So, the Google Play Books saga goes on. They really don’t make it easy, do they? In the early/late evening on Saturday, all three books I’d submitted to Play Books, showed up with “Buy” links. I assume that all that had happened was the links were turned on in different territories at different times. I’ll bet the US went first, and here in GB we were further down the list.
Now, initially I only activated the “English Speaking” territories, The US, Canada, UK and Australia. But, feeling confident that the process was working (albeit not very well), I activated all the territories for all three books.
And on Sunday, still feeling confident about the process, I decided to bring Play in to line with Kindle and Smashwords and get all the books on there. And, surprisingly perhaps, Google makes it quite easy to add multiple books. Instead of doing it individually, you can do it via a spreadsheet. I did that, and voilà, all books showed up in the preview programme awaiting the book file delivery.
After uploading the book files (a pain in the arse as you have to abide by Google’s naming conventions for the files), it took just a five minutes before all were showing as ‘processing’.
Then came the problem. Late on Sunday, a quick search of the Play Book Store showed up none of my books. All three that were already there – had vanished. Strange. The links that I’d recorded on Saturday to the books individual pages still worked, but the option to buy the books had vanished again and clicking on my author name led to a page devoid of any books.
This morning, about half of the books I added on Sunday were showing as ‘live’ in the Preview Program, but none of them were yet in the Play Store. This evening the situation hasn’t changed – still no book available to purchase in the Play Store and about half of the uploads from Sunday are live in the Preview Program.
So, all in all. A bit of a cock up. Google, you must do better.
On a separate note, Sophie’s Tutor has yet to be approved by Amazon for the Kindle Store. That’s eight days, about the longest I can recall it ever taking for a book to be approved. I wonder what’s going on there.
