With a ubiquitous presence, sky-high brand recognition, and customer-first ethos, it’s been a while since “Amazon” only referred to a geographical feature, and the adjective “Amazonian” used to mean a certain type of woman.
If you’re an Independent Author, you’ve either got your stuff on Amazon or you’ve got it nowhere. So when Amazon changes the way it does business, we all need to sit up and take notice. After the hullabaloo with sock-puppet reviews this summer, over the last few weeks a number of authors suddenly noticed reviews going missing from their book pages on Amazon. This led to emails and calls and questions, but one of the first hard-and-fast pieces of evidence to turn up in the media was here, where Amazon sent an email to an author confirming deletion of his reviews of another author’s book because, in Amazon’s opinion, there is “competition” between the two authors, which thus breaches Amazon’s rules. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Amazon is Redefining Ownership”
An author friend of mine, Jack London—no, not the dead guy— Jack Woodville London came up with a unique idea: if you can show him that you have his books your Kindle, he’ll autograph a cute little cotton bag silkscreened with his books on it. Adorable, and just the right size for a Kindle or smaller tablet. But I asked him what he did when someone in another part of the country or world wanted his autograph. His reply: “Come see me!”