Wednesday 15 December 2021

Clara let down again

 

 Don’t you love Amazon and don’t you despair of them sometimes?

It was becoming apparent that people were getting through the first book in the cycle and not moving on.  People like The House on Schellberg Street but don’t always realise that there are more books in the series. If they happen to read one of the others first, they’ll find the earlier ones. As the books are in a cycle rather than a series this is fine. They can be read in any order.

We decided then, at least for the Kindle editions, to advertise all of the books in the end papers of each book. And we accidentally uploaded Girl in a Smart Uniform instead of Clara’s Story.

As you might expect, Amazon rejected this straight away. The content was too similar to another book. Of course it was; it was identical, in fact.

We used their contact form to tell them about our mistake.

We kept getting the same form reply. According to their terms and conditions they could not publish this book. After some persistence and pointing out to them they were using a script rather than their brains, at last someone said we could take down the incorrect version and upload the correct one. Except that we couldn’t because the title was still blocked.

Eventually we found a brave soul who was willing to unblock the title as long as we promised we would put up different material.

We did, and it was accepted.

But it would be Clara’s Story that was affected. She was being rejected all over again.

We persisted and eventually someone saw sense. A little like how someone gave Clara back her real name. Somewhere in all of the chaos there are caring humans.