My Tangle with CreateSpace

By Andrew E. Kaufman 

One of the reasons I worked like a madman to get my latest novel finished was because I wanted to have it out by Christmas. Books make great holiday gifts. Lots of holiday gifts mean lots of sales, and  therein lay my motivation. As it turned out, I was able to release the e-book on December sixth.

Then there was the paperback.

I uploaded the file around the same time as the e-version, and to my satisfaction, it appeared I was on schedule. I ordered a hundred books—many of which already had buyers—then waited for the estimated December 19^th delivery date.

They arrived on schedule, but when I opened the boxes, I got an unpleasant surprise: it wasn’t the book that I’d uploaded. Well, it was, but it wasn’t, because this one was riddled with formatting issues: paragraphs that had no breaks between them and other problems. Now granted, I knew those problems had existed, but I also knew that we’d fixed them, then uploaded the corrected version; yet somehow, the one with the errors was what ended up being printed.

I saw red.

Immediately, I got on the phone and called CreateSpace (the Amazon company responsible for printing and distributing the book). The lady I spoke with seemed dumbfounded. She confirmed they had the correct file yet had no idea why the bad version ended being printed. Apparently it was some sort of glitch on their end, but since she couldn't figure out what that was, she told me they’d need to have technical support take a look, assuring me they’d re-ship the new books once they knew what had gone wrong.

“How long might it take for them to do that?” I asked.

“Two-to-three days,” she replied.

“But you don’t understand. I have nearly a hundred people waiting to buy  books as Christmas gifts. I can’t give them these.”

“It would be impossible to get the new ones to you by then.”

A deep sigh. “But this wasn’t my fault.”

“I'm very sorry,” she said, “but until technical support investigates the matter, there’s nothing we can do, and that will take at least—”

“Two to three days. Yeah, I know. Isn’t there a way to expedite the process?”

“I’m afraid not. They’re very busy this time of year.”

Now, besides having three boxes filled with books that will never see the light of day, besides not being able to sell them before Christmas, there was another problem, a much bigger one: a lot of people had already purchased the paperback on Amazon. People I don’t know and have no way of reaching. People who laid down their hard-earned money expecting to have a good book to read. People who were not going to get that.

Those people  will likely take one look at my book and decide I’m some yayhoo who thinks he can write. And that, in my world, is far worse than having three boxes filled with very expensive firewood.

So I asked the lady: “What about the customers who have already bought the book? Isn't there some way to alert them that they got a bad copy, maybe send them the good version once it’s available?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said.

I don't know if I've mentioned this here before, but I’m fiercely loyal to my readers. I have great respect for them, and I always put them first. It’s why I work so hard to create the best work I can. They deserve that. So the thought of them receiving a defective book makes me want to gnash my teeth to powder.  Now, luckily, the majority of my sales are on Kindle, and that version is fine. But I wouldn’t care if just one reader had bought the paperback—as far as I'm concerned, that's one too many. I don’t want anyone getting less than what they paid for. Not one.  

As it stands now, I'm still waiting for technical support to conclude their investigation. There will be no books for Christmas; in fact, I've pulled the paperback from Amazon to prevent any further sales until the matter is resolved. And, of course, I have three boxes of books that will likely either be headed back to Amazon or to the dumpster.

So why am I telling you all this? For one, I think it's good to share these experiences with other indie authors so they can be aware. But beyond that,  I also think there’s a lesson to be learned here: technology is a beautiful thing, and it’s made our lives better in so many ways.

But it’s far from perfect.


Incidentally,  if anyone reading this post bought the paperback version of The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted, please contact me as soon as possible (mail@andrewekaufman.com)  so I can figure out a way to get the good version to you. I’m hoping Amazon will make good on this, but if they don’t, you have my promise: I will, even if I have to replace every one of them myself.

Damaged Goods?

By Andrew E. Kaufman

For those of you who haven’t heard me shouting it from the rooftops, I’ve just released my second novel. A lot of things happen to me during the course of writing a book. Quite often between my fits of frustration and desperation, I also have bursts of revelation, and those moments seem golden. As I dig deep within myself to create my characters and my stories, I also discover things about myself and about the world that I never knew before. Sometimes those discoveries are immediate, but sometimes I don’t see them until after I’ve had a chance to decompress and breathe a little.

In this case, my main protagonist taught me the lesson. His name is Patrick, and to date, I think he’s the one I’ve enjoyed writing the most. Like many of my characters, he’s deeply flawed. Some would call him damaged goods, but I don’t see him that way at all; he’s human, and like all of us, he has challenges. When I created him, I wanted to raise the stakes like I’ve never done with any other character before, to push obstacles in his way that seemed insurmountable—at least to him—both on an internal and external level. Then I wanted to see him fight like hell to overcome them. Funny thing happened in that process: as I wrote the book, I found myself struggling right alongside him like I’ve never done before—I had to, in order make the story come to life.

Patrick suffered a horribly abusive childhood, has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and as if that weren’t enough, he’s a bleeder. The blood disease is a metaphor; he’s been deeply injured, and as a result, is deeply vulnerable. On a physical level, he lives with the day-to-day fear of being injured, of bleeding to death, and his emotional state is much the same—he’s scared of being exposed, of being wounded. Because of those internal and external fears, instead of living his life, he becomes imprisoned by it.

Enter the next layer. With the OCD, his particular compulsion is listing; he writes the same words over and over. To raise the stakes even more, he’s a journalist: a writer, trapped by his own words. The irony in that fascinated me, and I used it as a device to show his tension. As his situation becomes more dangerous, his disorder becomes more pervasive, so he's fighting his battles on two levels.

I grew to love Patrick just as I would my own child. It happens with many of my characters, and I’ve often tried to figure out exactly why that is. True, I create them, and in order to portray them in a realistic and meaningful way, I often need to throw myself into their minds and experience their emotions much as they would. Mentally, it can be exhausting, however, in the process, I suppose, some sort of bond occurs. But I’ve always suspected there was more to it than just that; I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then Patrick showed me.

I began to realize that the reason I liked him so much was because those very flaws, the ones he felt so crippled by, were the ones that made him seem so much more real, and as a result they endeared me to him.

Imperfections aren’t what separate us; they’re what connect us as humans because we all have them. And just as in real life, watching people triumph over them makes us feel like we can do the same. Think about it (I’m dating myself here): how did it make you feel watching Rocky climb to the top of those steps while that exuberant theme song played? For me, I might as well have been right there alongside him; I sure felt like I was.

Being vulnerable is like opening a door; it allows people in, helps them understand us a little better, helps us connect.

Patrick taught me that.