Exploring The Amazon

For better or worse, I've claimed my Amazon author page.

There isn't a lot of point in having one of these, unless you're writing novels or original digital material for Kindle. But I set up one anyway. Mostly I want to control (as much as possible) all my digital touch points, and Amazon is the big dog in digital for authors. It was better to set it up sooner than later. Plus my writing career is an experimental journey, and wrestling over my identity with Amazon is part of that.

There are only two credits on the page so far -- for the issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine containing my debut story, "Teddy's Favorite Thing," and the issue of Mystery Magazine which ran my story, "No One Will Believe You" earlier this year. Theoretically you can click through the page to purchase those issues through Amazon (though I think only the Mystery Magazine link will lead anywhere, as their past issues are available through print-on-demand).

I like to support the people who publish me and if these links generate sales, that's great! But really, I'm just being a completist here.

The process of setting up the page was a Kafkaesque maze of sliding doors. I tried to keep notes so I could outline all the steps -- I really did! -- but I got lost in the labyrinth pretty quickly, and the feeble breadcrumbs I left in my path were inadequate to the task.

For what it’s worth, the doorway to Hell is here.

My advice to those following in my path is to penetrate to AI-driven chat and thence to email correspondence with a real customer support person as soon as possible, and then have some patience in the weeks to come as everything gets sorted out. In my case, I received credit for my Mystery Magazine story fairly quickly, but convincing Amazon I was a contributor to my issue of EQMM was a more complicated process requiring photocopies of tables of contents and my byline on the story itself.

Eventually everything got sorted and now I have a functionally useless page to my credit ... but I'm glad it is there, in the event I need it later. If I had a book coming out I wouldn't want to be setting this up at the last minute!