Like me, I know many of you self publish your books so I wanted to share a recent experience with you. Well, actually it’s a recent frustration and I’ve still no idea how it happened.
First of all, I’m a huge fan of Amazon KDP. It’s the first platform I upload my books to and I thank them for empowering us authors and giving us freedom to release books that might never have seen publication. I’ve never had any problems with the platform before until last week.
I uploaded my Writing Your First Erotic Romance and Erotica Story to KDP on Wednesday and listed it in two writing related categories. I think it appeared on the site late Thursday afternoon and by Friday it was ranking high in a couple of its category lists and in the number one spot on hot new release which I’ve always been told is a writer’s dream come true because it gets lots of exposure.
I had high hopes that it was going to make it to the number one spot in each of its categories but when I checked on Saturday morning, it had fallen in the rankings and fallen a lot. I then noticed it had now been relisted in three new categories, and all of them were fiction…yes, this is a non-fiction book.
Wondering if someone had gotten into my account and changed my categories, I logged in and saw that no, they were still the same as the two I’d selected. By now I was completely confused and upset that this was probably costing me some sales.
I contacted KDP and they said they if I told them what categories I wanted they could change it back which I did, but then was told you have to supply them with a category pathway. I supplied them with that but still nothing happened. By now I was totally frustrated so I contacted them again, and this time asked them why this had happened and was it something I’d done when I uploaded the book.
Long story short, I finally heard back from them and they agreed to list it under my original categories but offered no explanation as to what happened or why they chose to switch the book’s categories. It’s now back where it should be and yay! it’s climbing again and in the number one spot of hot new releases.
I don’t know if anyone else has had an experience like this, if you have I’d love to hear from you. One tip I would like to pass along is that you need to keep an eye on your books to make sure they’re in the categories you chose. Picking the right ones can help sales and get you exposure to potential readers. Also, if you contact a company’s customer service department and don’t get a response the first, second or third time, keep on trying!