Banned by Amazon KDP After 8 Years and 300 Books

After some back-and-forth emails with Amazon KDP Account Review, I have been informed that my account termination will not be reversed. (They won’t say why.)

Let this be a warning to all Amazon KDP publishers, your account is never safe. Not even if Amazon sends you multiple emails telling you that it’s fine to publish a book.

Your account can be terminated even if there are hundreds of other near identical books available on the store. Even if those books have been online for years.

As an independent publisher you have no rights. No protections. No recourse.

Amazon can, at any point, for almost any reason, destroy your career as self-published author.

They will also keep your outstanding royalties.

Here are mine.

I’m also out about $700 in advertising costs.

If you’ve been publishing on Kindle for a while, then you know how useless the support is. Especially when you ask questions. They seem to be competent at linking a Kindle book with its paperback version, but that’s the end of it.

Any question like, “What are the rules surrounding unofficial books?” will be met with various responses like: “We can’t help you with this,” or “It looks like your book is online and available for sale. Hope that helps!”

Spoiler alert: It does not.

The book I was banned for was an Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook.

Like this one.

Or these 235 other ones.

My book was no different from those. I even included a statement at the start that said: This book is unofficial and unauthorized. It is not authorized, approved, licensed, or endorsed by J.K. Rowling, her publishers, or Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (Just like the other cookbooks.)

Over the years I’ve had a few books that got blocked. A block means that Amazon has removed your book from sale, and you can no longer edit it.

When most KDP authors think of a blocked book, they think of illegal content. Like the really twisted erotica. Bestiality. Families. Crap like that. Or maybe plagiarism. Content theft.

My blocks were trademark related. But Amazon only cares about trademarks when they get trademark claims. And they only seem to take down the books published by independent publishers.

This is because the books I wrote are within the law. There are free-use provisions in the copyright code that allow you create things that reference other things. Or even parody. Parody and satire are protected. And if you were to write some Harry Potter satire, Amazon would let you publish it. But if they were to receive a trademark claim, they would block your book, and then possibly terminate your account.

In the last couple years, the ridiculous trademark claims by large companies began to escalate. Here’s one of my books that was blocked:

Doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong there, right?

Well for this one it was the subtitle: Fun Facts and Trivia about Unicorns, Fairies, Mermaids, Dolls, Disney Princesses, Butterflies, and Ballerinas.

Disney sent an email to Amazon claiming their trademark was violated.

It was not.

This entire process was likely automated. Trademark owners can hire services like this one to crawl the web and send complaints on their behalf. Which is bullshit because innocent people get caught in the crossfire.

Disney does not own facts about Disney. Here’s a fact I came up with: Disney lawyers are dicks. You can use this fact, even if I say you can’t, because nobody owns facts.

If you wrote a book about space facts, and said that Venus was hotter than Mercury, National Geographic couldn’t have your book taken down. But if you did the same thing with a product, the company might request Amazon take it down. I can request that Jeff Bezos jump off a bridge, but he doesn’t have to comply. Neither does Amazon when companies bombard them with fraudulent trademark claims.

Products that complement someone else’s product have been around forever. When you were a kid did your parents ever buy you an off-brand controller for your video game system? Or an off-brand accessory? Sure. Happens all the time.

If you walk through a mall there’s probably a kiosk selling phone cases that work with certain models of iPhone. It’ll even say it right on the box: “This case works with the following models: iPhone 8, iPhone 9, iPhone X.”

These are not trademark violations. This company is not trying to present themselves as Apple. Nor was I trying to represent myself as J.K. Rowling, Bloomsbury, or Warner Bros.

The non-fiction game is one of numbers. The more books you publish, the more money you make. At the height of the business, I had two employees helping me work on books. We were publishing 1-2 books a week. We had a great process down: Write, Edit, Graphics, Publish, Marketing. (Pen names were chosen at random.)

This was not a fly-by-night business. We weren’t tricking people into buying 3,000 page machine-generated romances novels. We weren’t selling public domain works. We wrote books for kids. Adults too, but mostly kids. Kids are great to write for because they don’t complain as much. They like stuff. Their parents leave nice reviews.

Our books were popular. Some were very popular. Here was our best month ever. December 2018.

Amazon was fine back then selling our unofficial fact books. They loved it. We both made lots of money. Some of the books had been selling for years, before suddenly becoming worthy of account termination.

The more books you publish, the more likely you are to accidently break a rule and get a book blocked. Over time you will accumulate blocks. Amazon likely has a strike system, and once you hit a certain number of blocks you’re done. This is probably what happened with me. But the system likely doesn’t account for high-volume publishers. If someone publishes 10 books and has 5 of them blocked (50%), they’re more likely intentionally breaking the rules than someone who has 200 books published, and 5 blocked (2.5%).

Let this post serve as a warning to all authors.

Amazon will not protect you. They will not go to bat for you. Even if you email them directly to find out if publishing a book is okay, they might still later ban you for it.

I specifically emailed Amazon to confirm whether it was fine to publish this book. After all, there were literally hundreds of other unofficial Harry Potter cookbooks on the store. I figured that, plus direct confirmation from Amazon, meant I was safe.

You’d probably feel pretty confident after receiving this email about your book.

RIP

Just so you understand how dangerous it is now to publish with Amazon KDP: You could write a book today, someone could register a trademark 3 years from now, a web-crawling robot could flag your book and send an automated email to Amazon, and then Amazon could take your book down. Then they might terminate your account and keep your royalties.

This is insanity.

There should be no account termination for this type of takedown. Amazon should just remove the book from sale. It should also update publishers on the rules. Asking Amazon anything is useless because they can later change their minds and ban you for it.

How are you supposed to do business with someone like that?

Instead of using Amazon to publish your non-fiction, it appears to be much safer to go the traditional route and get an agent/traditional publisher. They have access to lawyers that can defend you from fraudulent trademark claims. Amazon is also less likely to steal your royalties, since your publisher will sue them. You should also consider publishing your content on your own website, and attempt to monetize it with advertising. (Which is what I will be doing from now on.)

I cannot sue Amazon. The KDP publishing agreement allows them to walk all over me for any reason. To be honest, I’m surprised they haven’t showed up at my house with pillowcase full of rusty doorknobs to murder my houseplants.

Nobody talks about this, but: Content creators have less job protection than temporary foreign workers.

I know some of you are reading this thinking, “Wow this guy was leeching on other people’s IP, he deserved to get banned!” Well, the vast majority of my catalogue was not that. It was original content.

Like this:

A fun game book. Pretty popular.

Or this:

A vocabulary-building game for kids.

Or this type of stuff.

An early learning book. This was a fun book for parents to read to their kids. Facts, funny stuff, noises, and lots of color.

I wrote game books. Fact books. Things to do when it’s raining. Activities for retired seniors. Healthy, wholesome, and humorous content. Light-hearted, enjoyable products.

And now it’s all over because Amazon couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone and call me.

Oh well. Lesson learned. Don’t believe anything Amazon says. You’re not safe even if you have it writing.

Good luck out there.