Wow. Marketing your work on Amazon was supposed to be easy. For some reason, it’s been a complete mess for me!
- I wanted the cheapest plan, but somehow ended up with a professional one. No problem – you can change it after you’ve finished registering, before your credit card gets charged.
- Ah, but you can’t complete registering because they need proof of ID and address and a bank account. So that’s thirty bucks off the card in the meantime.
- Oh no, can’t be in Dutch. We need a notarized translation.
- But the information’s there. Look: let me point out the non-translatable items like the IBAN code, my name, my address…
- Hey, you can’t annotate documents like that and send them to us. That’s forgery. Your account has now been suspended. That’s another fifty bucks off the card too, by the way.
- Oh yes, now we need a utility statement to prove the address, plus business licence details. (Whatever the equivalent of that might be: my Chamber of Commerce and VAT numbers?)
- Finally I get the information they require in the requisite format. No JPEGs, but it’s fine to make a PNG from the JPG. Now I’m allowed to market in the USA!
- Or I might be if it weren’t for the fact that their system doesn’t accept my perfectly valid Dutch ISBN numbers. Please submit proof on paper… but the Dutch system is entirely electronic.
This feels like it could go on for quite some time. Aaaaargh!
YLO 
A week later and it’s still not sorted. They should apparently have accepted the Dutch ISBN numbers (though it took multiple contacts with them and the GSI organization in NL to get the OK). But as a result of whatever went on behind the scenes, the ISBN isn’t associated with any type or class of object (such as a dystopian sci-fi story). It’s null… and the net result is that I don’t come up in any searches or anything like that. Which isn’t too helpful.
Watch this space.
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So why not have a look at whether I can sell it in the UK in the meantime? Sure, no problem, create an account, fill in the details… and they seem to want even more paperwork than the Americans! Because it’s through a company, they want passports and proofs of address of me, my wife (joint owner), the company itself, the tiddly holding company in between, statutes and articles of association (which there aren’t), proofs of registration (which are electronic in NL, not on paper)…
Another space to watch.
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We’re now a month later. Amazon have had no less than 63 pages of documentation from us, and have seen fit to communicate with us in four different languages (English, Dutch, Spanish and Chinese – standard fob-you-off responses that Google Translate can handle; just as well). And still no sign of when sales will be allowed or what on Earth it is that they don’t trust.
If it wasn’t a captive market, we’d have told them where to stuff their paperwork some time ago.
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Finally! The paperback’s available on Amazon UK.
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