Amazon— May They Choke on My Vomit

So here I am running a sale on my Metropolitan ebook, as detailed a couple posts ago. And then comes a notice from Amazon Quality Control saying that they blocked my book from sale!

Now what horrible quality control issue was so urgent that they had to completely block my book from sale during the middle of a major promotion? Here it is:

“The HTML Table of Contents is present in the middle/back of the content. Please provide the Table of Contents at the beginning of the book as per the Section 3.3.6 in Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines”

WTF?? I put the TOC at the end so that people wouldn’t have to wade through chapter headings when they wanted to start the story, particularly if they had clicked for their sample 10% and only got a small percentage of the text anyway.

This doesn’t affect the reading in any way. When you click “Table of Contents” on your Kindle reader, the same Table of Contents shows up no matter where it is in the file.

This is a NORMAL way to organize an ebook. TENS OF THOUSANDS of Amazon’s ebooks are organized in just this way, including many from major publishers.

I’ve uploaded a new file with the TOC moved to the start, but Amazon is still blocking the book from being sold. It’s been blocked for over 24 hours now, during promotion THAT I PAID FOR.

Anyone who wants the book should go to Smashwords and download the Kindle-ready file there.

UPDATE: Amazon has restored my buy button.