Alternating Reality Books

Sorry for folks who are looking for our Amazon store over the last couple of days, we have had some great customer inquiries, and I want to take time out to thank you. I understand that this leaves a huge hole in Amazon for independent comic books, and we offer our apologies. There are over 5000 independent comics that are currently no longer available on Amazon, and we do apologize for the hole we are leaving.

We were suspended in Amazon for breaking a policy; we are in the process of appealing that rule. But we broke the rule, Alternating Realty was bundling comic books against Amazon specific policy of one author one title one ISBN. We are not looking for sympathy or thinking that we did nothing wrong, obviously to be suspended from Amazon we did something wrong. While it looked like a good idea at the time, obviously we are dead in the water right now as an Amazon seller. We hope that our appeal goes though. But here is the story to date.

Last Friday we got notice that we had violated the policy of bundling story lines in comic books. We immediately started removing all bundled listings and thought we had gotten them all. Throughout the week we continued to find things that had slipped through the cracks. On Friday night, the 11th of September 2009, Amazon found 2 more that we missed and promptly suspended the account. We believe that we made best effort to remove them all, and with an error rate of around 2% for finding books that we had improperly listed was not enough, we had to find them all. Unfortunately, with an inventory of over 10,000 comics on Amazon, we missed two of them. We had over 100 bundles listed, many of those bundles made by other sellers. Hence the 2% error rate number reported above. If you are a comic book seller, stay away from comic book bundles like the Black Death, Amazon is on a roll right now purging sellers in advance of the Christmas season.

We are not the only Amazon sellers purged, and like many of the other sellers we are scrambling to come back up to operations and hoping that appeals work. But we thought we would let our customers know that we are busy with Amazon right now trying to be reinstated and moving operations over to Ebay as well. Our problem is that we really relied on a single source of sales, and that from a business viewpoint was a mistake. We would like to thank everyone for their kind words and show of support. We do hope to be back on Amazon in the next month and back to normal operations. This also shows that people really need to pay attention to policies on Amazon, regardless of what other sellers are doing. Eventually everything catches up to folks, and while we have been selling on Amazon for two years, we really hope to continue our relationship with them because we are a well established seller there. Starting out somewhere else is literally that, you start off from scratch.