Clicking the "Submit and Publish" Button

Once we have the HTML settled, and have uploaded a zip file of the HTML and the figures, we are pretty well done.

Another page to fill out to select the price.  My assumption is that, particularly in this case, we want to make it inexpensive to maximize it distribution, not to maximize income, so I set the price as low as possible to be in the Kindle Select marketing program -- $0.99.  Enable World-wide distribution. And submit it.

This moves the book from "In draft" to "In review" mode.  Apparently, there are actual people (?) who are looking at the book and determining if there are issues of some kind.

And there were.  But the time sequence of events is confusing.

Having submitted the book at about 8:00 PM, I took a break to work on other projects, but checked back late at night before going to bed.  When I refreshed the "Bookshelf" page that lists "all" my Kindle books -- which is just this one -- the status switched back to "Draft".  This seemed strange to me; there was nothing on the page to indicate an error.  Checking the pages which list "Book Details" and "Rights, Royalty and Pricing", I saw nothing out of place.  There was no e-mail message.

So I clicked "Submit and Publish" again.  Maybe there was some hiccup that meant it wasn't put in for review.  Clicking put it back "in review" status.

Then the next day, at 11:20 AM, I get an e-mail from Kindle Direct.  It says:

We're writing about the following book:

The Oak Island Enigma: A History and Inquiry into the Origin of the Money Pit by Leary, Thomas (AUTHOR) (ID:5821970)

During a review of your KDP submission, we found content in your book that is freely available on the web.  Before we can publish your book, you need to take one of the following actions within five days: ...

It appears that they (the Kindle Reviewers) went out to see if the content was exclusive to this Kindle, and decide it was not.  Exclusivity is required for the Kindle Select marketing program.

What did they find? 

There are two sites, that I know of, that are similar. 

• CRYPTOGRAPHIC SHAKESPEARE presents ideas of the author (Penn Leary) about how they contain the enciphered name of the real author, Francis Bacon.  It contains an HTML version of "Oak Island Enigma".
• There appears to be an eBook version available under Scribd.com.  Scribd.com is a subscription service that provides eBooks for $8.99 a month.  It was uploaded by "joavilher" in 2011, and can be read on the iPhone, iPad, and Android (according to the page that describes it).  I have tried to contact the "publisher" of this book (joavilher), but there is no clear way to do that on scribd.com, and there is no e-mail address on joavilher's profile page.

This is where it gets confusing.  Shortly after I got this e-mail, the book changed status again to "Live".



It appears that

1. The book went into review.
2. The reviewers questioned exclusivity, and put it back in draft.
3. But the e-mail describing this was batched and not generated for another 12 hours.
4. I saw it was in draft, and re-submitted it, which -- it turns out -- is the action that was called for in the (not yet issued) email to push ahead with publishing.
5. So, by the time I received the e-mail, it was already being processed for going live.

My response was to take it out of the Kindle Select program (which is what wants exclusivity), and the Kindle help web page say how to do this, but they made no sense. The web page says I have 3 days to un-enroll from Kindle Select by  "simply go to the book's "Enrollment Details" and uncheck "Keep this book enrolled in KDP Select" box".  But I can't find any "Enrollment Details" anywhere.

Which is probably because Kindle, itself, took me out of the Kindle Select program automatically, when they made the book "Live".

Now in theory, the web site that describes the status of the book says that it is available in the Amazon sites in the United States, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia and India. I assume this is just listing the English Language book; I doubt that it was automatically translated into Spanish, French, or Japanese.  (And it may still take time for the files to migrate there, since those links do not seem to work yet).

But in the U.S., the book is available as The Oak Island Enigma. (Kindle Edition), for $0.99.