Customer Service Suggestion for Amazon Author Central
You may have read about my travails due to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) no longer supporting third-party conversion software such as Calibre.
I learned about this issue after suddenly getting nasty reviews on Amazon about the formatting of my ebooks. It took numerous emails back and forth to KDP before the reason for the issue emerged.
My business partner Yael K. Miller spent considerable time researching how to create a well-formatted ebook using KDP’s own conversion software — KindleGen, which is the only conversion software now supported by KDP.
Then I undertook the time-consuming work to re-convert all my current 11 Kindle ebooks.
The problem:
I continue to get nasty reviews on my Kindle ebook pages complaining about the formatting issues. This is because, even though the ebooks are now correct, people are reading older versions.
To combat this, I have done several things:
- Added my email address in the book product pages of the two most-affected ebooks and offered a free replacement.
- Officially requested that KDP notify all purchasers of these two books that there is now an updated version. (KDP states it takes four weeks to respond to this request, and it appears to me the answer will probably be no.)
- Added a comment on each book review I find complaining about the formatting. In the comment I offer my email address and a replacement copy (some people have taken me up on this offer).
Now to my request to Author Central:
I asked if an author can receive notification each time someone posts a new review on a book page of that author. This idea came to me when I realized it took several days before I noticed a new review yet again complaining of the html code.
It would be so nice if I got notification of each review. That way I could immediately deal with any formatting complaint reviews.
Of course the answer from Author Central was no.
The Author Central rep did agree to pass on this recommendation. But I would certainly not place odds on this author-friendly idea being implemented.
What would it take for Amazon to truly support authors on the site?
There needs to be an Amazon author ombudsman (remember that word from college days?). This person would be the contact point for author recommendations of how Amazon can more effectively help authors on the site.
And, of course, this assumes that the ombudsman would have the ability to actually have helpful changes implemented. (I do realize this is a rather big assumption.)
Oh, Amazon, you say you want to help authors, but sometimes it seems as if you don’t truly care. Please say you’ll help on this issue!
© 2013 Miller Mosaic LLC
Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks, including TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK and the cozy mystery CAST THE FIRST STONE.
Click here to visit her Amazon author page at amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller
She also has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com
Woah wait. My book that was formatted via Calibre into a mobi format no longer looks perfect? I haven’t heard any complaints but I haven’t had many sales lately. I did have a return recently and maybe that was the reasoning? Why would they not tell people that? Why are they making it soooo difficult for us?
It may be that your ebook converted via Calibre is still okay, especially if you haven’t re-uploaded it recently. But it may not be okay on Kindle Fire.
At issue is that I can find no definitive answer for what looks good where. I did get an email from KDP that said changing the metadata and/or the book cover and then re-uploading would affect the formatting if not converted via KindleGen.
And I have no idea why Amazon does not make things easier for authors!
Hi Phyllis,
Thanks for this post, I came across it as I was browsing for information from other authors having the same problem with KDP’s customer service.
I use Calibre to format my ebooks and I also preview them on both the Kindle Previewer and on a tablet I own. The books seem to be OK, would it be perhaps an specific issue with the Kindle Fire as I recall you mentioned above?
What I don’t understand is how would KDP now not accept Calibre to convert our books to .MOBI. Aren’t we getting our books to be .MOBI, which is what should matter at the end of the day? Likewise, do we have any update from KDP mentioning this important fact? I’m sure more people use Calibre than KindleGen to convert to .MOBI, and I tried using KindleGen and it was an awful experience.
A quick Google search for this issue with Calibre doesn’t bring solid evidence for this issue except for this post. Since you corroborated this issue with the KDP department, I’d/we’d be very interested in knowing the root of what’s going on. Being April 2013, do you have any further updates?
Kind regards.
Rogelio
Rogelio —
Do you have the new Kindle previewer? You can change the settings to check your ebook on the Kindle Fire, the device that I believe started the problems.
I have no new information since writing this post. But here’s what I think:
I believe that the coding needed for a book to be read on Kindle Fire complicated the overall .mobi coding. And it is because of this that third-party conversion software such as Calibre no longer produces a good .mobi document.
In fact, when I just uploaded a new cover for my women’s friendship novel MRS. LIEUTENANT, I got a warning that this would require re-conversion of my already uploaded book document. And this is where the trouble starts if the uploaded book document was done in Calibre months ago.
This is why I now spend hours converting to .mobi via KindleGen requirements. I want to try to ensure that my books look good on all Kindle devices.
Thanks for the prompt reply Phyllis!
Yes, I use the new Kindle Previewer that allows to preview as a Kindle Fire, HD and HD 8.9; I seem to not have any issues when viewing my books. I’ve just checked in case with my last book (which I published a few days ago) and it all looks good. I’ve checked my other book too (published Dec. 2012) and it seems to be fine too.
Having said the above, my books are “how-to” books, thus I have a lot of chapter breaks in there (I set them when converting with Calibre). Perhaps this could be an issue with books that have no actual chapters as some romance/sci-fi could have? I’ve also never had a warning when uploading the Calibre-converted .MOBI to KDP; it does say converting to .MOBI as it uploads the .MOBI book for some reason, then says “successfully uploaded”. I then check it again for any issues prior to it going live.
On the above, are you guys uploading the Calibre-converted .MOBI version to KDP? Or Are you uploading a .ZIP, .HTML or .EPUB to KDP and allowing it to convert it? I don’t trust KDP’s automatic converter and I rather have the finished product with Calibre. The cool thing about Calibre is that it sets both ToCs for the book, which is a lifesaver in terms of complexity of the conversion when done through other manners.
One bad thing I’ve found with Calibre is that it will have an erratic image placement, which is a real pain in the derriere to fix (have to edit HTML code and it not always works). Furthermore, for some reason, the 3rd and 4th chapters always have an extra spacing before the title (after the number) in the ToC, although the ToC itself looks and works good (both of them). Must I say that I do not use Word but OpenOffice to write the manuscript and I use OpenOffice’s option to convert to HTML; perhaps this could be another factor to consider.
Would it be possible to expand a little on what extension (e.g. .MOBI, .HTML, .ZIP, .EPUB) you’ve uploaded to KDP when you encountered the errors and what errors did it produce? I think you’ve done a great job in outlining the problem and this post could help a lot of people who are banging their heads against the wall with converting their books to .MOBI.
By the way, I have quite a bit of bad feedback on KDP and, recently, they figured out an issue in their Terms & Conditions thanks to me asking them repeatedly about something they did wrong with my royalties. I managed to get them to research my issue instead of getting their robotic customer service replies. They are a new branch of Amazon, so I cut them some slack when it comes to making mistakes.
I would appreciate if you could let know a little about the problems you encountered when viewing your book/s with a Kindle Fire.
Kind regards,
Rogelio
Rogelio — I write in Word, then I formerly used Calibre to convert to .mobi along with creating a TOC before uploading to KDP. I do NOT upload a Word doc to KDP.
I think it is possible that a new ebook can still be created in .mobi via Calibre (even though KDP says it is not supporting Calibre) and uploaded correctly to KDP. The issues start when an author goes into KDP to an existing ebook on Kindle and changes any metadata or cover image. Then previously correctly formatted .mobi suddenly takes on a life of its own and shows all the html coding.
Now that I have done the complicated and time-consuming steps to convert via KindleGen, when I have made changes to the metadata, for example, the coding no longer seems to get all messed up.