Amazon listings for my Word 2007 and Word 2010 books

As some of you know, there have been problems with the Amazon listings for my Word 2007 and Word 2010 books since January 11, 2011.[1] The Word 2007 book suddenly appeared with the designation, “Currently unavailable,” and the “Add to Cart” button disappeared. As for the Word 2010 book, the listing vanished completely, and people who tried to find the book by using the URL / link that has existed since the book’s publication last May were taken to a dead page with a “404 – Not Found” error message.

These issues resulted from certain changes that Lulu, the publish-on-demand (POD) company that prints and distributes my books, made behind the scenes. Although it’s clear to me that Lulu acted with good intentions, the changes broke the links to many authors’ Amazon listings, including mine.

After authors complained, Lulu and Amazon responded by setting up completely new pages for the books. It’s not an ideal solution — for one thing, some of the new pages have not been updated to include the existing customer reviews, and relevant information about the books is missing and/or inaccurate — but at least it provides a way for people to buy the books from Amazon. (The books are available for purchase from Lulu, as well, although Lulu’s shipping charges tend to be higher than Amazon’s. Thankfully, the links to the Lulu pages remain intact, which means that people have an alternate purchasing option.)

I had hoped that Lulu and Amazon would restore the original Amazon listings, but that appears increasingly unlikely. However, I remain hopeful that they’ll get the new pages updated within the next few days. In particular, they need to transfer the customer reviews from the old pages to the new ones. Also, if they are not going to restore the old pages, they should minimize confusion by removing the old pages altogether.

To make it easy for you to locate the books on Amazon, I have created new links (“tiny URLs”), as follows:[2]

Formatting Legal Documents With Microsoft Word 2010:

You can click this link to go directly to the Word 2010 book’s new Amazon page, or enter the URL http://tinyurl.com/W2010Legal2 (note the “2” at the end).

As an alternate, you can use http://tinyurl.com/W2010Am (for “Amazon,” of course).

Formatting Legal Documents With Microsoft Office Word 2007:

You can click this link to go directly to the Word 2007 book’s new Amazon page, or enter the URL http://tinyurl.com/W2007Legal2 (note the “2” at the end).

As an alternate, you can use http://tinyurl.com/W2007Am (for “Amazon”).

Please don’t use the old links, even though the original Amazon page for the Word 2007 book hasn’t been taken down yet.

I’d be grateful if you would let your contacts know about the new links, in case they are interested in purchasing one (or both!) of my books. (Presumably the links will continue to work indefinitely. I’ll update the blog if the links change again.)

Many thanks for your patience, understanding, and support! I so appreciate your patronage.

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[1] Note that I have deleted all of my prior (recent) posts on this issue as a way of making the blog less repetitive and less cluttered.

[2] I have updated the links for the books here on the blog and also on my main (CompuSavvy) web site, but it could take a while for the new information to propagate.

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