Mood:
irritatedI can hear you now: oh dear, not ANOTHER gripe! I promise, this is a small one.
You see, Amazon.com keeps changing my product page for Along Came a Demon. At first that didn’t bother me all that much, until I started looking at it from the point of view of a prospective customer instead of an author.
Firstly, every now and then, at the top, the page says there are no customer reviews. There are indeed reviews down there, but if I was a customer I wouldn’t bother to scroll down the page looking for reviews Amazon says do not exist. And reviews help to sell books.
Secondly, every now and then the estimated shipping date changes from “in stock” to “1 to 2 months.” One to two months? They have to be kidding! If I were a prospective customer I would probably zero in on the “2 months” part. Would you order a book if you had to wait two months for delivery? I wouldn’t. The stupid thing is that the book is never actually “in stock”, it has to be ordered from Lulu Press, but neither would delivery be “1 to 2 months." Lulu Press takes 3-5 days to print. Then they ship it to Amazon. Amazon processes it and ships it to the customer. An acquaintance who ordered the book received it in 3 weeks.
I got quite irate. I sent a message to Amazon saying it seemed they were in actual fact trying to discourage people from buying the book, because that’s what it seems like to me.
Today the product page is back to how it should look. But who knows what Amazon will do to it tomorrow.
