I continue to have a challenge with Amazon’s Author Central program. This program is supposed to send regular updates to my ‘followers’ when I release new books.
However, it seems the system only sends alerts out when pornographers write books using my name. The author central system does NOT send out alerts when I actually publish my own family-friendly content.
Here is the letter I just wrote them today, July 3 2023.
…
Dear Author Central Team –
Back in early 2022, your Author Central team mistakenly sent a message out to all 5000+ of my followers telling them I’d published a pornography book. I had NOT written this book – a scammer did, from their own KDP account. I had not connected that scammer’s book to my author central page in any way. There is no way this scammer’s book should have in any way been connected with my followers.
Author Central had sent this pornography message to my followers without my permission or authorization.
I promptly wrote Author Central about the issue. Author Central never sent a retraction to my followers, so my followers had no way of knowing it was a mistake.
I then published a book detailing that I had NOT written a pornography book. That book was a new release for me, properly connected to my author central page.
Amazon’s author central system did not send ANY news of my new book to my followers. As far as I can tell, author central has not sent ANY news of ANY book I’ve written since then to my followers.
Please update me as to the status of my author central account. I want to make sure that the account is working as it should – that my followers will be getting alerts of new books I publish going forward.
Sincerely,
Lisa Shea
* * *
Amazon wrote me back on July 4th claiming that my Author Central account was in perfectly fine shape and that sometimes it takes 60 days for an alert to go out, and that some readers choose not to get the alerts. This of course is fairly ridiculous since I have people who are specifically testing that they’re getting my messages and that the issue has been going on for a full year.
But clearly what this means is I need to release another book, watch it for sixty days, and then write to Amazon alerting them that none of my friends who were waiting for news about it got any news.
Hopefully what actually happened was that Amazon had screwed something up with my account, they fixed it now, and they just don’t want to admit it. So hopefully the next alert does actually get sent.
Time will tell …