Hi, Angela,

Thanks for last week’s article, Check Your Book’s Reviews on a Regular Basis!. What would be helpful, I think, would be to provide some guidance about HOW to get Amazon’s attention, should we find such problems. Tackling that behemoth is daunting, especially, when one can spend a lot of time just figuring out how to e-mail them in a useful way.

I am listed on both their U.S., and U.K., entities, and, happily, have found nothing adverse thus far. Wish I could say as much for Barnes and Noble which is less useful, I think, because it insists on listing “Used” versions in dominant position. I frankly doubt that there are any such used versions available of my books.

Regards,
Kevin Murphy

Degrees of Murder
Something Bright and Alien

Any company with an Ingram account can list “new and used” sales of books on online bookstores without buying the books first. That’s confusing for a lot of authors who see those listings and think someone has purchased their book, read it, and put it up for sale. Often, these “new and used” copies haven’t even been printed yet. These companies won’t order a copy from Ingram until a reader orders from them.

Amazon is really good at answering inquiries…but they tend to send out a form email and you sometimes have to twist their reps’ arms to get them to take action instead of just firing back another form email. The Amazon email for oopses is: book-typos (at) amazon.com.

Barnes and Noble’s is: corrections (at) barnesandnoble.com