1st Customer refund!
In this blog I thought I'd capture all of the highs and lows of publishing my first novel via Kindle Direct Publishing and Createspace.
If nothing else, it'll be a useful memory jogger in future of the whole venture.
I was looking at my Kindle Direct Publisher reports today and spotted that 1 person requested a refund of my book.
I immediately worried that they were unhappy with the book (typical neurotic author response) but after a bit of looking around I quickly found that there could be several other explanations.
How do you return a digital book?
The first thing I learnt was that is it very straightforward to request a refund of a book that you buy on your Kindle on Amazon. You even get 7 days after your purchase to request your refund and you can request the refund directly from your device.Kindle return policy
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144510As my first novel "System error: in your favour" only ran to 150 or so pages it seemed possible that someone could easily read it and then ask for a return within that 7 day period.
However, after reading a few postings on this it seems that the most common reason for member returns is that when people view the book on the Amazon site it displays the price as "Free" and then in smaller letters "for Prime Members".
Many people zoom in on the Free label, click the buy button, and then find out that as they are not Prime Members they have to pay the normal listed price.
I can see why people might be confused by this, I've been using Amazon for a few years now and I'm still not entirely clued up about their Prime Member offering so lets give this one the benefit of the doubt.
I found a couple of other blogs raising concerns about unscrupulous people always refunding their e-books but I'm sure that Amazon would be able to zoom in pretty quickly on someone who requested a refund on every book and surely getting your Amazon account shut down would be a bigger hassle than the few dollars you got back on those titles.
What do you guys think? Is 7 days too long to give people to claim a refund on a digital book?
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