When Amazon Says You’re a Disappointment

Yesterday, for the first Wednesday in months, I didn’t publish a piece on Vocal.

Believe me, I wanted to. I had it all written up and ready to go. I was going to share the news that I had officially become a published author.

I sat there looking at my Amazon Bookshelf, hitting refresh all day long. Finally, at 4 p.m., I hit that refresh button for the last time, and those angry, red, offensive capital letters glared back at me.

BLOCKED

Then below it:

Your title is unavailable for editing due to either a copyright restriction or blocked content. Check your email for more details.

Huh?

I would have loved to check my email, but I had some issues with keywords earlier in the week, and I’ve discovered it takes exactly four hours for the email to come through once they’ve flagged an issue in your Bookshelf.

Oh, and by the way, Amazon, thanks for not bringing up the major copyright issue the other day when you gave me the impression that I just needed to fix a few minor keywords and I’d be on my way.

Feeling deflated, it was time to pick up my son from daycare. The perfect way to end a terrible afternoon would have been to get a nice, big bear hug from my loving child.

As always, at pickup, he ran straight past me and into Dad’s arms. He went on happily saying, “That’s my Dada,” all the way home.

We got home and then spent an hour in terrible two land with tantrums, hitting and screaming before we finally put him to bed.

After that, I had just enough energy to sit and stare into space for an hour before my Amazon email finally arrived:

Based on our review, we won't be accepting your submission for publication because the book(s) might result in a disappointing customer experience.

There it was, the crappy icing on the terrible cake that had been my day. To my exhausted mum brain, Amazon was telling me my book wasn’t good enough for publication.

I emailed them straight back, asking for more information.

Is it not obvious that authors need that information to resolve the problem? You can’t just flag something as having a copyright issue, then say it might be disappointing to the customer, without telling the author why?

Do they not realise a dedicated person has poured hours into this project? They’ve used up everything they have left in them to get this book, a book that means the world to them, published. They need to know how they can fix the issue.

I got a reply almost straight away saying:

We received the information you submitted for the following book(s).

We need some additional time to review everything. We'll contact you again within 5 business days with more information.

Five business days. Great. I’ll just sit here for another week wondering if I’ll ever get this book published.

Once they get in touch with me, I’ll have to use my tiny snatches of spare time to fix the issue, go through the whole submission process again, and wait another 72 hours to find out what the next issue is.

In the meantime, my brain will continue wondering:

Am I good enough? It’s a common writer problem I’ve wrestled with throughout this whole process.

Is it all even worth the stress?

And if it ever does get published, will I even sell more than a few copies to just family and friends?

I’m not giving up just yet. But first, I’m going to sit in a dark room, watch a horror movie, and eat a block of chocolate.

Then we’ll see.