I have been so busy with other projects that I haven’t worked much on my fiction writing. I need to set aside time to do that. I have several out-of-copyright books I want to publish, but I am disheartened about how Amazon is now ‘hiding’ an author’s out-of-copyright book from results if it isn’t the very first one into their system. It makes it much more of a race to get your version in first.
I have one out-of-copyright book I’m working on which is in essence a massive book of quotes and sayings. Amazon keeps balking at me putting it in, claiming my title doesn’t exactly match the paperback version in their system, that the author names don’t exactly match, etc. So I need to take another run at that. I spent quite a lot of time photographing the pages, formatting it, editing it, etc. So it wouldn’t make sense for me to give up now when I’m nearly there. I just get worn down dealing with the Amazon team.
As an example of the challenge with out-of-copyright books, I republished Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers, which is a mystery novel. I created an illustrated version which, according to Amazon’s rules, should always be allowed and considered a separate entity. However, when you search on “Whose Body Dorothy L Sayers” in the Amazon Kindle store, my illustrated version is hidden.
You have to search Amazon on “Whose Body Dorothy L Sayers Lisa Shea” to find my book – and even then it shows up beneath the main Kindle results. It only shows up under the “All Departments” additional results. The same ‘hidden book’ issue happens with book 2 in that series that I illustrated – Clouds of Witness.
So in essence all the work I put into creating that version is fairly “worthless” if the only way a person can even find it is to search for the entire string including my name.
This situation shows how quickly Amazon is changing, as they try to manage the flood of incoming “duplicate” versions of books they already have available.
