DANGER! Rant ahead.

(This is a copy of a non-existent letter of protest to Amazon re: the travesty of their "new and improved" author page. I have been using it proudly for more than ten years as a way to showcase all my published work, until I realized the bottom had dropped out of the whole thing. I have nowhere to send or post this, as they don't seem to want any feedback of any kind, so I  just wrote this in my journal for my own sanity. I cannot believe how Amazon boasts about basically wrecking the setup so that it looks like nothing. I used to be very proud of it and put links to it at the end of every blog post, but now I am ashamed to direct anyone to it any more. But here it is. The rant of the week. Buckle in.)

Though you are not providing a means to send feedback and likely are not interested in it anyway, I have something to say about your “updated” Amazon Author page. The new and improved one that you have been boasting about is nothing but an insult. I showed it to a friend who looked puzzled and said, “So what’s this supposed to be?” It had NO photo of myself or of anything else, only a small box with the first sentence of an author profile, and a bare-looking listing of my three novels. And that’s all. The old format looked great and I was very proud of it, and I often directed editors and publishers to it and linked it to my Facebook page and my blog. Now I am ashamed to show it to anyone because it looks like NOTHING.

I guess (?) you are supposed to click along all the separate buttons at the top to find bits and pieces of information about my work, but who will bother to do that? I had no idea how or why I was supposed to access the information, or why I should even bother. The first rule of ANY website is lots of eye-catching visuals on the home page. One photo is worth a few thousand words. But there are no photos at all! The old format not only had a prominent author photo and a complete author profile, as well as a  photo gallery (which included my three book covers -  crucial to reader identification of my books), but it also had a blog feed which both helped promote my blog, and which helped link the blog back to the author page.

I no longer provide any such links to anyone because this thing is such an amateurish mess. The automated email I got from you (not a human being, of course) gushed over how proud and excited Amazon is over this nonsense. How can you say that, when you have stripped my page of practically everything that was of any use to me? Any publisher can tell you that an author photo should be the bare minimum for identification, unless you click around and try to find it under that ridiculous truncated “author profile”.

I am seriously thinking of pulling this thing if I can, as it is actually working against me as an author. I thought Amazon was interested in selling books! This format will drive potential customers away by creating confusion and looking extremely bare and unattractive. NO ONE is going to bother clicking on multiple buttons at the top to get bits and pieces of information which are divided up between multiple pages. With the old format, all the information was on one page, attractively set up, eye-catching, and at a single glance you could take in all of my life’s work, even my decades of freelance work, not to mention those all-important images of my book covers.

I don’t know why a mega-corporation like Amazon thinks you don’t need any visual images on your home page to attract potential customers. Anyone in the book business knows, or should know, that the cover is about 85% of what catches a prospective customer’s eye. What a travesty this is, and shame on you for running over your authors like this with all these utterly ludicrous statements about being "excited" and "thrilled" about this decimation. Thrilled about what? I am NOT "thrilled" at permanently losing one of my major forms of promoting and selling my books. It would appear Amazon would rather I not sell anything at all through them, as they’re doing a pretty good job of burying everything I have ever written. This is worse than a disappointment. It is actual damage to your authors whom you pretend to care about. But in the end, you are the ones will will lose potential book sales by burying the information in the ugliest format imagineable. Trying to put a spin of excitement on this travesty is both desperate and pathetic. It is a public relations disaster, or it would be if you gave a single damn about your authors. And YOU will be the losers in the end.