I feel I made substantial progress today in the two areas mentioned in the title of this post. To take the more routine one first, the “Search Inside the Book” function finally started working on Amazon in the US for the Panasonic Lumix LX5 camera book.  This means that potential buyers of the book can look at various pages in PDF format, including the Contents, Index, and the first few pages.  Also, they can enter a search term and see any reference to it on a page of the book.  Some authors and publishers don’t use this feature because they’re afraid people won’t need to buy the book if they can search through it on Amazon, but my opinion is that it helps people decide whether or not the book is one they’re really interested in buying.  Anyway, I have set this up for all three of my books on Amazon.  This time it seemed to take a long time for the PDF files I submitted to be processed and to show up in the book’s listing; I submitted them on November 7 and it took 12 days.  Anyway, I’m glad it finally worked out.

The bigger news, at least from my point of view, is that, a little while ago, I finally succeeded in setting myself up as a seller on Amazon.co.uk.  I never had any intention of doing so, but recently the book about the Panasonic Lumix LX5 was listed as “Unavailable” on Amazon in the UK.  For a while there were a few third-party sellers selling it there, then just one, selling it at an outlandish price of more than 1,000 pounds, and then, for the past few days, the book was listed as “Unavailable.”  I hated seeing that word, so I worked through the system to get listed as a seller on the UK Amazon site.  I probably was doing something wrong at first, so it took me quite a number of tries until I succeeded.  When I finally did, the process was quite smooth. After I entered my basic information, including addresss, phone number, bank account, e-mail, and credit card, I receive a call on my cell phone from a British voice (a recording) asking me to enter a 4-digit PIN that had shown up on my computer screen.  I entered the number, and, within a few more steps on the computer, I had the LX5 book listed for sale. Here is the listing for the LX5 book in the UK.

I know there have been some potential buyers in the UK who were frustrated at not being able to purchase the printed book at a reasonable price. Of course, now the book has to ship from here in the US to the UK.  The good part for UK buyers, though, is that, because I am listed as a UK seller, I’m required to ship the book to UK buyers at the domestic postage rate, not the international rate, so they will save a good deal on shipping costs.  I ship quickly, within one business day after receiving an order, so hopefully this system will work out okay for the buyers and for me.  We’ll soon see, I guess.

Otherwise, today has been very quiet.  I have had only one order for the downloadable PDF.  There’s no way of knowing why things quieted down so much; hopefully they will pick up again before too long.