Another Amazon glitch, this time with series

[Eric Thomson]

[Rant]

Just when you thought the Zon couldn't get any stupider and more useless than ever...

Yesterday, I published the fourth book in one of my series, which clocked in at over 97K words. All the metadata is fine (I've been doing this for a while), everything is copacetic. Never had issues getting them to link new books to their existing series until now. Now the series in question has the status "BLOCKED" and this is what I got as an email just now:

Hello,

We’re contacting you regarding the following series:

Ashes of Empire by Thomson, Eric (AUTHOR) (ID: SRS-YVYJFCEM8NK)

During our review, we found that one or more book(s) in the submitted series lack significant content on the interior pages. This includes books intended to be filled by the user (e.g. lined journal, notebook, sketchbook, planner, calendar), “gag” books that intentionally have blank interiors, and books used for a professional purpose like staging a house. As a result, we won’t be making the series page available on Amazon.

To have your series page reconsidered for publication, please remove the book(s) that do not comply with our guidelines and resubmit as a new series. Instructions on how to submit a new series can be found here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/GMFKBUS43QQ5AJ5A#create2

If you have questions or believe you've received this email in error, reply to this message.

Thanks for your cooperation,
Amazon KDP

Arrgh! Why is it they always manage to f*ck things up whenever they try to make improvements? Don't even get me ranting on how they butchered Author Central. Does Amazon hire only the cheapest, most useless developers? Every other retailer already has the book linked to its series without any intervention on my part. Anyway, I replied to the email telling them they screwed up - politely, of course, since this is obviously a mistake by the badly programmed bots. We'll see what happens next. Thank God I'm wide and get more than half my income from more competent retail outlets.

[/Rant]

[TimothyEllis]

Just double check the Look Inside on each book, in case one of them has had some sort of accident internally.

[Eric Thomson]

Just double check the Look Inside on each book, in case one of them has had some sort of accident internally.

Look inside isn't available yet, but I downloaded a copy of the mobi and the pdf proof from the bookshelf, and they're fine.

[TimothyEllis]

Just double check the Look Inside on each book, in case one of them has had some sort of accident internally.

Look inside isn't available yet, but I downloaded a copy of the mobi and the pdf proof from the bookshelf, and they're fine.

What about the older ones? Has one of them been corrupted ?

[Eric Thomson]

Just double check the Look Inside on each book, in case one of them has had some sort of accident internally.

Look inside isn't available yet, but I downloaded a copy of the mobi and the pdf proof from the bookshelf, and they're fine.

What about the older ones? Has one of them been corrupted ?

All the looks inside are good on the older ones, both ebook and paperback. Considering how many downloads I've had from Amazon since late yesterday, if there was a problem with the content in the new ebook, one of my readers would have reached out by now. I'm betting that one of the new automated processes for series has serious glitches stemming from lousy programming.

[DmGuay]

Maybe the issue is the MOBI file?
Amazon wants a Kindle EPUB Now and is no longer supporting MOBI files.
Could just be a glitch, but worth at least trying to upload an EPUB and see if it helps.

[notthatamanda]

Does your book even have the blank pages of which they are accusing you of? I honestly feel the error messages are generated by a slot machine type algo. They are so far off base sometimes it's unbelievable.

Sorry for your woes and good luck.

[Eric Thomson]

Maybe the issue is the MOBI file?
Amazon wants a Kindle EPUB Now and is no longer supporting MOBI files.
Could just be a glitch, but worth at least trying to upload an EPUB and see if it helps.

I always upload .docx files, so that isn't it.

[TimothyEllis]

Maybe the issue is the MOBI file?
Amazon wants a Kindle EPUB Now and is no longer supporting MOBI files.
Could just be a glitch, but worth at least trying to upload an EPUB and see if it helps.

Last time I looked, you couldn't even download an epub to send to the kindle.

Has that changed?

If that's the case, it sounds like the conversion process to epub didn't work, but the mobi did, and the bot is looking at the epub.

[notthatamanda]

Maybe the issue is the MOBI file?
Amazon wants a Kindle EPUB Now and is no longer supporting MOBI files.
Could just be a glitch, but worth at least trying to upload an EPUB and see if it helps.

I always upload .docx files, so that isn't it.

I use D2D to create the epub files for Amazon. The last time I put one up there (a couple of weeks ago) I had a lot of problems with the KDP previewer crashing but eventually it worked.

[Eric Thomson]

All's well that ends well. It was indeed a bot glitch that got sorted when an actual human being set eyes on my book and noticed the bot had glitched. I just heard back from the Zon and they gave it the green light without my having to make any changes. Say what you want about how infuriating the automated systems at the Zon can be, at least the humans doing tier two support still move at a reasonable pace once they understand the problem.

Endfile.