Dealing with Amazon’s latest hiccup #AuthorMarketing #WriterWednesday #Amazon

If you are reading this from the US, stop. This doesn’t apply to you (you lucky bastard). For those of us who live outside of the US and distribute ebooks via Amazon.com, there has been a ‘problem’ with seeing our books on amazon.com. Namely, we can’t. Yikes! Apparently, Amazon is aware of and dealing with the problem. I’m not so sure they see it as a problem, but that’s beside the point. (And maybe a tad bit cynical on my part.)

What you should care:

• Not every country has a kindle/Amazon store. Many of those readers purchase ebooks from Amazon.com but are no longer able to do so. If your ads are targeted at this group, you will not only have trouble reaching your target audience, but you may be burning through ad money without the desired result.
• Even though (except for a few free days) my ranking is sometimes in the four-digit range but mostly in the five- or six-digit range (and if I’m being truly honest often in an even higher digit range than that), I still want to see where I stand. Not only is this important to me to see how my ads are faring, but this gives me a good idea of which categories are working better for my books.

Do not panic. Trust me, I’ve done enough panicking for everyone. There is a way to see your kindle books on Amazon.com. It’s a simple, two-step process. First, use a VPN to ‘hide’ your location and indicate your location is somewhere in the US. There are quite a few free VPN services out there. Unfortunately, there are mostly free for a 30-day trial and then you have to pay. I keep switching VPNs as I don’t feel like paying $10 a month to use a VPN for five minutes a day. Call me cheap. I’m currently using this one.

Step two. Go to amazon.com and log out of your account. Your account is location based. Even if your computer indicates it’s in the US, you still won’t see kindle books (unless you live overseas but usually buy your books from .com). Once you’ve logged out of your account, you should be able to see the kindle content for all books including yours. BONUS: My also boughts suddenly reappeared as well! *Squeal*