Showing posts with label Amazon Author Page. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amazon Author Page. Show all posts

Friday, February 17, 2023

DANGER! Rant ahead.

(This is a copy of a non-existent letter of protest to Amazon re: the travesty of their "new and improved" author page. I have been using it proudly for more than ten years as a way to showcase all my published work, until I realized the bottom had dropped out of the whole thing. I have nowhere to send or post this, as they don't seem to want any feedback of any kind, so I  just wrote this in my journal for my own sanity. I cannot believe how Amazon boasts about basically wrecking the setup so that it looks like nothing. I used to be very proud of it and put links to it at the end of every blog post, but now I am ashamed to direct anyone to it any more. But here it is. The rant of the week. Buckle in.)


Though you are not providing a means to send feedback and likely are not interested in it anyway, I have something to say about your “updated” Amazon Author page. The new and improved one that you have been boasting about is nothing but an insult. I showed it to a friend who looked puzzled and said, “So what’s this supposed to be?” It had NO photo of myself or of anything else, only a small box with the first sentence of an author profile, and a bare-looking listing of my three novels. And that’s all. The old format looked great and I was very proud of it, and I often directed editors and publishers to it and linked it to my Facebook page and my blog. Now I am ashamed to show it to anyone because it looks like NOTHING.

I guess (?) you are supposed to click along all the separate buttons at the top to find bits and pieces of information about my work, but who will bother to do that? I had no idea how or why I was supposed to access the information, or why I should even bother. The first rule of ANY website is lots of eye-catching visuals on the home page. One photo is worth a few thousand words. But there are no photos at all! The old format not only had a prominent author photo and a complete author profile, as well as a  photo gallery (which included my three book covers -  crucial to reader identification of my books), but it also had a blog feed which both helped promote my blog, and which helped link the blog back to the author page.

I no longer provide any such links to anyone because this thing is such an amateurish mess. The automated email I got from you (not a human being, of course) gushed over how proud and excited Amazon is over this nonsense. How can you say that, when you have stripped my page of practically everything that was of any use to me? Any publisher can tell you that an author photo should be the bare minimum for identification, unless you click around and try to find it under that ridiculous truncated “author profile”.

I am seriously thinking of pulling this thing if I can, as it is actually working against me as an author. I thought Amazon was interested in selling books! This format will drive potential customers away by creating confusion and looking extremely bare and unattractive. NO ONE is going to bother clicking on multiple buttons at the top to get bits and pieces of information which are divided up between multiple pages. With the old format, all the information was on one page, attractively set up, eye-catching, and at a single glance you could take in all of my life’s work, even my decades of freelance work, not to mention those all-important images of my book covers.

I don’t know why a mega-corporation like Amazon thinks you don’t need any visual images on your home page to attract potential customers. Anyone in the book business knows, or should know, that the cover is about 85% of what catches a prospective customer’s eye. What a travesty this is, and shame on you for running over your authors like this with all these utterly ludicrous statements about being "excited" and "thrilled" about this decimation. Thrilled about what? I am NOT "thrilled" at permanently losing one of my major forms of promoting and selling my books. It would appear Amazon would rather I not sell anything at all through them, as they’re doing a pretty good job of burying everything I have ever written. This is worse than a disappointment. It is actual damage to your authors whom you pretend to care about. But in the end, you are the ones will will lose potential book sales by burying the information in the ugliest format imagineable. Trying to put a spin of excitement on this travesty is both desperate and pathetic. It is a public relations disaster, or it would be if you gave a single damn about your authors. And YOU will be the losers in the end. 

Friday, March 10, 2017

YES! I am an author







Margaret is the author of The Glass Character, a novel about the life and times of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd. She loved researching and writing this novel and believes it's her best work to date. The Glass Character (Thistledown Press)is available in bookstores, libraries, Amazon.com, Chapters/Indigo.com, Thistledown Press.ca, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle, Kobo, and everywhere fine books are sold.

A published novelist since 2003, Margaret  is a seasoned writer who has published her work in a variety of venues (columns, newspaper articles, poetry, short fiction and book reviews). Her first published novel, Better Than Life (NeWest Press, 2003) received excellent reviews, with the Edmonton Journal calling it "fiction at its finest" and the Vancouver Sun naming it as a worthy contender for the Leacock Award.

This was followed in 2005 by another novel, Mallory (Turnstone Press), a harrowing tale of a social misfit ostracized and bullied by her peers until she finds dubious acceptance in a group of teenagers living on the fringes of the law. Of the many reviews this novel received, not one was negative.

In addition to The Glass Character, Margaret has written a book of poetry (The Red Diary, based on the diary of Anne Frank) and Bus People, a novel about the inhabitants of Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside. She hopes these books will soon find a place on the shelf beside The Glass Character.
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This is more-or-less a transcript of my Amazon Author Page. I used to include a link to it every few posts, not so that people would buy my books - that's too much to ask, I think - but to just let people know, if they are interested, that I am the author of three NOT-self-published novels. I did it the old-fashioned way, with traditional publishers, and paid for it in blood. It was not a pleasant experience, not because of the writing - hey, that was great, tons of fun - but because of the long, arduous process of trying to get them promoted and noticed. Because they did not become bestsellers, because I was not anointed into the hallowed halls of CanLit, I was left with the feeling that I had failed. No one tried to talk me out of that feeling, by the way. But here they are, my life's work! It's something, I guess. I never wanted to make money with it, but once you're in the marketplace, there is incredible pressure to sell your product. To me, that feels like selling one of your kids, or at least a chunk of your own soul. No one thinks of this when they eagerly strive to be a Published Author, because it is the best-kept secret of publishing. Besides, everyone is sure their book will win the Giller and the Booker and, perhaps, the Nobel, top the New York Times Review of Books for a year, then be made into a big-box movie that wins an Oscar for Best Picture - or will, if that Price-Waterhouse guy is on the ball. I had all those dreams too, but damned if they weren't right all along - the writing really is the best part.


Thursday, February 16, 2017

Paperback writer: come take a look








































So what is this? Anyway?? For a long time, I posted a gif at the bottom of my blog entries, along with a link to my Amazon author page. It was a kind of signature, along with a little publicity for my actual work. So why did I stop? I got soooooooo sick of doing it, and felt it was so utterly futile ( I mean, WHO goes on my Amazon author page?) that I dropped it. But I was left with this super-cute collection of signature gifs. I have a few thousand gifs in my collection, most of which I made myself. It would be nice to think that SOMEONE might go on my page, just to take a look at everything I've written - and by the way, all three of my novels are still for sale! Maybe I'll start doing it again. Doesn't seem likely, but maybe.