The online publisher iUniverse has been battling IT problems of late. The difficulties may stem from its takeover last September by rival self-publisher AuthorHouse, the transfer of its operations from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Bloomington, Indiana, in April, and the relaunch of its Web site in mid-August.
But they are embarrassing for a print-on-demand publisher that acquires new customers, sells its books and reports its sale figures through its Web site. At this point, I should confess to a conflict of interest: I know about the problems because I have a back-in-print book published by iUniverse. This column could promote a few extra sales and put pressure on iUniverse to fix the glitches. But I can live with both those outcomes. And we’re accustomed to conflicts of interest in Italy, where the prime minister is the country’s richest man and owner of its biggest communications company.
My book “Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy” was first published by London publisher Constable in 1991. The book flopped in the U.K., sold well in Italy — where some publishers are less than scrupulous about royalty payments — and had never been published in the U.S. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, I assumed that the subject would be of renewed interest and paid to have the book republished by iUniverse in October 2002.
The experience has been fairly gratifying so far. The book seems to sell around half a dozen copies a month and I enjoy watching its progress: first on Amazon.com, where a leap of hundreds of thousands of places in the bestseller chart can correspond to sales of … around half a dozen copies, and then on the iUniverse Web site.
I particularly enjoy iUniverse’s “sales activity detail” feature, an irregularly updated account of unofficial sales figures. Unlike the official sales figures, which follow a set calendar, one doesn’t know when the sales activity detail will be updated, so feels justified in logging on frequently to take a look. It’s like buying a lottery ticket every time: you know you are unlikely to win big, but don’t stop hoping.
So it was with some disappointment that I noticed recently that the sales activity detail was not being updated. It had been stuck for three months on the figure for April. Official sales figures did come through in May, but the deadline for reporting June sales came and went in August.
An e-mail inquiry submitted through the iUniverse Web site initially failed to elicit a response. In reply to a second query I was informed: “iUniverse’s sales activity and royalty information is down right now. Our IT team is working rigorously to get this problem fixed.” When I replied with a follow-up question, my e-mail bounced back. The author support representative used a no-reply e-mail address, so couldn’t be troubled by e-mail dialogue.
Of course, iUniverse is not the only company where a Web site can act as an obstacle to communication. It is notoriously difficult to get through to a human being at Amazon. The product description for my new book contains a quote repeated three times, twice with a typo and once correctly. But I have given up appealing to them to change it.
IUniverse’s response to a telephone inquiry was courteous and helpful. A company representative said they had been redesigning the Web site and database and everything should be back to normal by Aug. 25. On Aug. 26 there was still no sign of the official June sales figures and the sales activity detail, less clear than it had been previously, was now stuck on March.
“We weren’t entirely sure why these things weren’t being updated,” the helpful author support representative told me. “In retrospect, I think IT problems was an umbrella term. The IT department was overworked and the priority was getting the new Web site and database developed,” he said. “I haven’t had any reports specifically of IT problems at iUniverse.”
I asked the iUniverse public relations department for comment on the IT difficulties, but they didn’t get back to me before the deadline for this column.
Meanwhile, I have had a trickle of e-mails from iUniverse authors who feel that there has been a decline in quality and customer service since iUniverse’s acquisition by Author Solutions (AuthorHouse’s parent company). Victoria Strauss, author of the informative Writer Beware blog, told me in an e-mail. Strauss said she didn’t expect the iUniverse brand name to survive, since there wasn’t much point in having two competing self-publishing services under the same roof.
“In quality, service and price, I feel it was AuthorHouse’s superior, but when things are combined they have a tendency to sink to the lowest available level,” she said. IUniverse’s Web site problems seem to offer a number of very simple lessons: don’t roll out a new Web site until it is ready, don’t make promises you can’t deliver, and when it comes to communications there is no real substitute for (accessible) intelligent human beings.
(Philip Willan’s Web site can be found at this link.)
