Sam will soon be off to the US for a week on business, and he asked me to order him a couple of my ghost stories so that he had something to read on the plane.  I logged into his account in that mahoosive online  store that we all love to hate, and ordered  paperback copies of ‘Finding David‘ and ‘Partners in Time‘.   I did this on 23rd June.

As you know, once the paperbacks are delivered then the sales should have been recorded on my KDP paperback dashboard.  However, it is now nearly 2 weeks later and  only ‘Finding  David’ has been recorded even though both books have been delivered.

I have complained many times via chat and phone about the missing book sale on my dashboard, but the sale never gets added to the dashboard.  I have wasted hours on the chat facility going around and around various departments that shift me on to someone else and say they will get back within 24 hours and never do.  They are now trying to get rid of me by saying they have no details of the sale; yesterday a very convenient ‘glitch’ happened that had to halt the conversation.  When I try to ring, I get told that the KDP Department are not contactable by phone and that someone from that department will phone within 24 hours (ha ha).

Can one person fight such a large institution?  This makes me wonder whether every sale gets recorded.  I only know about this one because I ordered the books myself from Sam’s account.

Has this infuriating situation happened to anybody else?  If so, how was the situation resolved?

By the way, my ghostly short story ‘Finding David’ will be FREE from Friday 5th July to Sunday 7th July.

UPDATE

I was surprised beyond belief to receive an email from Executive Customer Relations this morning after I had emailed Jeff Bezos himself out of sheer frustration when noticing online that he reads all of his emails but doesn’t reply to all of them (I hoped at the time that he would reply to mine).  This is part of the reply:

Mr. Bezos received your message and I’m responding on his behalf. That particular event didn’t reflect on your royalty reports because we fulfilled this order with existing inventory from an either cancelled or returned order that was already reported as a royalty when the manufacturing event occurred. 

Yes, I remember that I’d had a Kindle copy of a different book returned, but this was a paperback bought at a higher price.  Oh well, I think I’d best shut up now…