I thought this might be of interest to the HN crowd because bad UX at Amazon is impacting an author.
Will Wight, a popular niche Fantasy author, had all pre-orders on the final book of their series canceled due to bad system design. Amazon is telling the author there is no way of reversing the pre-order cancellations. The author stated on reddit
> Bottom line is, you have to click “Submit for Pre-Order” by a certain deadline even when there’s already a pre-order up and the manuscript is uploaded, but our team member didn’t know that.
> They were thinking it had already been submitted for pre-order since there was a manuscript submitted and the pre-order was live.
This seems like a situation Amazon could design their system to avoid, "there’s already a pre-order up and the manuscript is uploaded" should be sufficient to deliver pre-orders. At the very least, some sort of notification to the author could have prevented this. Canceling pre-orders is devastating to author and I'm sure Amazon is losing money as well. I'm surprised they let this happen to a series with books in multiple "top 10" categories at Amazon.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadWill Wight, a popular niche Fantasy author, had all pre-orders on the final book of their series canceled due to bad system design. Amazon is telling the author there is no way of reversing the pre-order cancellations. The author stated on reddit
> Bottom line is, you have to click “Submit for Pre-Order” by a certain deadline even when there’s already a pre-order up and the manuscript is uploaded, but our team member didn’t know that.
> They were thinking it had already been submitted for pre-order since there was a manuscript submitted and the pre-order was live.
This seems like a situation Amazon could design their system to avoid, "there’s already a pre-order up and the manuscript is uploaded" should be sufficient to deliver pre-orders. At the very least, some sort of notification to the author could have prevented this. Canceling pre-orders is devastating to author and I'm sure Amazon is losing money as well. I'm surprised they let this happen to a series with books in multiple "top 10" categories at Amazon.