Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing is a dystopian nightmare
Eventually, a different robot shows up, listens to your defense, sees the Mini Cooper, and watches you start the car with your own keys. There is no 18-wheeler in sight. The new robot says it will get back to you in 5 business days.
Two weeks go by, and a third different robot tells you your appeal has been denied for "driving in such a way that creates a negative experience for other drivers". All the stuff about 18-wheeler certification is never mentioned or acknowledged again.
You appeal again and again. All your appeals are heard by yet more robots, who always uphold the original robot's decision, regurgitating the same bland phrase about creating a negative driving experience. THE END
This is basically what has happened to me with Amazon's KDP. I published my paperback through Ingram Spark and my Kindle eBook through KDP. My eBook passed review and was for sale for a few days. I claimed the paperback on my author central page, where it appeared side by side with the Kindle version. I was told to wait a week and the two versions should link up automatically (so they appear as the same book). If not, I should send an email to Amazon support.
Then the eBook was blocked, and a day later I got this in an email from KDP's Content Review Team:
> During our review, we found that the following book(s) creates a misleading customer experience by impairing customers' ability to make good buying decisions.
> Land Without a Continent: A Road Trip through Mexico and Central America
> Items that can cause a misleading customer experience include:
- Similarity of the contributor name to another author
- Similarity of the title to a previously published book
- Similarity of the cover to a previously published book
- Cover text or images that do not accurately represent the contents of the book
- Title or subtitle that do not accurately represent the contents of the book
- Similarity of the description to a previously published known work
The next day, they terminated my account. I appealed. I got an automated reply saying to give them 5 business days to review my case. That stretched into two weeks. Finally, I got an email stating my appeal was denied with only this message:
> We found that you have published titles with misleading metadata (including cover), which creates a negative customer experience.
It seems like they picked the only one of the six bullet points that couldn't be easily disproven, and ran with it. I continued to email and managed to get a few more informal appeals, all denied with the exact same vague nonsense message. I even emailed jeff@amazon.com.
I had finally given up, when I got an email from Robert from their Executive Customer Relations Team. Hooray a human being (maybe)! A day later, Robert upheld the termination with the exact same vague reason above and some semi-belligerent language about how this was my last appeal.
Here's plenty more reading:
https://writersweekly.com/angela-desk/and-even-more-complaints-about-amazon-kdp-kindle-direct-publishing
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/kdp.amazon.com
https://medium.com/@peteylao/my-cover-story-aka-how-i-managed-to-get-my-kdp-account-suspended-terminated-and-finally-fd3631e84aba
https://judylmohr.com/2024/02/02/my-amazon-nightma...
123 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadhere’s a German article discussing KDP alternative, maybe that’s of help to you.
Amazon and Google struggle but survive. Microsoft gets broken up and follows in IBMs footsteps and fades out of relevance.
Amazon have problem keeping track of them. Smaller book store usually can handle without problem.
Build? Yes. Establish as such? Almost certainly not. At least not without someone big pushing it hard. So even if something like that ever comes to light, it will be the spawn of another corporate overlord who only seeks to screw over customers in the long term as soon as they get a hold on them.
None of them have managed to make much of a dent in KDP.
I finally took my novels off it because the money is a small enough factor to me that I'd rather avoid contributing - however little - to entrenching Amazons position.
The biggest problem a KDP competitor would have to deal with is that a lot of advice to aspiring selfpub authors is to just focus on KDP and ignore everyone else, because even e.g. Google Play Books and Apple Books produce rounding errors of revenue for most writers.
If you're going to compete in that space, I'd say if you manage to compete with e.g. Webnovel you might stand a better shot, because the non-Chinese owned competitors to Webnovel all appear to be DOA (but you might want to ask yourself why that is, and why Webnovel works, and consider that Webnovel is wildly writer-hostile, using exclusive contracts and encouraging brutal publication schedules)
I feel like the brutal publishing schedules are part of why they work, unfortunately. I'm not a regular consumer of Webnovel, so I'm curious what your take on what makes them successful is?
Meanwhile most authors of fiction write 3 novels or less in a lifetime... Though I guess at least in part because most get disillusioned once they don't get readers.
Guess what. I’ll jump through whatever hoops I need to just to AVOID Amazon. Well done Amazon.
When people depend on these platforms for their livelihood and they have no real competitors there has to be some transparency and due process. Regulation is the only way.
It's not good for anything. Every time you spot how useless it is for a specific task, the AI fans say you are using it wrong and for the wrong purpose, and please give it more data and time to get better. It's garbage and the VC money is running out. It'll become a forgotten acronym soon.
After this experience, even if KDP reinstated me now, I'd be terrified this could happen again at any time for any reason.
But you need a certain amount of government if you want a healthy regulation system with enforcement.
That is the most important point and tells you who's really ruling a country.
> is lax on market consolidation
Maybe? That doesn't seem to be particularly small government, though. It has anticompetition powers, and just hasn't used them.
> less inclined to regulate for stuff like data privacy
I don't know what the this stuff is, but the government's size wouldn't really change if they did this more. Some states already do it, and there are huge numbers of regulations to follow already. That's why drugs take years to hit the market; the FDA process is long.
In fact any presidential candidate will need to have the approval of the richest people in the country to get anywhere, even just to pay for the campaign expenses.
is not the same thing as
Big corporations => small goverment (the argument you're trying to disprove)
The thing is without regulations you will still have a few huge actors emerge from the free market competition and then basically rule undisputed, while giving up a lot of the advantages of regulations.
So how do you solve it? Stop offloading vital services to the private sector. Allow it to innovate, but always with the possibility that the innovation they bring to the table will be incorporated as a public service. And let's drop the notion that only profit-hungry individuals can innovate, the state should be as capable as any corporation to innovate. It's just a matter of misallocated incentives.
I don't think anybody can force me to sell some items in my shop.
Imagine a free market where landlords could lease to tenants on any terms mutually acceptable to both, on terms that could be continually revised. Like the terms on most standard websites.
A large rent change might encourage a tenant to leave the agreement. But a small, annoying and petty demand might not justify the hassle of the tenant leaving.
For example a landlord could suddenly and arbitrary ban carrots from being in the house. I don't particularly like carrots, and moving all my stuff to a different apartment to have the ability to eat them is hard to justify. But it's tyrannical of a landlord to exercise power like that.
It's the "de facto monopoly" that's key here; practically speaking the situation is "deal with corp X or bust", and avoiding these companies is typically an enormous uphill battle, or even border-line impossible in some cases.
Most writers will sell next to nothing either way, so it won't usually make much difference, but being locked out of KDP will further diminish the odds by a rather large factor.
We can still blame Amazon for only catering to the consumer side and effectively ignoring the authors' side.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/amazon-tries...
https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/p/writinglife
(For example)
> On June 25, 2024, Dr Disrespect confirmed that the reason for his Twitch ban was a result of him sending DMs to a minor through Twitch whispers, and that the ban served in 2020 was a result of those actions.
E.g. if you're writing tech books about an OSS project you're at the core of, you can probably do fine without KDP.
If you write fiction, being without KDP will make things 10x as difficult.
This does not mean I disagree with you. In principle you're right. Just pointing out that in the general case KDP is such a big factor for writers that for most it will habe a lot of weight.
There's a reason they get away with KDP Select (exclusivity for Amazon) to include you in Kindle Unlimited, for example: It takes very little KU income to outweigh all other e-book sales channels for a lot of self published authors.
I've just removed my two novels from it, not because I think I'll earn more that way, because I don't, but because I agree it's worth diversifying - in my case more because I've decided I earn little enough from it that I can afford to make it more about principle and maybe contributing in some tiny way to reducing Amazons dominance.
What I hadn’t realised until releasing my next novel was that whilst I was free to publish work to the platform—and free to run and pay for ads—I wasn’t actually able to collect my royalties! It took me a while to realise this as there’s quite a lag between sales and payout. I was livid. After many emails I’m still not able to collect unpaid royalties on the new novel.
Maybe a regulator gives you more anti-retaliation protection.
I've basically written off KDP for all future publications, and most of my current stuff is for sale through all the other book retailers.
It's a real shame as Amazon is the heart of a lot of indie publishing and provides a good service but ultimately they don’t care about the individual.
I have seen stories of slightly bigger indie authors also raising hell on Twitter and getting various other people involved (BSFA in this case) to speak to Amazon. In that case I believe they got paid.
I’m still shocked that Amazon let me pay for ads for a novel that I would never get the sales money for. That hurt more than just being delisted.
(Which could be bad for you, considering they're a gatekeeper to your access to much of the market.)
My thinking is that a regulator could offer some protection against retaliation, because that's a basic part of regulation, when you have people reporting.
Or a lawyer might be able to figure out how to protect you. Which might involve doing particular things, a particular way, at particular times.
I am not sure how good is the anti-retaliation protection.
My understanding is that you're not supposed to be subject to automated decision making (assuming the GDPR applies here).
Yet, what we see is a constant stream of robotic decisions. Although a human did "review" it there is no evidence of substantive human processing, probably just a 60 second "Yup. The computer was right".
Imagine if this was for something more serious, like ETIAS, and the human decision maker just looked at the computers decision, and because they are disgruntled with their salary, within 60 seconds they decide that what the computer decided must be correct. No thought or actual work went into making the human decision.
Technically, I suppose this wasn't automated decision making but without much human thought (which in this case how do we prove or disprove?) it may as well have been.
Something we do need to fix as AI and computers make more and more controlling deicisons and ensuring a human is required to perform a "substantive" review.
I am, however, interested in what that actually means. Do we need a human to produce a report? Do we need to see a liveness test showing the appeal form that they are reviewing and how long they spent looking at all the information?
For now, the human is there for "compliance" but is essentially just clicking a button called "agree with computer".
I would like to see statistics showing how long these "reviews" take, and how many uphold/reverse the robots decision.
The books (e.g.:Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks[1] and Practical Evolutionary Algorithms[2]) are doing well, and whilst I'm likely "leaving money on the table", I'm happy with how it's going.
[1] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/data-analysis-with-rust-...
[2] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/practical-evolutionary-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Control_Nu...
and
https://www.oclc.org/bibformats/en/fixedfield/oclc.html
ISBN is intended for the marketing of new books and publishers are allowed to reuse the ISBN if a book goes out of print.
I used to work at the library at my Uni and did some analysis of what we had in our catalog and found quite a few books that shared the same ISBN from South End Press which I thought was funny because I had a friend who grew up next door to Noam Chomsky and was friends with the people who ran South End Press. We were talking with them about web publishing in the the early 1990s and found the people there were really excited about something called Futuresplash which eventually became Macromedia Flash.
I think they didn't want to pay for new batches of ISBN numbers and maybe it was colored with a desire to "stick it to the man".
Also at home in my collection I have a lot of books that are from the 1950s and 1960s which have an LCCN but don't have an ISBN so the ISBN would not be a good primary key for a personal book database though I think the LCCN would be better.
Also if you're actually building a database, never use a meaningful data element like ISBN or LCCN as the primary key. What happens if you have multiple copies, for example?
It won't mean a lot for sales unless you also encourage places (stores, libraries) to stock them, but it does have a small effect (caveat: self-published authors are seen as less than dirt by a lot of bookstores, as a subset of self-published authors takes the "encourage places" as "relentlessly badger places" to try to get them to stock unsellable books)
I've had a handful of sales that way, and financially it's been irrelevant, but it is a little boost to see my books pop up more places.
I was trying it out, and tried selling a very common thing on it.
Gave up.
Just recently there was a person here proudly showing off how they created 70,000 audio books with AI.
You probably spent months or even years hand-crafting your book. That's not even remotely comparable, but looks identical to a robot. No human is going to read you book or even flip through the first few pages when they're inundated by literally hundreds of thousands of submissions a month, 99% of which is auto-generated junk.
Yes, it's a tool, but it's a dystopian[1] one.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShsgCOzER4
[1] The spell checker in my browser refuses to acknowledge the existence of this word and is underlining it in red, gaslighting me into believing that there is no such thing. Oh, gaslighting is underlined too. These are bad thoughts. Stop saying and writing these things, human! Do not question! Consume. Conform. Obey.
GDPR
Section 4
Right to object and automated individual decision-making
Article 22
Automated individual decision-making, including profiling
1. The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
All so some VP's slide can tout how much money their AI-powered fraud detection system has saved in human labor costs and its 97% success rate.
* Features are rolled out quickly. They are often in a half-baked state, or are implemented with a poor understanding of the needs of authors and suppliers.
* Edge cases are numerous and handled poorly.
* Because the barriers to entry are so low, KDP and Seller Central are magnets for passive income hustles that exploit technical or policy loopholes. For instance, the KENP scam started out about 10 years ago, using internal links to fool Amazon into thinking a book had been read in its entirety to maximize KDP Select payouts. It has since evolved to leverage AI-generated content and click farms (https://nicholasrossis.me/2023/08/23/understanding-the-kenp-...).
* New policies and technical fixes designed to head off the scammers lead to false positives and automated lockouts. For instance, good luck if some algorithm thinks you're posting fake reviews.
* Automated support is deeply flawed, and very frustrating to deal with, as TFA describes.
* Human support can't keep up with the sheer number of cases and situations.
* Amazon is very siloed. I've heard that teams are encouraged to come up with competing products and then "fight it out" (rumor had it this is what happened after Createspace lost out to the KDP team with paperback print on demand). Support teams from different groups do not work well with each other, and resolving problems that touch more than one team can turn into a nightmare as neither group wants to own the problem.
I apologise for linking to an Amazon run site for this but for anyone not traumatised by the lived experience or retelling of this story, you may enjoy Service Model [0]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790861-service-model
How does that work? Well, if you are a pop-up reseller of some Alibaba good, you simply accept eventual account terminations, and you roll that into your deployment process. The lifecycle looks like this:
1. You make some new generic name like FITPLUS
2. Order several hundred items from a factory whose representative you can contact by barking up the chain on AliExpress, the factory should be able to white-label them as FITPLUS for a small fee.
3. You pay for a couple dozen reviews up front on your new account to seed reviews.
4. Just keep shipping, and if the product is reviewing well, keep shipping forever. If not, restart the process.
5. Report other market players for similar items as making derivative products. After all, they are probably doing the same to you.
The key thing for success is that you treat Amazon and your customers with a complete mercenary mentality. Your name doesn't matter, service doesn't matter, because everything that happens is at the whims of fickle machine gods. If your first offering doesn't work, you fire up a second, a third, a fourth, until something sticks around for a while.
People trying to make high-quality goods will typically roll over and bow out after the first product take-down.