Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett here. As regular Maine Crime Writers blog readers know, I am spending my retirement re-editing and reissuing backlist titles. The process goes pretty smoothly, if not at all rapidly, until the books are actually released. Then, thanks to good old Amazon, where most people these days do tend to look first at books they are thinking of buying, things get confusing. It’s hard enough for a writer to let people know when there’s a new book out. We don’t need a “bookseller” making it harder.

The new trade paperback edition of the tenth and final mystery in my Face Down series, Face Down O’er the Border, was released on January 9th. At present, Amazon also lists a Kindle version (shortly to be taken down and replaced with the updated version) and used copies of the original trade paperback edition. These come up first. To get to the new edition, you have to click on the Kindle version and then go to the $15.99 paperback. That’s annoying enough, but what is far more irritating is that when you find the new one and click on “read sample” the text that comes up is from the old version. In some of the other nine books, it’s from the original print edition and in some it’s the Kindle version, but either way, it isn’t the revised text that I worked so long and hard to produce! The note at the top claims the text of the new edition isn’t available.

What they mean is that there isn’t yet an e-book edition of this particular paperback, so they are taking the lazy way and assuming the text is identical to that in earlier versions. Since the decision is being made by an algorithm, or a bot, or AI (take your pick) no human intelligence is involved. The real irony is that the electronic text for each of these novels is readily available. It appears in the e-book omnibus editions. For The Face Down Collection Three (there are three volumes in all, containing all the novels and short stories), which includes the same text as the new trade paperback of Face Down O’er the Border, Amazon had no trouble finding a sample.

That’s good, right? Well, it would be if Amazon hadn’t also decided that Volume Three was the same as the fifth novel in the series, Face Down Under the Wych Elm. That one, incidentally, is included in the second collection, not the third. In their infinite wisdom, Amazon gets the sample and the product details and book description right, but offers (as if they were the same) links to the hardcover, mass market paperback, new paperback, and old Kindle versions of Wych Elm and includes editorial reviews and customer reviews for that single title (which, again, is not included in Collection Three). Since the reviews are good ones, I am tempted not to complain about that. Then again . . .

actual new Wych Elm edition

Confused yet? Meanwhile, I’m trying to get the current Kindle editions, published through Belgrave House, taken down. I’m not sure what the delay is. They hold no rights. This is a co-op of sorts that I’ve been involved in since 2002. Anyway, I have to wait until those are gone before I try to put up the new versions in e-format, and then hope none of the titles are available for free on some pirate site. Amazon is a royal pain about selling e-books if they think someone else is giving them away. I’ve had them refuse to list other e-book titles and there is apparently no appeals process. Thank goodness Barnes &Noble, Kobo, and other online booksellers make things easier. I’ve never had any of them refuse to carry one of my books.

Keep in mind that I publish my re-issues through Draft2Digital and thereby avoid most of the Amazon hassles. I hate to think what I’d have to go through if I was trying to publish each book there on my own!

Okay. I have finished venting, except to say that it’s a good thing I don’t depend on selling my self-published reissues to pay for food and shelter!

For those of you who, despite my bitching, have now developed an interest in the Face Down series, historical mysteries featuring a sleuth who is a sixteenth-century English gentlewoman and a expert on herbal poisons, please check my webpage for more details. Each trade paperback sells for $15.99, the e-book collections are $9.99 each, and the forthcoming Lady Appleton’s World: The Complete Short Stories from the Face Down Series will be $18.99 in trade paperback and $5.99 in e-book (including Kindle) when it is released on February 6th. Incidentally, all of my newly edited trade paperback editions (children’s books, YA suspense, romance, and biography, as well as mystery) can be ordered by any library or brick-and-mortar bookstore. The ISBN numbers are at my website.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.