The Ninth Avatar, growing pains of a novel

Managing an intellectual property in the age of the Internet is so complicated, it's a wonder we do it at all. Take my recent struggles with Goodreads & Amazon, for example.

As most of you know, I self-published The Ninth Avatar in 2009 through CreateSpace, a POD owned by Amazon. The process was fairly straightforward and, though I can't say I was completely satisfied with their customer support process, I got what I wanted out of the transaction.

An entry for the book was also posted on Goodreads, a great place to discuss books and show your reader clout (if you're organized enough to post all your books and update it often with your status). Three ratings were posted there, and one review, and many people added the book to their "to read" lists. Some of this was thanks to the Giveaway I posted, where I offered up three copies of the book to random drawing winners. This was a good experience, and one I will probably try to repeat.

Flashforward a few months. The Ninth Avatar was acquired by Trapdoor Books, and around that time the CreateSpace version became, for lack of a better word, obsolete. I've said this before, but just for clarification, the "new" version of the book retains the story while having an improved structure and a few small additions to better flesh things out. The chapter order was rearranged, and if you haven't heard about the new cover by now -- go here immediately.

In an effort to push forward, I created a new Goodreads entry and contacted both Amazon and CreateSpace to have the self-published version (now out of print) de-listed. This is something Amazon pointed me to CreateSpace for, which produced a response from the latter saying it was impossible. Amazon retains all listings indefinitely, even of out of print books, for people to re-sell used copies and (I assume) to discuss them. So, in an effort to somehow mark it as "out of print," I took their suggestion and accessed Amazon's AuthorCentral to edit the details of the book.

So far, this has not worked. They allowed me to set the number of pages to 1 (rather than 490, or whatever it was), but they did not accept the change to append the words "Out of Print" to the title or format fields. Add to that, I can't "remove" the original entry from Goodreads because "it has too many reviews."

So, it looks like The Ninth Avatar has a battle to fight to overcome any confusion people might run into about its versions. This annoys me, to no end, because even though I have explained it clearly to multiple customer service departments and tried the recommended channels to correct this confusion, I have been rebuffed at every turn. I'm not quite ready to throw up my hands and despair, nor am I losing sleep over this yet, but it is perplexing. How can a retail giant like Amazon deal so loosely with their products and those who provide them?

To quote a character from my favorite sitcom, "The mind wobbles."


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