Of course, iUniverse is not the only company where a Web site can act as an obstacle to communication. It is notoriously difficult to get through to a human being at Amazon. The product description for my new book contains a quote repeated three times, twice with a typo and once correctly. But I have given up appealing to them to change it.

IUniverse's response to a telephone inquiry was courteous and helpful. A company representative said they had been redesigning the Web site and database and everything should be back to normal by Aug. 25. On Aug. 26 there was still no sign of the official June sales figures and the sales activity detail, less clear than it had been previously, was now stuck on March.

"We weren't entirely sure why these things weren't being updated," the helpful author support representative told me. "In retrospect, I think IT problems was an umbrella term. The IT department was overworked and the priority was getting the new Web site and database developed," he said. "I haven't had any reports specifically of IT problems at iUniverse."

I asked the iUniverse public relations department for comment on the IT difficulties, but they didn't get back to me before the deadline for this column.

Meanwhile, I have had a trickle of e-mails from iUniverse authors who feel that there has been a decline in quality and customer service since iUniverse's acquisition by Author Solutions (AuthorHouse's parent company). Victoria Strauss, author of the informative Writer Beware blog, told me in an e-mail. Strauss said she didn't expect the iUniverse brand name to survive, since there wasn't much point in having two competing self-publishing services under the same roof.

"In quality, service and price, I feel it was AuthorHouse's superior, but when things are combined they have a tendency to sink to the lowest available level," she said. IUniverse's Web site problems seem to offer a number of very simple lessons: don't roll out a new Web site until it is ready, don't make promises you can't deliver, and when it comes to communications there is no real substitute for (accessible) intelligent human beings.

(Philip Willan's Web site can be found at this link.)