Well, it happened again. I went to check out one of my books on Amazon, only to discover that the image of the paperback cover had been replaced by a picture of men’s’ workout pants. This has happened to me a lot in my years of selling books on Amazon. It’s always pants, for some reason. And no one can ever tell me why it’s pants.
Here’s the letter I wrote to the Amazon customer support team that runs the indie-pub arm.
I'm writing to report a serious issue with the image on the detail page of one of my books.
First, let's look at the correct image.
But when you look at the paperback detail page, you will see a glaring error...
[image below]
This has happened before with other books of mine. For some reason, the image is always pants or clothing of some kind.
For the record, I am not an author of pants. I am an author of books!
I have inspected the detail pages at Amazon's international stores, and they all show the same error with the paperback books.
Please tell me this can be corrected speedily. If you look at my record, you will see that this has happened before. Can anyone tell me why this happens? It is very frustrating, as you can imagine.
Thank you,
Joe D'Agnese
Author of Books (Not Pants)
Last time this happened, 16 days elapsed between my discovery of the issue and their correction of the problem. This time, it took less than a day. I clicked through to all the other Amazon international stores, and all looks okay. I wrote them again asking why this keeps happening. Still waiting for a response.
If you want to read about the previous issue in a pair of pants what I hope are funny posts, you can check them out here…
Why Amazon is Currently Making Me Insane
Amazon Pants Debacle Resolved!
Here are a couple of images of the pants error occurring in the past, on other books of mine. Not sure which pants I prefer. They look equally hideous. Not nearly as enticing as a paperback mystery novel.
Here’s a screenshot from fall of 2019. Notice the “title” of the book, and the choice of “colors.”
Credit: All screenshots by me. Like it matters.