Amazon Samurai
>> Friday, December 9, 2005
Yes, yes, I know. The Samurai Shortstop page at Amazon.com is wonky. For some reason, they have confused my book with a very different tome about the Golden Age of comics - The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer. While I'm all about the history of comics, I'd rather that book's information be confined to that book's page.
I've read that online book sales only account for about 4% of all book sales, and I'm not so foolish to think Samurai Shortstop is going to sell like hotcakes on Amazon. Still, I use Amazon as a reference site for books, then go and buy them elsewhere. (Preferrably at a local independent bookstore I like.) I know a few other people who do this as well. Since the information is out there, I'd prefer that it be correct. Amazon also doesn't have a cover scan, and since it thinks my book is some kind of weird amalgamation of Samurai Shortstop and The Great Comic Book Heroes, the "look inside," "Listmania!" and "Other customers who bought this bought . . ." features are all about comic books.
I've e-mailed Amazon twice about this, always trying to remain professional and respectful. They are, after all, a business, and they presumably want their sales information to be correct. I'm sure they get thousands of such quibbles a day, and I still have a fair amount of time before the book comes out. I just wanted to be able to go to Amazon and look myself up!
Here's the really odd thing: I already have a sales rank in the 1.2 million range, which is different from the 300,000 range of The Great Comic Book Heroes, and isn't nearly the lowest rank (somewhere around 4 million, I think). Is someone actually pre-ordering Samurai Shortstop?
Hmmm. Maybe they think they're getting a Jules Ffeiffer book . . .
4 comments:
As of December 11, you've jumped a bit. You're now at the 140,000 range. It's a nice jump in only a day.
Today: #146,564 in Books
Yesterday: #1,261,300 in Books
I pre-ordered your book and it put your book in my basket, and not the other tome that the verbage is confused with. So, one would make an assumption that your sales rank is accurate.
I also think there may be an issue with the ISBN assigned. I used it to search and the mix-up is not just isolated on Amazon.
http://www.allbookstores.com/book/compare/0803730756
What's the ISBN that's listed on your galley copies? If it is an ISBN issue, that would definitely need correcting. You might want to do some investigating then contact the publisher.
The galley ISBN is 0803730756. I'm off to do some investigative research. Thanks, Fabricationist - you've saved the day once again!
(And I do get these comments e-mailed to me . . .)
Okay, the weird thing is (well, ONE of the weird things is) that Amazon has the right ISBN number - as do all those other sites. What's messed up is that on half of them, my information is confused with the other book's information. Most distressing. If it were simply a matter of telling Amazon the ISBN was wrong, that would be much simpler. Perhaps all the wrong sites are using the same database - or the same original/bad info. Amazon Canada and Books-a-Million have the information right, as does Borders, which is teamed with Amazon.
More oddly, I clicked on the "Buy it" link from the allbookstores.com link the Fabricationist gave me, and it brought up an Amazon page with a clean entry - except that the suggested list was for comic book books, not YA historical. When I clicked the button to tell them the list was inappropriate, the page refreshed to the old, incorrect Amazon page!
Grrrr. But the existence of a good Amazon page is promising - perhaps they are working on it in the dungeons in Walla Walla, Washington.
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