I’ve definitely reaching a limit with some retailers.
We sent out our newsletter to our authors, asking them to check on their own books on each of the sites (we were good, gave them a list and told them how the books got there) and two of our authors have responded inside 24hours. That’s great but where are the rest of you? LOL – Don’t’ mean it – I’ll give you another 24hours at least!
A couple of the retailers introduced tagword/keyword searches since we loaded our earlier books with them , while another one has changed their category structure. One of them doesn’t allow a blurb of more than 400 characters and I wasn’t certain I was compressing all existing blurbs to fit on this site. Rather than just simply checking ourselves, we decided to involve the authors as well – after all they know their books better than anyone.
All relatively simple issues to resolve and indeed we’ve already turned up a couple of books that need some minor adjustments.
What has got my back up a little (and NOT with the author who spotted it) is would appear one of the sites has changed how it formats the excerpts for a book – not the blurb – the excerpts. This is usually done on a copy and paste basis from the finished manuscript. When you do this it looks perfectly fine in the maintenance form on their site, albeit in Courier font. Now when you transfer it to the live system it loses the entire paragraph formatting and runs everything together. It looks horrible!
I don’t know if I missed this point when we first uploaded to them (everything gets checked out very carefully on the first book loaded) – I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the case a year ago, so I can only guess they changed their handler on the web site. Not making excuses, even if they changed it since it’s still my bad.
The worst of it is, it would be this particular site. There are two issues. Firstly, for their own reasons, and unlike everyone else the excerpt is attached to a format of a book, not the overall book. So, as we have each book on there in four formats – I have to redo the excerpt four times! Thank god for cut and paste. Secondly, you change things on their “maintenance” system and it isn’t uploaded to the “live” system until about 2am Eastern Standard Time.
So I’ve had to make the change 4 times, and I now have to wait for 24 hours to check if its right, if it isn’t then a wrong version will be visible to the world for 24hours and I can’t do anything about it. If its right, and I sincerely hope it is, then I’ve got to update 57 other books, each of them 4 times.
Oh what fun.........?
Ugh. I feel for you, David.
ReplyDelete