joabaldwin

Feel free to bring out some pitchforks! Here's more info about the damage.

https://twitter.com/joabaldwin/status/1741484863985770912

I'm calling it "damage" just for simplicity's sake on the note, although some were properly damaged (bent covers, weird creases, etc, although not during shipping since they were surprisingly well packed in this case), while some were miscut/misprinted.

Regarding royalties, it's better explained on the reply I posted to the main thread. But I'm still unsure about how that might resolve, but I have the specific order number and will try to get an answer. I have not had time to deal with KDP support yet (will as soon as I get home next week).

That’s exactly it (I’m the author). Now, regarding the “bomb” comment, it certainly was that—I saw someone post about this and wanted to see if I was suffering from the same issue, so I’m glad I planted those bombs to verify. And I see nothing wrong with doing it as an exposé on social media, because that’s how you get Amazon support to freak out and look at your case and solve the problem. It’s not an isolated incident, and I wish I could just say “fuck Amazon,” but being my first time publishing, I have no option here other than use Amazon or I’ll lose 95% of my sales. It’s unfortunate that I have to work with people who do this, but it’s just the reality for 99% of self-published authors.

Correct, author copies have no royalties, that’s what I was claiming there. So if Amazon resells those after I return them, it won’t register as a new print. Expanded more on it on another reply to this thread.

Yep, it’s B, supposedly sold without a markup, although I’m sure someone must be making some money. They do limit the number of author copies to 1000 (per year I guess? Haven’t checked), so that people don’t just abuse that and sell all outside of Amazon.

Author from original post here! For clarification, this is not a new thing, but something I learned to do from this post: https://bsky.app/profile/kristadb1.bsky.social/post/3kb4wbix...

In her case, she ordered author copies (that gives you no royalties, of course) and got the same copies sold again to herself as author copies.

In my case, I also ordered author copies, but they were resold to a normal customer after I returned them.

From an order of 50 author copies, I returned 14. Packaging was fine, so it wasn’t a problem with how they bumped up during shipping. They were misprinted, or had folded covers (they tear easily after a fold, really bad), some were printed beyond the bleed area (that’s what bleed is for, you can’t be printing beyond it), and a few were printed slightly off angle. One particularly bad copy was even cut an inch smaller than it should’ve been, trimming every single page and cover, text and all.

So yeah, that’s why I returned them. But I do give you that some of those defects would go completely unseen by someone at a warehouse. You flip through the book, all pages seem to be there, but how is a person there supposed to know what the margins of the book look like? But most errors would not pass a regular printing press QC, particularly the damaged covers.

Also, Amazon both prints and distributes these books, so QC is in their hands from the start.