Amazon publishing experiences

a foray into print publishing.

There’s a bug in the documentation for Amazon’s cover calculator. For a nominally 6x9 book, with .125" bleed and .125" margin in each dimension, figure 9.25" height and 12.25" plus spine for width. For the spine, there's a "spine margin" of .031 inches on each side of the spine proper, called the "spine safe area", so the minimum spine is theoretically 0.062"; but in reality, the calculator shows a spine width of 0.54 inches for the minimal 24 page book, for a total width of 12.304". The number of pages determines the spine safe area, but it's not linear; 24 and 50 pages both show as 0, for example, but the total width is different.

But if you look at the above table, linked from my sourcebook repository, you will see that, by dividing the “spine shown” by the number of pages, you get 0.00025 inches per page.

Thus, in fact, the calculation is linear, and the spine margin is a myth.

Also, I have been contacted by their content review people, multiple times over the past few days. I just sent them this:

I am being challenged by Amazon to prove publishing rights for two of the books I created from my own source code: "sourcebook" and "xacpi". They assigned me two different author IDs, for reasons I cannot fathom. They also put their complaint into two separate case numbers, #40133484 and #40136846, which need to be consolidated, as I'm getting conflicting messages on both, from different individuals.

Author IDs mentioned in emails from Amazon's content review "police":

• sourcebook by John Comeau (AUTHOR) (ID: PRI-6VT90JDWHG5)

• xacpi: battery indicator for fluxbox and similar minimalist Xwindow managers by John Comeau (AUTHOR) (ID: PRI-2YJENAT7GTH)

These are both mine. The same John Comeau. They should have the same author ID.

And in a later email: xacpi: battery indicator for fluxbox and similar minimalist Xwindow managers by Comeau, John (AUTHOR) (ID: 60740423)

Although it seems that may be the ID of the book, as from another email:

Thanks for your message regarding the following book(s): 60740423

xacpi: battery indicator for fluxbox and similar minimalist Xwindow managers

Comeau, John (AUTHOR)

When I Google "John Comeau author", I get

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001KD3E5O as one of the results. This one is not mine, but the ID in the URL doesn't match any of the other IDs, so I guess this is a 3rd one. Or maybe not, since it's a different format.

Googling B001KD3E5O gets me the other John Comeau. Googling any of the other IDs gets me nothing.

Googling "comeau xacpi" gets only seemingly random results, certainly no books of that name, either mine or others'. Googling "xacpi" alone shows a program by Francois Fleuret, but completely different from mine.

My publishing history, in part at least:

• 1973: A poem in a local newspaper. https://jcomeau.com/awards/?1973-07-19-01

• 1988:

  Cover article in Portable 100 magazine: https://jc.unternet.net/awards/?1988-04-01-01

  Article on working as a handyman in NYC in Kessler Exchange: https://jcomeau.com/awards/?1988-05-27-01

• 1992: Another Portable 100 article, https://jcomeau.com/awards/?1992-05-01-01

• 2003: http://jcomeau.blogspot.com/

• 2004 to present: http://jc.unternet.net/blog/?2004-01

• 2018: changes submitted to Bochs project, https://github.com/ipxe/bochs/blob/master/CHANGES#L1692

  [1641816] partial support for non-DMA access to floppy by John Comeau

  [1624032] shows where write outside of memory occurred by John Comeau

  [1607793] allow fullscreen when app requests it by John Comeau

• 2021 to present: https://github.com/jcomeauictx?tab=repositories

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