Amazon.com update on unavailable e-books

Hi everyone–

If you are outside the U.S, and you’ve tried to go to Amazon.com lately and buy any of my e-books, you may be experiencing issues doing it. Either you won’t see the e-book to begin with, or you click on the e-book to buy it, and then it tells you that you can’t purchase it on the US site.

I’m aware of the problem, but completely powerless to do anything about it. Depending on who you speak to at Amazon HQ, this is either a bug and being worked on, or it’s a permanent solution. Evidently, it began in Australia, because of a new tax plan being introduced there, but is now being used widely in other markets, and appears to be rolling out incrementally.

For anyone outside the US, you are now being guided to use your own Amazon site (UK, AU, DE, etc). If you are outside one of the countries with an Amazon presence (for instance, New Zealand, the Philippines, etc), who formerly used Amazon.com, I’m not sure how this is being implemented.

Suffice to say that for me, a US author, now in Canada, writing about American subjects, this has caused a HUGE seismic shift in my fortunes. I’d seen a major dip in sales the last month, and this only makes things worse. US KDP sales were the bulk of my earnings every month.

At least the experts are staying on top of the issues. By experts, I mean those folks very recognized in the indie publishing community, such as David Gaughran and Joanna Penn.

Here are some links to help you understand what’s going on:

Reuters

The Digital Reader blog

David Gaughran’s blog

In the meantime, all I can really suggest is searching other stores for digital books, such as Chapters/Indigo, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, or Kobo. I know formats are different. I’m available through just about every digital market there is. If you have a question about one, please feel free to contact me.

Amazon has lost a LOT of market share the last few weeks, and now I really understand why. Since they forced we authors to move from Createspace over to KDP for all of our books, their support has become non-existent. And now this.

I urge ALL my readers, now more than ever, to move away from Amazon to other sources for my books.

Related Post

Lost FilmsLost Films

In my quest to learn everything I possibly can about the silent and early sound film eras, I’ve bought every old Hollywood biography I can find. Plus many other research

Translate »
https://lainigiles.com/?p=1934
lainigiles.com
CC-MAIN-2024-18
95775
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:AKIWKEJMLKNZJJ27GFEVFLEXTNKQIO7M
<urn:uuid:90938f19-e991-49be-a7ee-281794dab30d>
2024-04-21T23:30:54Z
192.249.116.52
text/html
sha1:BTJ6ZA2PDWKGQSXLA44OSXGUP37KOTFG
<urn:uuid:794c26a0-160c-4b81-bf94-43e313ab8cb3>
https://lainigiles.com/?p=1934
response
<urn:uuid:11a9f803-58e9-4fdb-8fbe-8597cda9d330>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-18
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-230
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/