I promised that I would follow this up in my last post, so here are my findings. Just as a refresher for you, my premise was: if there are reviews posted for my novel ‘The Trespass’ on Amazon.co.uk, then surely they can be shared with Amazon.com? Makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, they are both in the business of selling books, and so am I, so. . .
I dropped the nice people at Kindle Direct Support a line. I asked the question. They replied and said, we’ve linked your Kindle edition with your Print edition. And by the way, we can’t share your reviews with Amazon.com – it’s a different website:
“I’ve linked the Kindle and physical versions of your title, “The Trespass” and this change should appear on our website within 24 hours. It may take up to five days for customer reviews on any other editions to be linked to the Kindle edition. Reviews cannot be linked from one website to another, therefore any reviews you currently have on the UK site will not be transferred to the US site. I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. I hope this helps! We look forward to seeing you again soon.”
I said, well, thanks, but you’ve already linked my Kindle and print editions, so I’m not sure why you’re taking the trouble to repeat the process? Maybe they thought they had to take some kind of positive action, and that was all they could think of…anyway…
I replied and thanked them for their belt and braces approach, but what I really wanted to know was why my reviews couldn’t be posted on Amazon.com.
And they said….
“We appreciate your interest in this feature and your understanding with this current limitation. Further, I’ve forwarded your mail as a feedback (to transfer reviews) to our development team and we’ll consider your feedback as we plan further improvements. Customer feedback serves an important role in helping us to improve our platform and provide better service to our publishers. Please be assured that we’re constantly working to improve our authors/publishers experience on the KDP”
So, all is not wasted, I reckon. But if you’re hoping as I was that your fab reviews are going to magically appear on all Amazon sites, you’re going to be disappointed – at least for the foreseeable future. These things take time, but I guess if they’re thinking about it, that’s better than nothing! And I don’t know what you guys think, but I’m convinced that readers are more likely to buy a book with positive reviews than a book with no reviews…?
Author Central
Still, while I was browsing the KDP site I came across a suggestion which, up to yesterday, I hadn’t taken up: to publish an ‘author page’ on Amazon. I’ve created my page now and you can view it at Scott Hunter’s author page.
If you’d like to add your own page you can find out how at The Author Central Team
It all helps to raise your profile and let people know where to find your books. Check it out and I’ll see you there!