We spend so much time focused on what’s going wrong, I wanted to give a shout-out to something going right with Amazon, and the easiest customer service.

So, quite a number of years ago, we started Sedgefield Press, and moved all of our then-published books, print and ebooks alike, into a KDP / Createspace account for the company. this was right about the time that Createspace accounts were going away, which complicated matters… but we were growing in sales enough that it was a Very Wise thing to incorporate. As part of the process, Amazon terminated the personal KDP accounts.

Unfortunately, everything moved over… except the print verion of Scaling the Rim. The ebook moved over fine, but the print book was stuck in a terminated account, where I got royalty reports emailed to me when someone bought a print copy, but couldn’t actually access the tax documents, see the sales, or transfer the book. On the other paw, hey, the money (tiny as it was) came into the account, so I was still getting paid. I tried moving it over, and got tangled in a confused loop of Amazon help, so I just put it on the back burner, and let it be.

Everything comes around again. In the last two years, as I’ve released more books, sales of backstock picked up, and I’ve been irritated by a couple typos that I can’t fix because I can only touch the ebook version. Also, it’s the one book I have to buy at retail price since I can’t change the price or buy author copies, if I want to have available at conventions…

But the last straw was when Amazon sent out the email that print prices are going to go up by $2/book, to cover the increasing costs of POD. (Just like everything else; not unexpected.) With that price increase, I’d be losing money with every book. And with the account closed, I can’t even unpublish it and republish under Sedgefield… So I finally went back to KDP Help.

Very late Sunday night, I selected the email help option, not expecting to see anything until Monday. Instead, 15 minutes later I had an email reply, telling me to click this link, enter this token, and it’ll be moved.

Except the link took me to the “Account Terminated” redirect, not the page for transfers. I emailed back with a screenshot. The gent erplied 5 minutes later, saying he could see it fine on his end, and when able, please call for troubleshooting.

Monday was right out; It was a 12-hour shift of stupid-busy and I had no will to live, much less to troubleshoot anything, after work. Tuesday morning, I went to my husband, and together, we looked at the emails to pick up the help thread. He clicked on the link… and on his computer, it worked fine. (Different computer, different OS, different browser, 36 hours later… I dunno, either.) So we put in the token, but it had already timed out. The directions said to put in the old account’s email, to get another token. I did, and nothing came through on the email.

So I went through help to get a phone call. In the time it took the nice lady on the Amazon end to understand what was going on, and verify that I was who I said I was, and that I had the right to be in those accounts…

…my husband realized that despite asking for the old account’s email, they’d sent a new token to our current account’s email. He entered it, and it moved the book over.

So I explained to the lady on the phone, apologized for wasting her time, and bid her a lovely day.

After making breakfast (which also gave time for changes to propagate in the system), we went back into KDP, and clicked on the bulk-update-price tool. It warned that this may take several weeks to work, and I noted that’s why I wanted to do it now, so it’ll be done before the cost increase.

One telling it to run, I then went back to morning chores… and fifteen minutes later, it was done, and telling us that everything was updated on the backend, but it may take a few weeks for the price increases to reflect in all kindle stores.

That was… surprisingly painless.

Have y’all looked at doing your print price updates yet? Did you use the bulk tool or update individually?