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Doggy Daddy's avatar

Steve,

I’m a big fan of your books, so I wanted to let you know about a problem I experienced when I tried to pre-order a Kindle edition of “A Hired Kill” on Amazon. I placed my pre-order on 14 May & expected the book to be delivered to my Kindle this morning, 27 May. By mid-morning however, I still had not received a downloaded copy.

The Amazon page for “A Hired Kill” did indeed show it to be available for immediate purchase/download but my Amazon digital order summary page showed “Status: Pending” and the book did not appear in my Amazon Digital Content listing.

I would have just canceled the order and repurchased the book, but the return window was inexplicably based on the date of my pre-order rather than the date I would receive the book and so had closed on 21 May. I understand Amazon return periods are normally based on the purchase date, but for this policy to be applied to pre-orders makes no sense to me as the return window is closed before the product is ever received. Not that I would have returned the book, but if the option had been available in this case it would have provided a quick and simple solution to whatever was delaying my download of your book.

Instead, my only recourse was to attempt to contact Amazon customer service for a resolution. I experienced multiple circular references while attempting to do this, but eventually wound up on the right page. After a rather lengthy chat, I was told I could either wait until sometime later in the day to receive my downloaded Kindle edition or I could cancel the pre-order and then purchase the book immediately.

I chose to cancel my order as I didn’t want to have to repeat this process again this afternoon if the book still didn’t appear. I asked repeatedly why a pre-order, supposedly intended to insure earliest possible access to the book, was instead penalized by having delivery delayed, but I never received an answer.

To be fair, once Amazon was made aware of the problem they promptly offered multiple options to make things right. However, I doubt if I will ever pre-order anything from Amazon again.

So, I’m still not sure what the problem was, but I wanted you to be aware of it in case I was not the only one who experienced this glitch. Keep up the great writing and I’ll keep adding your books to my library, just not by pre-ordering.

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Bruce Landay's avatar

Steven, congratulations on your new book coming out. The Kirkus review is great and it sounds like another exciting read.

Good luck with your gardening project. Hopefully the evil hungry rabbits will stay far away.

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