Not that it’s too hard for them to do so. Yesterday I tried to publish my story True North on Amazon’s site. They say they need, sometimes, 12 hours to publish English-language ebooks.
My experience is that they generally take less time than that. The thing was “In Review” for only a few minutes, and has been sitting in “Live–Updates Publishing” for over 24 hours.
The thing is, I don’t believe them. First, the “live” part of that should refer to ebooks that were previously published and merely being updated. Second, in the past when they were indeed publishing (meaning “pushing stuff out to their servers”) I’ve been able to access my ebooks well in advance of their official “you’re published!” email. Often within an hour or so.
This time? Nothing. On all Amazon sites, the links give a “404 Not Found” error. And in their “Author Central” site, where I can typically link my books (in case there’s another person using the same name, I guess, and from the same account?) I can’t find the new story. Usually this, too, works fairly quickly.
And I can’t schedule the thing to go free until Amazon admits they’ve pushed the thing to their servers, so…it’s just stuck.
I’m not looking forward to trying to fix this. It happened once before, and I had to go through several rounds of “there’s no problem and we’re closing your support ticket immediately–you should wait 12 hours at least next time” with Amazon support staff over a couple of days before suddenly a ticket wasn’t closed right away…then the ebook finally showed up…and then I got an email telling me there was no problem, ’cause see? It’s published now!
I don’t want to go through that process today. Other things to do. I don’t know when True North will be available, or when I’ll be able to schedule its 5-day freebie.
When it happens, I’ll post. Sorry about this.
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