Thursday, 8 October 2015

See how my mystery shopping book came into existence

My Amazon Kindle book called The Secrets of Mystery Shopping : How to Become a Mystery Shopper was released yesterday. This is one of the books that I have published on areas of modern life that I have gained great experience in. I'm passionate about mystery shopping and I think that it's a good way to gain some money and free products whilst helping out companies with how their team reacts in certain situations.

The book was available to pre- order on Amazon but there was a little bit of a wrangle between me and them about the pre-order and edits to the book so the pre- order was cancelled and the book launched immediately.




When I uploaded the book file when setting up the book for ore-order, there was no mention of any issues in updating the content in the run up to launch. So when I went through the final edit of the book, checked and updated the contact details of all the mystery shop companies I was ready to upload the final file to the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing site. When I got there, this book was greyed out and I couldn't access it to update. I contacted the help desk and was told that for the 3 days before the release, the book was unavailable to edit - I'd missed the deadline by about an hour! Although I didn't know I'd missed a deadline because there wasn't enough information there to tell me.

I was gutted - the choice was to wait until after it was released and then change the book file -meaning that any pre-orders would be unable to access the updated file. Or to withdraw the pre-order title, republish as a ready to buy book and have my customers read the full experience. This meant that I would lose the ability to set books up to pre-order for a year. I went for the second option as I couldn't see the value in having someone pay for what wasn't a full book.

So, here we are, it's published and I've set up a twitter account @mysteryshopper74 to help with the exposure.

It's available on the Amazon Kindle store now, so take a look and see what you think.


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