Amazon.com: Making Changes in Listings and Deciphering the Rankings

If the Amazon.com listing for your book is incorrect; if the page omits features that might improve sales, such as sample content or laudatory reviews – or if a reader review is defamatory or obscene – authors or publishers can request changes. Here's information about updating your listing, as well as links to information about the Amazon sales rankings.

• Correcting mistakes
• Adding content
• Dealing with inappropriate reviews
• Deciphering Amazon's sales rankings

Updated January 1, 2007

Correcting Mistakes

What if Amazon has omitted the subtitle of your book or misspelled the name of your co-author? At the bottom of Amazon's page for each individual book is a Feedback box. One of the links is to "Update product information."

Click on the link. This takes you to the Catalog Update Form. You will be asked to log onto Amazon to verify your identity. Once you've done that, you'll be allowed to proceed to the update form, which already has the title of the book and the ISBN filled in. You can correct any of the following by checking the relevant box and following simple prompts:

• Title
• Author
• Binding
• Publication Date
• Publisher
• Number of Pages
• Edition
• Format
• Language

If you experience difficulties or delays (more than a week), send an email to
book-typos@amazon.com with the ISBN and title plus the correction. Indicate that you are the author.

If that doesn't work, try the telephone: 206-266-2992 or 206-266-2335.

Adding Content

If you want to add descriptive material to the page for your book, you will need to fill out the Books Content Form. Though the form is geared to publishers, authors may use it too. Have your ISBN and the new text ready ahead of time to simplify the procedure.

Here are the types of material you can add with the Book Content Update Form:

• Description
• Publisher's comments
• Author comments
• Author bio(s)
• Table of contents
• Inside-flap copy
• Fair-use citations from reviews (source plus up to 20 words per review)
• First chapter or other excerpt

After you enter the content, you'll be given the opportunity to edit it. Before you sumbit the material, use your browser's copy function to keep a record of the final version.

Once you've sent your additions, a page will come up saying that the additions should appear within five business days. If you experience difficulties send an email to book-typos@amazon.com with the ISBN and title plus the additions. If that doesn't work, try calling Amazon: 206-266-2992 or 206-266-2335.

Dealing with Inappropriate Reviews

Amazon.com allows readers to post reviews – including negative reviews – of books. Most authors would not wish to censor legitimate reviews, even if we disagree with them. However, we do have the right to protect ourselves from reviews that violate Amazon's policy prohibiting content that is illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious or objectionable.

If an objectionable review appears on your page, you can ask to have it removed. For example, a reader posted a "review" of my coauthored book, Strong Women, Strong Bones, which is about osteoporosis, claiming - I assume as a joke - that it contained "wonderfully graphic photographs" showing a gaping hole burnt into the palate of my collaborator from "hooting" calcium. Needless to say, the book contains no such photographs. I drew the review to Amazon's attention and they deleted it.

To deal with an inappropriate review: Send an email to community-help@amazon.com. Include the title and ISBN of the book, as well as the review to which you're objecting. Identify yourself as the author and explain your objection. You might find it helpful to read and refer to Amazon's "Conditions of Use," which lists forbidden review content.

Deciphering Amazon's Sales Rankings

Amazon ranks all of the books in its inventory in order of their sales. These rankings provide useful information for authors, from the proposal stage, when the rankings pinpoint our competition, to the post-publication stage when they help us assess the effectiveness of publicity and predict the likely content of our next royalty statement.

For a detailed look at how sales ranks are determined and what they signify, see Surfing the Amazon - Decoding Sales Ranks, by Morris Rosenthal. If you haven't read the article recently, check it again: Rosenthal updates it from time to time. Also check out his blog, which discusses rating-related developments at Amazon and elsewhere.

If you become obsessed with the Amazon rankings of your books (or those of your competitors), you can subscribe to a service offered by Books & Writers, which provides email updates weekly, daily, or even hourly. The cost is $10 per year for a single book, $20 per year for two to ten books, and more for additional books. You can try the service free for a month.