YouTube video (Julie Broad, June 25, 2024) outlining three growing problems authors face when using Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP): (1) Amazon increasingly requests proof of publishing rights and may suspend accounts pending documentation, (2) significant processing delays and technical glitches are causing long waits for books to go live, and (3) account suspensions or terminations can occur (sometimes without clear justification) and can withhold royalties. The video gives practical advice: file copyright early, allow extra lead time before launch, consider widening distribution (IngramSpark, direct sales, audiobooks via aggregators), and, if needed, hire legal help to resolve terminations.
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Selling your book on Amazon has never been easier. As an author and I am grateful for all Amazon has done for indie authors. But in working with more than 500 authors over the last seven years, I can tell you there has never been a more difficult time to deal with Amazon KDP than we are experiencing right now. If you're wondering what is up with KDP or you're about to upload a book to Amazon KDP and you want to know what to watch out for, well, well, this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing company helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that is set up to sell. While publishing a book on Amazon has not been without its challenges and issues, we've seen more issues this year than ever before. Let's run through the three key ones we're seeing and what you can do about it. Number one Publishing rights. Amazon has started asking some authors to prove they have the rights to their own work. This can be tricky for self published authors and can be upsetting, especially if Amazon suspends your account until you can provide the proof it asks for. This issue is a great reason to file for copyright as soon as your book is complete, rather than waiting until after launch so that you have the documentation to submit if you do get caught up in this one. This actually happened to me last year, so it's not a brand new issue, we're just seeing it more and more. They flagged Self, Promote and Succeed. We sent in the copyright letter I had received when we submitted it and all was well. As always, having the right documentation and giving them a prompt reply when they flag something is always important. A delayed response can trigger an account suspension, so make sure you're monitoring the email that you submitted your book through. Two delays, delays, delays. Things that used to take 48 hours are taking so much longer now. We've been seeing this for the last few months. Many authors have been caught in what KDP support calls a technical glitch that led to tons of books getting caught in processing purgatory for weeks at a time with nothing the author can do except wait. This is extremely frustrating, especially for us, because authors are looking to us for guidance and we have set timelines based on years of experience, not on months of glitches. So we will tell you that what we are telling our authors now is to give yourself weeks more time than you think you need. If you're an author that thinks you're going to load to launch as in skip any sort of presale, I would not start promoting that launch date until your book is live because of this. Number three, suspensions and terminations. Amazon maintains the right to suspend or terminate your KDP account at any time and withhold any outstanding royalties you might be owed at that time. This has always been the case. Sometimes these account issues stem from very legitimate causes. Like if you try to publish a book that isn't yours, or you violate KDP's terms and conditions by maintaining multiple active KDP accounts or starting a new account after your old one was terminated. All of those reasons are things you should not do. And it's totally legitimate that Amazon would suspend or terminate your account. But this year, and while it's happened to authors in the past years as well, this is the first year we've run into it multiple times. And in this situation, there doesn't seem to be any justifiable reason why it's happening. And it's super scary. And we're seeing this in the forums and the chats that we're a part of. And one of them said, oh, well, my father's friend had is high up in kdp. And that's how I got it resolved. A friend of mine has a built. Has built a relationship with someone in KDP that helps him out of his own snags. But for most of us normal folks, we're stuck resolving issues with tickets, check chat boxes, and a lot of hoping and praying and just trying to get a human that will help us. And if the account is terminated and all other methods of resolution fail, hiring a lawyer to step in and resolve it for you is the answer. One of the legal firms that's come recommended and you can hire will charge at least $2,500 for the resolution of your issue. It's well worth it for many authors to get back in business on Amazon. But there's no compensation for the sales you lost while you were terminated or suspended, even if it was without a good reason. So what can you do? Well, you can boycott Amazon and KDP altogether. Many authors are doing that. If you're big enough, like David Goggins, you can sue Amazon. Although he's not suing for an account termination, he's suing because Amazon didn't do anything about the fraudulent books that were being sold, so they didn't shut down the accounts that weren't legitimate. Amazon still made money, so they didn't seem to be motivated to do anything about it, according to him. So here are legitimate authors getting their accounts terminated while others are stealing the work of other authors and selling it and successfully doing so anyways. My approach is to always remember the fact that self publishing, owning your own rights and making more money per book is now largely possible thanks to Amazon. And while they could do a lot more to help us authors out, they aren't the enemy. While waiting weeks and weeks and weeks it takes to sort out the issues that you might encounter with kdp, I would highly recommend you set yourself up to be wide While your KDP account could be terminated, IngramSpark can continue to sell your print book on Amazon and even potentially your ebook. You could also be selling direct to your reader, which is something we recommend strongly. Now I owe you all a video on setting up your direct sales for print books as I've updated how we do this, so subscribe to the channel and make sure you turn those notifications on if you want that. But there's also this video right here on selling your audiobooks wide with aggregators. And this one right here on selling books direct to your reader. How to and this one on what to do if your Amazon account is in fact suspended. So go ahead, choose one of these three fabulous videos. I'll see you there.
