“People who work in publishing today are by a huge majority young, female graduates from good universities who have an absolute laser-like focus on advancing their career. They are very dedicated, very smart and absolutely fucking terrifying. These people think nothing of arranging a meeting at 9.00 a.m. 9.00 a.m.! To me that’s not a meeting; that’s a court date.”

If there’s a list of things not to do in the weeks before your book is published then ‘write a blog post bitching about Amazon’ has to be pretty near the top.

Oop.

No – I want to be absolutely clear here. I love Amazon. I love it as a consumer – cheap, reliable, and every book with an ISBN available with one click ordering. I love it as an author – I defy any writer to tell me they aren’t fixated by their Amazon sales rank on the week of publication. And I even loved it as a publisher…

One of my favourite TFP stories was when Clare and I visited Amazon HQ in Slough. As we walked through the front door, the receptionist immediately greeted us – “Oh, hi, you must be Clare and Paul, I’ll tell them you’re here.”

Now that’s how you do fucking personalisation.

So yes, I love Amazon.

And yet, any yet.

Unlike traditional book shops where you deal with actual people and actual shelves, when you shop at Amazon, you’re talking to a database. A database with a very smart interface, yes, but still a database. And databases are stupid and – if they reside at Amazon HQ – they also take an age to update.

Which is why, when combined with the fact that pubishers frequently change titles and release dates during the run up to publication, it’s not unusual to find errors on Amazon listings. And why, for the last week or so, I’ve been getting emails from people asking why a) the publication date on Amazon for The Book is wrong b) the title is fucked c) the delivery date when someone pre-orders a copy (or three) is about a million years in the future.

The answer is simple: because Amazon is run by a database, and databases are stupid.

Bea at Orion is on the case and has sent the Amazon database all kinds of corrections to the title, descriptions etc, but they take a while to go through. And as for delivery dates, they’re basically guesswork bollocks until Amazon have stock in their warehouse. Then suddenly everything magically becomes correct.

In the meantime, I’m giving myself the advice we always gave authors at TFP: don’t worry about the wrong publication date or the bizarre delivery date. Or the title typo. Amazon is cool. And by publication day, everything will be fine and all this madness will be forgotten.

Trust me.

Now, go, pre-order.

Weekend whoring ends. Next up, balloon dodgeball.