Conventual Amazon wisdom is that Amazon won’t promote your book until you’ve made some sales. Promote means to show it in results for various searches so that people can find it and potentially buy it. Now that’s a Catch-22 of course. You have to make sales for Amazon to promote it, but how can you make sales if they don’t promote it? And the answer is advertising.
...That did the trick! After I deleted the page from my school friends’ website, I got an email from Amazon to say that Chapter 3 had now been accepted. So Chapters 1 through 5 are now published and I’ve also grouped them together as a series.
...Well, the problem preventing Chapter 3’s publication is now revealed. I have a website that I maintain for my old school friends. It contains mainly gossip, reminiscences and old photos. I’d forgotten that I once posted Chapter 3 on it as a sample of the novel (Teachers Pet) that I was working on.
...Well, this is a bit strange. Amazon approved the publication of Chapter 2 but not Chapter 3. Nothing to do with censorship, but they said “some of the information is freely available on the internet”. This is clearly a conclusion drawn by software, not by a live person. I was invited to resubmit and I’ve done so.
...I’m pleased to say that Amazon has approved the publication of Chapter 1. You can buy Chapter 1 from Amazon for only US$2.99 or your local currency equivalent. Click Read More below to find out how you can be reading minutes from now. I’ll submit Chapters 2 and 3 next.
...Page [tcb_pagination_current_page] of [tcb_pagination_total_pages]