Thank you to the4ts, entropy12, dracavia, tootiredtosleep, synkkaenkeli, anmkosk, sammaetz, veritas03, spike7451, annelislashfan and nenne for the vgifts on LJ. I didn't realise some of them were there, clearly the emails have been going astray. *hugs* to you all.
I've had my head down finishing the covers and helping with the final tweeks for the new anthologies Soph and I have coming out. All those of you who have been patiently waiting for the Giveaway Games Anthologies, they are finally ready. Should be definitely up by Monday, maybe tomorrow, depending on whether Amazon get their fingers out or not :). I will be making a post about them on Monday because that's when we're going to do all the marketing. There are 8 of them in case you are wondering.
I've had another great experience with Amazon.
Now the rules say you're not allowed to put advertising links in to a product description and I made the stupid mistake of linking to the Authorgraph pages for some of the books so that people could see where to get autographs if they wanted (it's a totally free service and used to be called Kindlegraph, so I thought it wouldn't matter - WRONG). That meant, rather than telling me there was a problem they just removed my ability to edit my own product details and edited it themselves to take out the link. I only found out because I wanted to do some fancy editing (y'know little things like bold and italic) and you can only do that on author central not where you actually update the books, because, y'know that's totally logical.
Some of the books I could edit, some I couldn't and since there wasn't anything consistent (some have kindlegraph links and they were accepted fine), so I emailed them and finally someone mentioned what the problem was. So I edited the descriptions on the KDP bookshelf to take out the links. Then I had to email Author Central to let them know what I'd done so they would open them up to me again because even though I edited at step one, they don't automatically let your description go up even if it's okay now.
So far I have heard back for two of the books. One, the user support sorted it out and I can edit perfectly again. The other one told me it was a bug they didn't know how to fix and I had to go through them to put in my edits. As you can tell I was not happy, so I have written to them again telling them that someone doesn't know what they are doing, could they please fix it. I await a response.
Also it is really annoying that you can't do anything at all until they've finished okaying the books. I accidentally got overenthusiastic and uploaded Soph's anthology when she was going to do that herself. I can't delete it until they've gone through all the steps to put it live! *bangs head on desk* I can understand why you can't edit, but deleting should be allowed.
Also discovered you have to enroll the book in KDP select to get 70% royalty rates in Japan, India and Brazil even if they are above $2.99- which is just plain wrong. That is totally anti competitive since to be in KDP select a book can't be sold anywhere else. KDP select also sucks!