When you’re running an Amazon bestseller campaign (or any bestseller campaign, for that matter), timing is everything. So what happens when things don’t go to plan?

Advertising dollars are wasted, marketing activity gets put on hold, and if you’ve been building up anticipation in advance, you can lose a lot of the buzz you generated. Ultimately, you might not hit your goal of becoming a bestseller.

At Grammar Factory, we ran our first bestseller campaign last June when my book, Book Blueprint, was released by Morgan James publishing. We scheduled the sale, booked in our advertising, shared it on social media and via our newsletter, and the book hit the bestseller lists for its categories within a day.

I then thought, ‘Why not offer this as a service?’

So we did – we’ve run bestseller campaigns for a number of our publishing clients now, with books across a range of subjects. Every time we follow the same formula – schedule a price drop, ask the client to solicit reviews and schedule advertising activity throughout the week that the book is on sale.

I have to admit that I’d been getting a little cocky. Why wouldn’t I be, when it always worked?

Until it didn’t.

Here’s the story of my last 48 hours – or the bestseller campaign that went wrong.

It was time to do something about the situation, as both the authors and I had planned marketing activity starting that day.

Step 1: Check our backend

The first step was troubleshooting – where was the problem? Was it with our distributor, Ingram Spark, or was something wrong at Amazon’s end?

I logged into our dashboard and saw that while Wayne’s book was showing up as being priced at 0.99 (which meant it was an Amazon issue), Tanya’s book hadn’t changed. When I clicked into her book’s details, it still had the price change scheduled for the 4^th, but said it wasn’t yet in effect.

Hmm – how strange.

Step 2: Get the price updated at our end

I called Ingram Spark Australia and explained the situation – we’d scheduled the price change weeks ago, and it didn’t appear to have gone through.

The woman I was speaking to looked at her dashboard and said, “It looks like management in the US rejected the price change.”

At this I sputtered and asked, “What?”

She explained that all price changes needed to be approved by the US office, and that sometimes when there was a significant difference between an old price and a new one, they would reject the change.

I was furious. There had been no communication about this and, if I had just assumed the change was still being processed, we could have been waiting for days with no news. I took a deep breath and asked whether she could get it cleared.

“Unfortunately I can’t – it has to go to the US office. I can submit a request, but I won’t hear back from them until tomorrow.”

We ended the call and I decided to take matters into my own hands. We were one day into a campaign with limited time to make our mark – I was losing money on the advertising that had already started, while Tanya was having to rethink her entire campaign.

Step 2, attempt 2: Get the price updated at our end

I looked up the contact details for Ingram Spark US and, upon discovering that they work on a Sunday (thank you!), I gave their office a call.

The first person I spoke to had no idea what I was talking about – she said she couldn’t see any notes about the pricing change being declined. She also said the price appeared to be updated, and didn’t seem to understand that I was seeing a ‘price not yet in effect’ alert at my end.

Eventually she transferred me to her supervisor who said the same thing – she knew nothing about it being declined and said it all looked like it was in order. But she could run a refresh and put in an IT request and see if that updated things at my end.

It looked like I’d done everything I could regarding the pricing change in my dashboard, so I asked whether there was anything we could do to get the change to show up on Amazon more quickly (as for past campaigns it had always been live first thing on Monday morning, and the morning was getting away from me).

She said they’d refreshed their retailer feeds, but that was all she could do for the moment. When I asked if she had a number for Amazon, she said, “I guess I could Google it…”, after which I said I could do my own Google-ing and set off to do just that. No direct number for me.

Step 3: Get the price updated with Amazon

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to contact Amazon as a publisher, but it’s impossible. I don’t recommend it if you can avoid it.

Here’s what I tried:

The second time I called the US office, I had more luck (or so I thought). The woman I spoke to was fantastic – she understood the problem and transferred me to the Kindle department, which she thought could help. Unfortunately, they couldn’t.

Once I spoke to the Kindle rep, he said that because I hadn’t uploaded the book to Amazon myself, Author Central wouldn’t be able to process the change for me. They’d need the distributor (Ingram Spark) or the authors (Tanya and Wayne) to contact them directly.

It was now outside business hours, so I sent Tanya and Wayne each an email listing what they would need to tell Amazon to get the price changed. 20 minutes later, Tanya emailed back to say that they hadn’t known who she was and hadn’t done anything.

So much for that plan.

Step 4: Sleep

It was getting late and there was nothing I could do after emailing both the Australian and US offices of Ingram Spark.

Step 5: Get Ingram Spark to call Amazon

First thing the next morning, I called the US Ingram Spark office again (following my experience yesterday, I’d given up on the Australian office).

After waiting on hold for over 10 minutes, I got through to a gentleman and explained my situation. My request was simple: since the online system doesn’t seem to be working, can you give them a phone call?

The response? No.

No ‘Let’s look for another solution’, no ‘let me speak to my supervisor’, no ‘Sure, I’ll try it and see how it goes.’ Just no.

Why?

Because their dispute resolution process says they can’t contact Amazon unless there is a significant error in how a book is listed, or if a price change is significantly overdue. How long was ‘significantly overdue’? Three weeks.

Wait, three weeks?!

Both of my authors were running a one week campaign – in three weeks’ time the pricing would have already gone back to normal!

I explained that we were running campaigns and that three weeks was too late. I explained that I’d already tried calling myself and that they’d said someone from Ingram Spark would need to call them. I explained that I would make the call myself if I could – that I would solve the problem myself if I could – but that I’d already done everything I could.

What happened next? Did the block of ice around his heart start to thaw and crack?

Nope – the answer was still no.

So I asked, was there anything else we could do?

No.

A tangent to this phone call was that he also told me that price changes only got pushed to retailers on the first of each month, which meant I’d missed the cut off to have the change processed this month. This piece of information seemed nonsensical, given our past experience – we’d never based our sales dates on the first of the month. The system also allows you to schedule a price change on any Sunday you like. But, if he was right… we’d be waiting until April for the change to go through.

Step 6: Look for other options

By this stage I was pulling my hair out. Timing is everything, and we were running out of time.

So I started looking at alternatives. Was there any other way we could run these campaigns?

Here’s what I came up with:

So which books are currently running their campaigns?

Buy on sale at:

Buy on sale at: