[Steven Lyle Jordan]

As of this morning, I've uploaded all 10 of my novels into Amazon's DTP system, which means that within the next 12 hours, all will be visible, and within another 72 (or so) hours, they will all be purchasable. (I haven't uploaded the free short stories, and don't plan to at this time.)

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the experience. Getting the novels in, of course, wasn't hard. Most of the books I downloaded were from the original Word documents, with formatting cleaned up to correspond to the DTP conversion process. Although I don't know firsthand how a book will actually look on the Kindle screen, I'm fairly confident that the preview display captured the book as I intended, and any differences in font sizes, etc, can be dealt with on the reader.

Concerning DTP, I am not satisfied about how well it functions. Amazon has taken steps to limit the control an indie has over what they publish--possibly to avoid hacking or other vandalism, I'm not sure--but as a result, I cannot create a nicely-formatted Product Description. Right next to my entry, Big Publishers have entries with nicely formatted descriptions, reviews, headers, etc... indies get one paragraph, however long it ends up.

Other indies have complained about a number of other DTP functions, many of them requesting the ability of being able to set up descriptions, list multiple authors, add reviews, etc, much like standard (ie, Big Publisher) entries. Some of those requests have been denied outright... most have simply never been responded to by DTP support.

Speaking of DTP support... they don't speak of much. They have not been very forthcoming about the hows and whys of their system, they do not respond to many questions other than "We're looking into it," and they haven't even pretended that they give a rat's a$$ about any indie's suggestions or complaints. (And we thought Adobe support was bad...)

Also, now that the books are in... I cannot remove them. Amazon has apparently left DTP indies no choice in the matter. If I decided to not make my books available, I'd probably have to upload a blank file and alter the product description warning people that the book was no longer available. Which may work, but it won't exactly leave people talking favorably about the guy who has blank pages for sale on Amazon.

And is there any way for me to promote my e-books? No, there is not. They are in, but that's pretty much all. I do not have the funds to buy my way to the top of the search engines, as the Big Pubs do, nor to buy banner ads. So, unless I am discovered by someone else, somewhere else, who spreads the word around, my e-books won't be percolating up to anyone's "favorites" or "also boughts" categories anytime soon.

So, overall, I'm giving the Amazon DTP process a D grade... D for Below Average, as is befitting my ongoing status in the Amazon universe... and only because the end result of getting your e-book available on Amazon.com is, yes, a bit of a rush. Not a victory, not even a score--after all, I might never be found in there--just a vague thrill for being even a small part of the largest online bookseller on the planet.