Member-only story
Dead Guys with New Publication Dates on Amazon
I wrote this story on Google’s Blogger on 5–18–2011. I have abandoned the account because Google doesn’t like to pay people any money for their work — same as Amazon, as this story shows.
Hello. My name is Tony Berard.
I am an author of two publications. One is a math book, and the other is a book about a game I invented. This game is called Tines and Barbs, which is my user name.
I published the math book on Amazon.com a few months ago. It was in December of 2010. However, when I do a search by publication date, I find to my horror that I am way down on the list of newly published math books. How can this be? It turns out that Amazon republishes a bunch of tried and true sellers from the past. I saw guys from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s with new editions of their books beating me in the list of returned results. One deceased author that sticks in my mind is George Salmon. If a person wanted to find my math book, he or she would have to click next a bunch of times to find my book in the list of returned results. This is not fair!
I thought to myself, “Well, that’s ok because I have another book about my game that I will put in the chess category. Then, I will get some hits on that and get crossover sales to my math book. So, I’ll be ok after all.” It turns out that that notion is false. I whipped my game book into publication shape and got it onto Amazon…
