Amazon and the Erroneous Ebook Excuse

I have to admit, I’m pretty steamed about this.

Just yesterday, I set up my newsletter (you can sign up for it in the sidebar), and I was proud to announce that there was a new version of The Hidden Institute available. I added the short story “The Kody’s Shame” to the book, thus answering two of the biggest complaints:

1) MOAR BEAR POLO and

2) it’s too short.

Except I didn’t. Oh, I wrote the new copy, formatted it, exported it, uploaded it to Amazon, previewed it, and waited for them to evaluate it.

Only later did it occur to me “Hundreds of people have already bought this book. How is Amazon going to update their e-books to show the new content? Do they have an automatic update? Is there a manual update you can use?”

Turns out, there’s nothing.

If you buy the e-book today, you will get all the best content, including the short story, and all the spelling errors fixed. If, however, you were one of the hundreds of people who bought it before? One of the early adopters who showed support before the reviews came in? You get nothing.

Seriously, the only way to get the new version is to delete your purchase (not the download on your Kindle, but the actual purchase on Amazon) and then to re-buy it, which is totally unacceptable.

So here’s what I’m going to do. If you send me proof that you ever bought the book (copy of the receipt with private info blacked out, picture of you holding a kindle with the book on it, picture of the paperback, whatever), I will give you the new version.

And not just the Kindle version of the new version. I’ll give you access to every possible version (that I could think of). EPUB, MOBI, PDF, RTF, HTML, TXT.

And what the hell, I’ll give you the first three chapters of the sequel (rough draft) if you want it.

This is by way of an apology from me for a gross oversight made by Amazon.