You may have heard of the “Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest”. As a way to promote their createspace service that allows a wide variety of self-publishing, from books to music to movies, Amazon had an open manuscript submission for the first 5000 novelists. All valid entries would be read (!) and judged by a panel. The winner is to have their novel published by Penguin.

Too bad I’m not an entrant.

It’s not that I didn’t try, you see. I submitted everything as I was supposed to on the forms that they had. I waited patiently to find out if I made the first cut. Then, after the contest had closed, I received notice: my entry was denied because it was an “excerpt”, or it didn’t start at the beginning.

Naturally, I was crushed. I don’t see how this could possibly have happened, and I was very careful to follow the instructions as I was supposed to. But here’s the catch to the whole thing – the notice that came allowed for no reply, and no appeal. I had no way of contacting the contest and telling them that a mistake was made. It was final.

On one of the Amazon chatboards, there are many people who entered the contest who had exactly the same problem. I used this to contact 4 of them, and all 5 of us entered our manuscripts between 10-14 October. There are dozens more I don’t know of, several others that were told they did not enter anything at all, and quite a few who never received notification of any kind.

The issue at hand is not merely a botched contest. This was nothing more than a PR move from the start, and we all know that. What is quite shocking is how badly this has been run from the start, relying on mechanical submission processes and the special forms that they created to operate everything in place of human beings. All of my attempts to use the normal mechanisms of createspace.com to contact them have been met with silence. I waited three days before writing this to give them a chance to say something, anything at all. Nothing. Not even a, “Sorry, there are no appeals”.

As PR moves go, this is just shocking. The anger that the effected entrants feel is beyond being treated in a way that they find unfair. This has been exacerbated by the complete lack of any kind of human contact of any kind. At the start, it was all about the technology, not the writing. In the end, it’s still about a mechanical system that is supposed to somehow spit out what Ammy calls a “Breakthrough Novel”.

Anyone who works in PR will tell you that when there is a situation the most important thing is to be on top of it. Even a message of “I don’t know” can be phrased in a way that gives the reader a feeling that someone is in charge and that their worth as a human being is being acknowledged. You don’t want to make things worse by invalidating people because they become your enemies. The goal is to get good press, not bad

This poorly run contest has generated a lot of heat long before it has even run its course. The bad will come out long before the good, and people who have been enraged by the mechanical nature of the process will get their say out on the internet long before the product is found. That’s a recipe for very bad PR.

Amazon is generally known in financial circles as a PR machine, carefully controlling its press releases and analyst recommendations for the maximum affect on the stock price. That they could have created such a tremendous liability out of a simple contest is just shocking. But they have.

Relying on technology so heavily in the first place was the initial mistake, but it’s one that could have easily been corrected by human monitoring – by someone being in charge. That they compounded this with a continued reliance on their “noreply” addresses and utter silence is incomprehensible. They have created dozen, possibly hundreds, of very angry people who will do their best to get back at them.

The real story here is the PR, which is all this was ever about. The art of public relations is all about people and how to ingratiate your operation with them. Amazon has very much done the opposite with a stubborn belief that technology is more important than people.