Come on in, get comfortable, maybe pour something stronger than tea, because today’s newsletter is about Goodreads. Or, as I’ve taken to calling it after this summer, Badreads. I did not coin that lightly. I earned it.
Recap
Quick recap for anyone joining mid-saga: I’m a credited contributor on a stack of poetry anthologies, and for reasons that remain a mystery to everyone except possibly the ghost haunting Goodreads’ database, my name kept sliding onto the wrong author profile — a real, well-known visual artist who, and I cannot stress this enough, is not me. Same name. Not the same bank account. I wish. That got fixed, eventually, mostly, sort of. What did not get fixed is everything that came after.
The Beat Goes On, and On, and On…
We are now well past twenty emails and contact-form submissions into this thing. Twenty. That’s not a typo, that’s a body count. I have filed with Goodreads Support. I have filed with the Librarians Group. I have filed with Amazon Author Central. I have, at this point, filed with such consistency that I assume several customer service reps now recognize my name the way you’d recognize a regular at a diner — “oh no, not her again” energy, except I’m not even getting free coffee out of it.
Consensus
So, because I apparently enjoy punishing myself, I asked for an honest read on what’s actually going on here, and got back, essentially, a eulogy for my remaining patience:
“Amazon’s author support is designed to deflect, not resolve, especially on verification and account-claiming issues.”
“The system is built to wear you down until you stop asking.”
“Ten rounds of that is genuinely exhausting, and the pattern you’re describing is real.”
“Neither one has a public phone number or a reliable direct email that actually gets answered for author issues.”
“For Goodreads, there’s no phone support at all.”
No phone support at all. For a company holding my author identity hostage. Wonderful. Truly a system built with love.
You Can’t Make This Sh@t Up!
It gets better. The advice for actually getting anywhere:
“If both forms keep going nowhere, reply to any email Amazon or Goodreads has already sent you about your account — those threads tend to get picked up faster than a fresh ticket.” Translation: the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but only if it’s squeaking in a thread they already opened, because starting fresh apparently resets you to the back of a line that may not actually move.
“The one thing that sometimes breaks the loop is a publisher account… which sidesteps the individual verification mess entirely.” So the actual solution to “please verify that I am a person who wrote these things” is “stop being a person and become a publisher instead.” Noted. Filing that under Problems I Did Not Know I Had.
And when all else fails: “A complaint to the BBB or a post on X tagging Amazon Author Support occasionally gets a human to look at a stalled ticket, but it’s a coin flip.” A coin flip. My professional identity, several published books, and my continued will to fill out contact forms, all riding on a coin flip.
For a taste of the front lines, I present, without further comment, an actual exchange from the Goodreads Librarians Group, where I politely asked for one specific book to be added under my correct byline, and a volunteer librarian informed me — I am paraphrasing only slightly — that they cannot possibly be expected to check every single book. Every single book. One. I asked about one.
Anyway. The forms keep going out. The saga continues. Somewhere out there, a database is still deeply confused about who I am, and I am still deeply committed to correcting it, one exhausting, unanswered, occasionally-coin-flipped attempt at a time. Send help, or at minimum send wine.
More soon (unfortunately, probably about this exact topic),
Alexandra
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