Listing The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb

As I enter the final stages of making The Horsepower Whisperer available to the markets, I have been amending its various listings. These include Amazon and the book data people on both sides of the Atlantic. At the moment all of them are different but amendments have been submitted and accepted. It still takes a few weeks, though, for the changes to actually show on the listing if “you are a small publisher or this is your first book”.

The implication could be that bigger publishers get preference. Fortunately, for a small publisher I’m quite tall but The Horsepower Whisperer is my first book. So I’m listing The Wormton Lamb as well.

Amazon is still showing the wrong price for The Horsepower Whisperer. That one is years old and predates the distribution deal that fell through because the distributors only dealt with publishers that had ten titles or over. (Is it just me or is there a theme emerging here?).

I believe Amazon base their listing on what’s shown by Nielsen Bookdata in the UK and Bowker in the US. One thing’s for certain – I never uploaded the original listing on Amazon. They must have got it from Nielsen, who, in turn, might have got their information from Lightning Source, my printers.

I’ve added a synopsis to my Amazon page as well as the latest cover design. There should be an illustration of the back cover soon. Apparently, there is supposed to be an Amazon customer rep for publishers but nobody on any of the publishing discussion groups that I’ve joined knows how to contact them. Maybe that’s a secret to be revealed only to the big publishers with loads of books to list.

But if the Amazon publisher reps are reading this (unlikely I know but word may get back to them) - you can ride but you can't hide.