The Dramatic and Ongoing Saga of Two Titles

UPDATE: The problem has been fixed. Inheritance is once again available and all on one page here. Thank you to everyone who alerted me to the problem and patiently waited for the book to come back online. You're the best!


I've been going bonkers for about three days.

As you may know from my previous post, I retitled The Druid Gene and stuck it in the Confluence series since there will be two books total devoted to Darcy that converge (or conflue) with Jane's stories.
​
Confluence, as planned, will be six books total. Book 5: Vengeance, is what I'm working on right now and this book is about Darcy. The events in Book 5 will be EXTREMELY important to Jane in Book 6: Convergence when the two women finally meet, put their heads together, and have a really big adventure. I planned all this stuff out ages ago. It's awesome. That's all I'm saying about that.

---

So. Yes. I retitled The Druid Gene. It's now called Inheritance. If it was going to be in the Confluence series, it needed to follow my naming convention for that series. Honestly I don't think the title was really working well for the novel anyway. My friends told me it wouldn't. But none of us seemed able to come up with a better name.  <Sigh>

Luckily, says I, publishers rename books all the time. Amazon even makes it easy. I just change the name on this little form. Change a few things in the books. Make new covers. Contact the audio book narrator and ask her to record new intro/outro.

Yeah, it was a lot of work, folks.

And now… a new challenge of sorts.

I kept the Amazon identification code ASIN (pronounced ACE-in, I'm told--not the other way, never the other way!) for Inheritance the same--so that anyone who ever bought Druid Gene would be alerted that they already owned it and wouldn't buy it twice. I even put a line in the description stating that "this novel was formerly titled The Druid Gene." 

Apparently this was not enough. Amazon tells me it has taken the novel down because, and I quote: 

---

E​rror Category: Wrong_Content; Comments: Your title, cover and content seem to belong to different books. Because this affects all of your readers, we have had to temporarily block your book from sale. Please make the necessary corrections so that we can make your book available for sale again.(Book contains The Druid Gene)

It's been down for probably 3-4 days as of this writing. That's when I started getting dozens of emails, tweets, facebook messages, and messages through my website--all from people who want to buy and read this book. 

You know what? I want you to read it too!

I immediately contacted amazon. I got an autoform reply that said someone would contact me within 24 hours. The next morning I was given the quoted message above. It was clear that they didn't understand the situation.

I've checked the book. Only about 10 times. It contains the proper content.

What has happened, I suppose, is some very confused customers complained to Amazon that Inheritance is a repackaging of Druid Gene without realizing that Druid Gene is no longer available for sale except for a few used paperbacks floating around.

Again, I'll restate that it should be nearly impossible for them to be duped into buying the book twice because of the name change. I asked some of my readers to check the day Inheritance went up for sale--they were immediately alerted that they already owned the book. In fact, for most customers, Druid Gene magically transformed into Inheritance on their kindles without them doing a thing.

So I immediately replied to this email from Amazon, explaining everything in detail. This was well over 24 hours ago. No reply about why the book was taken down or how we can fix it. I did get a reply saying they finally put the ebook, paperback and audio book on the same page. Yay?

They ignored me today, completely. Not a word.

I tried calling Amazon today through Author Central. The call absolutely would NOT go through. I tried for over an hour. By the end I may or may not have been frightening my neighbors with random screams of frustration. I ended up sending another email to that team, essentially begging them for help.

I'm losing sales, but even more than that, I'm disappointing readers. The scores of people that contacted me are probably only a tiny percentage of the people that actually wanted to buy that book over the last three+ days.

All I can say is that I'm doing everything I can short of hopping a plane to Seattle and bopping Bezos in the nose with a wet noodle.

Stay tuned, gentle readers. I plan to let every single person who contacted me know as soon as I find out the book is back up. Personally. That's how I roll.