Aneeta and her writer-friends have published a collection of short stories called Snapshots. She lamented that the book couldn’t get on to Amazon for the following reasons.

I want to share this information with her and other writers who are interested to know how this can be done. This is what I found out from the publisher of Life’s Like That.

For a book to be listed in Amazon UK, one has to list the title at the Nielsen Bookdata. This company provides bibliographic information for books published in the UK and internationally. This is a quote from an insightful article by self-publisher Published and Be Damned :

The DVLA of the publishing world,” says Phil Edwards, Buying Manager of Gardner Books – the UK’s largest book wholesaler – talking about Neilsen Bookdata. It’s Neilsen that provides a key source of bibliographic data that is used by sites such as Amazon or that sales staff view in bookshops. The UK ISBN Agency is a part of Neilsen Bookdata.

 

To be listed in Amazon.com (USA) the publisher must be based in North America before they pick up the book. However, sometimes they pick up titles from lists such as the Nielsen Bookdata.

My book, Life’s Like That is available on Amazon.co.uk. Lee Su Kim’s Malaysian Flavours, is available at both the UK and US portals of Amazon. Yvonne Lee’s The Sky is Crazy is on at Amazon.com.

Lee Su Kim’s book (both our books are published by Malaysian publisher, Pelanduk Publication) must have been picked up for the Amazon.com site from its UK counterpart and/or Nielsen Bookdata. Yvonne’s book is published by Marshall Cavendish which has publishing centres all over the world including USA, so that took care of the North American base issue.

But having a book on Amazon is one thing. Getting people to buy the book from Amazon is another.