Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Thomas Nelson Isn't Listening

Inside burning buildings, Captain Caleb Holt lives by the firefighter's adage: Never leave yoru partner. Yet at home, in the cooling embers of his marriage, he lives by his own rules. Growing up, his wife Catherine always dreamed of marrying ... [emphesis added]

What’s wrong with the statement above? I copied this statement from Thomas Nelson’s website. Now my thought was that a publisher employees enough editors that they ought to be able to spell the word your correctly on their website, but people make mistakes. That isn’t the problem. I figured that since Thomas Nelson is trying to make a good impression about their products they would want to correct the obvious mistakes in the description. They wouldn’t want people thinking the book has the same mistakes in it. Since I noticed the mistake I thought I would contact the webmaster and tell this person about it. It would then be up to Thomas Nelson to decide if they really care enough to correct the description. I looked down at the bottom of the page, but I didn’t find a link to the webmaster. I looked several places for contact information and didn’t find anything that directed me to someone I thought would be responsible for correcting the problem.


The fact is that I could send an e-mail to Michael Hyatt and let him delegate this problem to one of his subordinates, but it is just a typing error and I’m sure he is busy doing other things more important than correcting book descriptions. That brings me to my point. Visitors to a website need to be able to contact the people responsible for the information it contains. Nothing will irritate a user more than the inability to provide feedback. Most people can ignore a few mistakes. Most people don’t mind if you disagree with them. The thing people hate more than anything else is if you don’t listen. By making it difficult for the user to contact the person responsible for the website, Thomas Nelson isn’t listening and that makes the difference between yoru and your a major problem.