The Last Word On Nothing

The publisher did what publishers don’t much do these days: send the author on the road. The book tour did what book tours don’t much do these days: sell books. The evening of my return from the book tour, I received a Google Alert that a major newspaper was doing with my book what major newspapers don’t do much these days with any book: reviewing it. That night I went to bed with visions of double-digit Amazon numbers dancing in my head.

The next morning, my wife woke me up. Type in your name or the title of your book on Amazon, she whispered, and you don’t get the book.

I went back to sleep. At least once a day my Yahoo e-mail account goes down for about five minutes. At least once a week my Facebook account disappears for a quarter of an hour. It’s a software glitch, I told my wife; it’ll pass.

I was half-right.  It was a software glitch. Type in my name or the title of the book, and the first “hit” was the United Kingdom version. Which was not only not available in the United States, but which, as of that Sunday, January 30, was still two days away from being on sale even in the U.K. True, you could click through to the U.S. edition via the links to other formats on the page for the U.K. edition, but even I know that making a purchase as difficult as possible isn’t a sound business strategy.

By the following morning, the publisher had determined that the problem had something to do with bad information that the U.K. publisher had inadvertently introduced into the data stream. Or something like that. I was only half-“listening” to the e-mails by then, because by then, for the second day in a row, a major newspaper had done with my book what major newspapers don’t do much these days with any book. And it was a rave. And the Amazon numbers were indeed moving. The book hadn’t broken the two-digit barrier, but to be fair, it was competing against itself. By Monday evening, both the U.S. and U.K. editions had settled into the mid-three-digits.

It’s a software glitch, folks. Fix it. How hard can it be?

Pretty hard, turns out. My agent counseled that he had seen publishers “brought to their knees” by Amazon. He had talked to other agents about my situation, and they all had horror stories of their own. The publisher reported that this wasn’t the first time a U.K. edition had somehow supplanted the U.S. edition. Fixing the problem can take days, someone in sales reported. A week, even. That, my agent wrote, was exactly what he had suspected, but he hadn’t had the heart to tell me.

Part of my job as a writer is to try to understand the various points of view in a conflict. All characters have their reasons. I understood my point of view: Amazon’s routing mechanism for my book had worked fine on Friday, yet by Sunday something had gone wrong. Get rid of the thing that had gone wrong. Go back to Friday.

Through numerous reassuring if despairing e-mails, various people at my publisher had made clear their point of view: They had made sure Amazon was aware of the problem, but they were powerless to do anything other than wait for Amazon to act.

And Amazon? What was its point of view? Hard to say, when a company is barely responding and has a reputation for opacity. But a publisher and author are powerless only in inverse proportion to how powerful Amazon is. What’s a publisher going to do? Take its product elsewhere? What’s an author going to do? Write a damning post on a blog? Here was the moment that we had all worked hard to make happen: a convergence of tour, publicity, reviews. And here we waited, powerless to do much of anything other than to try to guess Amazon’s point of view.

The best guess, I think, came in one of the e-mails from my publisher. Amazon gets data from thousands and thousands of vendors. The U.S. publisher and the U.K. publisher are rival vendors. Amazon can’t change a page of one vendor just because a rival vendor says it should.

This post is on a science writers’ blog, but me being a science writer or the book being a science book isn’t reason enough to justify a post about a publishing injustice. What is reason enough, I hope, is the insight that followed that e-mail—or perhaps more honestly, the insight that followed the fix of the glitch that Wednesday, some seventy-two hours after my wife first noticed it. I had confused cause and effect.

The cause, in this case, was the code. One effect of the software code was the ease with which we all navigate Amazon and any number of other sites. We want what we want, and we have learned to want it now. And by “now,” we might mean tomorrow, via express shipping, or we might mean now, via Kindle download.

But I was thinking of another effect: the ease with which the system can go haywire. I wanted the problem fixed now not because I was used to one-click shopping but because the system had failed so easily.

Just go back to Friday, I pleaded with the gods of Amazon. How hard can it be?

You’ll have to wait your turn, the gods of Amazon answered. How hard can it be?

Pretty hard, turns out.

Image credits (top to bottom): Afnecors; LeoNomis; rumormillnews.com