So having got Chasing Innocence print ready three weeks in advance, it surely was a simple matter of updating the publish status on Nielsens - the central database in the UK for all books and sales, and they would sync across to Amazon and we'd be good to go. Simples.
Of course not. Nielsens sell a 'expedited' database update subscription which almost syncs your data in 1-3 days, otherwise updates take upto 'two weeks'. Of course my updates had previously synced to Amazon in a few days. But the crucial: 'In stock and published' update was still missing five days after clicking 'Accept'. The book was still sat in a pre-order state, a state ironically, I can now only dream of. Because I then made a very, very big mistake. I assumed it was simply a matter of telling Amazon the book was good to go. I can only imagine what occurred during the update, but when I subsequently received confirmation the publish date had been updated, it had, I could also see half the books product detail and links had been deleted, including the fact it's a paperback. So we now have a wonderfully alluring 'Unknown Binding' in big letters next to the title on Amazon.
The lesson learned is to set a publish date and stick to it. I was early because, by all accounts, Lightningsource can take from days to weeks to make your first book available. Mine became available in about 20 seconds. I should have just left it all to run its course, but three weeks seemed like an awful long time to wait. Hopefully it will all catch up with itself by the end of the week. Pre-orders are still listed as being delivered beginning of Feb, so it looks like some part of the system still thinks the original end of Jan publish date is in place. Stressed? You betcha. Who ever would want to publish their own book? Need wallpaper stripped? No problem, I can do a wall a minute with my nails.
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