Almost a month ago I listed my DVD on Amazon… getting into a $39.95/month payment plan. Shortly thereafter I had to take the listing down because I hadn’t gotten my DVDs yet, and by policy I had to ship within 2 days of any order. Once I got the DVDs I immediately went back to Amazon and relisted the DVD… but there was one little, er, MAJOR problem: If you look at LinkedIn book, my DVD would not show up.
Why?
Because I had to list my DVD in the DVD section, where it was buried amongst movies… and totally not related to books at all. Even though they are the same (a) subject and (b) author, you wouldnt’ find my DVD on my book page. And what I really wanted you to see was my DVD on ANY LinkedIn book page.
Alas, wasn’t going to happen.
I spent hours poking through the help pages, the advertising pages, listening to the advertising webinar, emailing support, and even trying to talk with them on the phone. It was very frustrating trying to get an answer. Amazon has a cool sellers forum, where I found some awesome information, so I listed my problem there. I learned about more options, but didn’t get the answer I wanted.
Finally, I decided to try calling again, and finally got on with someone who had a suggestion that wasn’t going to work (he said to put the DVD as a book, and in there you can say what the binding is (I think that’s the section), and he said to say it was a CD ROM or Diskette). The problem with this first suggestion is that I didn’t want Amazon to come back and say I was doing something deceitful… I certainly didn’t want my amazon account to get taken down!
The second solution sounded a lot better, and he reiterated three times that this was totally acceptable and would not get me in any hot water… he said to “package” my book with the DVD, and then I could put it in the books section. That is what I did. So here is what I came up with (the wording was almost 100% from the Amazon rep, as we were brainstorming it):
and here’s the image (which is the front cover of the CD sleeve… luckily it already had the book cover on it!):
You can click here to see the posting.
