This is somewhere between pitiful and hilarious, so I'm pushing for hilarious. In the process of signing up to get Dungeons & Dayjobs an ISBN number with the print-on-demand service Lulu.com, they also give you one year of selling it on Amazon. It's not actually Amazon taking any interest in your book. It's Lulu agreeing to list it via "Amazon marketplace", an auction like any shmuck can do, just so it will show up when people look for it on Amazon.
Amazon later started author blogs on their site so legit authors could drum up interest in the related Amazon pages. I started a blog there, feeling all special, and posted a few stories to it. I never had any actual in-store appearances or readings or book-signings to report, so instead I wrote stories about appearing at a vampire's bookstore in Livonia, and battling with my marketing witch. But now that my one year has expired, Lulu is not selling the book as an Amazon marketplace seller, so Amazon took the book page down. Even though you find a dozen book pages saying "This book is not available" every time you search, those are apparently reserved for legit books, not for self-publishing scum. You can't find me by name or by searching for the book title on Amazon now, but my phantom author blog is still available if you get there by direct link. I'm going to see how much trash talk I can get away with there before they delete it. If a book falls down the memory hole of a megalithic commercial website and there's no one around to hear it, is there any point in hosting the author's blog?
The best part is at the top of the page, where it used to give the name of my book, it now reads:
Robert T. Northrup's Amazon Blog
Author of .
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