If Something Can Go Wrong (with Amazon) It Will

Working with Amazon is kind of like working with a very intelligent monkey who lives on the back of a giant elephant. You yell up to the monkey… "I want to publish my great book!" Then the elephant’s trunk comes swinging down and you quickly upload your awesome book into its curled and warm trunk. Normally the elephant drops the book into the monkey’s hands (paws?) and then the monkey sticks it onto a virtual book shelf up in the world of the internet. BUT…and here’s the catch, sometimes when the elephant uploads your book, he drops it and then scrambles to pick it up–swishing it around with his thick trunk. When your fab book finally gets to the monkey, sometime later, a few pages within it have been crumpled, but the monkey doesn’t notice because that is simply not her job (it’s my job), and so she plops my now not so perfect work into its place on Amazon’s virtual bookshelf–crumples and all.

Somehow, when my book uploaded it crumpled. What I mean is, the file became corrupted in the loading process, scrambling a few capitals (only capitals were affected)…how strange is that? When I noticed the weirdness (which was quite a while back) I let my publisher know and she began the process of whatever gets done to fix a messed-up file. Then she uploaded the new file to Amazon again, but for some reason that elephant just hung onto the book–he wouldn’t pass it to the monkey. In fact, he’s still holding onto the file as I write this! Of course I’ve contacted Amazon, and an email from the monkey said, my file is stuck and  the situation was being looked into, and she’s very sorry for the inconvenience.

So, with all this going on, what can we learn? (Besides working with large conglomerations and intelligent little monkeys isn’t easy). I guess I’ve learned this: publishing is difficult! And in this world of doing things faster, I have to remember to go slower, making sure all my i’s are dotted…and my capitals are still capitalized.

-deidre