Murphy’s Law says that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Summer’s law says: “What do you mean “IF”???” That seems to have been especially true with my launch of Teleportal: Damage Control. My original plan was simple. I would launch the Kindle book and the paperback on February 22 and simultaneously give away Peacemaker and Teleportal. Unfortunately, I hadn’t read the small print.
I submitted the Kindle version and everything seemed fine. My plan was to start a countdown sale of the Kindle book. It made sense to me that offering the book at a low price initially and raising the price in increments would encourage anyone who was hesitant to buy while the price was low. So much for planning: I hadn’t read all the requirements. They said the book had to be available for 30 days at a fixed price before I could do a countdown. Score one for Murphy. Just to add to my confusion, when I selected the countdown option, the software took all the information for a countdown to start on the launch date. When I submitted it, I even got a message that I had succeeded. Did that make two for Murphy? I’m not sure.
I also planned to start an ad campaign and filled out the form for that, or so I thought. I apparently quit before I activated it. Score another for Murphy.
Then there was the paperback. I started on the Amazon form and ran into “imprint,” which had to be filled in. After some searching, I found out that the imprint was part of the ISBN application. I dutifully filled in the required information, picked what I believed was the imprint, and finished filling the Amazon form. When I hit the publish button, I got a message to fix the highlighted error. Problem: no error was highlighted. After going through the form again more than once, I was stumped, so I tracked down a phone number to call Amazon for help and got an immediate response, but the agent had to contact their IT folks and promised an answer in twenty four hours.
Getting to the heart of the problem took a lot of help and several days. What had happened was that the ISBN software took the colon in Teleportal: Damage Control as an indicator that Damage Control was a subtitle and stored it as such; whereas, Amazon had it stored as part of the title as I intended. Everyone was very helpful, but the fixes weren’t available right away. It took almost four whole days, but finally everything matched up. Whew! I count that as more than one for Murphy.
So here’s the deal. Both the Kindle version (https://www.amzn.com/B07NV2TZS8/) and the paperback version (https://www.amzn.com/0997682051/) are now available. To effectively run a Countdown Campaign I’ll manually adjust the price of the Kindle version. Right now it is $1.99. I’ll raise it to $3.99 on March 4th, and $5.99 on the 6th. After the 8th it will go to $8.99.