Run the launch-week availability audit
Verify price and release date across retailers
Confirm on publication day that each format shows the intended list price and the correct publication date at every major retailer, and report anything that differs.
Why it matters
A wrong price confuses readers and can trigger price matching between retailers that the publisher did not intend. A wrong date can hold a book in preorder after it is actually out, or mark it published before stock exists. Both are correctable, but only when someone notices, and the author is the person most likely to look at every storefront on the day.
Your part
- What you do
- Verify. Someone else may do it. Inspect the result yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Publisher and Distributor. Publisher sets price and date; distributor transmits; author verifies
- When
- Publication day (Run the launch-week availability audit: publication day and the first week)
How to do it
The full walkthrough
Price and date are the two data points most likely to disagree between retailers. A retailer may show last season's placeholder price, a different currency conversion, or a discount that makes the ebook look mispriced. A date may be off because a retailer received an early feed with a provisional date and never updated it, or because a format was rescheduled and one channel missed the change.
On publication day, check the list price and any displayed discount for each format at each major retailer, and check the publication date shown on each listing. Compare against the Book Identity Sheet. Note the differences with links.
Traditionally published authors report differences to the publisher, which sets the list price and the date in its metadata and can see which feed a retailer received. Retailer discounts are the retailer's own and are not errors. Hybrid authors do the same through their publisher contact. Self-published authors check the price and date in each platform dashboard and, where a third-party retailer shows something different, contact the aggregator or the retailer.
For authors with international distribution, check the main foreign storefronts too, because a price set in one currency and converted can look odd and a date can shift by a day across time zones.
Common mistakes
- Reporting a retailer's own discount as a pricing error.
- Checking the price but not the date, or the reverse.
- Not knowing the intended list price, because it was never recorded.
- Assuming the ebook price shown in one country applies everywhere.
Identifiers for Verify price and release date across retailers
Set a status on any record and it joins this step. All book identifiers.
| My status | Identifier | Why this matters | Yours |
|---|---|---|---|
| ONIX for Books ONline Information eXchange: the standard file that carries your book's details from your publisher or platform out to retailers and libraries. | If your subtitle is wrong at one retailer, that is one mistake; if it is wrong at a retailer, in a library catalog, and on Google Books, that is usually not three mistakes but one, in the feed, copied three times. It also explains why correcting it in one store often does not stick, because the next feed writes the old value back over your correction. Nobody acts on the feed directly: traditionally and hybrid published authors normally find out who owns it, which is the publisher's metadata or operations team and sometimes a separate distributor, and send corrections there, while a self-published book's feed is generated by the platform from the fields you filled in on its dashboard. Find the person or team that owns the book's feed so a correction goes to the source that can keep it fixed. | Nothing to record |
What done looks like
- List price and publication date checked for each format at each major retailer on publication day.
- Comparison against the Book Identity Sheet, with discrepancies logged with links.
- Retailer discounts recognized as discounts, not reported as errors.
- Differences reported to the publisher or platform the same day.
- International storefronts checked where the book is distributed there.
Evidence. Done means someone says the work happened. Verified means you checked the confirmation, link, or public record yourself.
Ask your publisher
Copy this into an email. Replace the bracketed parts with your details.
Sources and last checked
- Official source
- No single official page for this step.
- Last checked
- Not checked against its source yet.
- How confident we are
- Verified