular large retailer. So, until I insert a table of contents this book might get delisted at the most publicised web site for e-books due to the requirements of a different web site. Now I have to go ahead and do so. The big problem is, like most of our authors this lady has followed the modern trend and doesn’t put in chapter headers – chapter breaks yes but no headers. How silly does a table of contents look with no actual headings showing? What possible use does it have? After all every e-book reader piece of kit or software for the PC I’ve ever come across automatically returns to the last page read when you reopen the book (except for Adobe reader of course).You wonder why I want to scream?

Wait.... There’s more.

A few weeks ago I had a problem with one of our series which they de-listed because it was a serial and they don’t carry serials. I exchanged e-mails with the boss there, who by the way is a nice guy, and easy to work with (suck up... suck up in case he read’s this LOL), and he agreed it was a series not a serial and removed the block. I also, during the e-mail told him about one of my series which I would be uploading soon, which had no less than 32 discrete episodes spanning an entire historical epoch. Not only did he say this one wouldn’t get red-flagged he expressed interest in seeing it. I got the upload results back this morning – you guessed it. “Please un-publish this – we don’t carry serials”.

On top of that they reported three formatting errors – which I immediate corrected as well as firing off e-mails about the above. The format check simply reported two of the formatting errors again, I checked and re-uploaded and they were reported again ... and then again. Another e-mail winged its way over the Atlantic. And yes, I've checked the file I was editing and the file I was uploading are one and the same. I checked, twice.

I’m sure there are frustrations on their side but at the moment mine make me want to SCREAM.......