My War with Amazon KDP is Over

Summary

The author resolved a contentious issue with Amazon KDP regarding a copyright dispute over their novel "The Game Called Revolution," which led to the restoration of their KDP account and valuable insights into publishing strategies.

Abstract

The author recounts a challenging ordeal with Amazon KDP, which incorrectly flagged their novel "The Game Called Revolution" for copyright infringement. Despite the author's innocence, they faced a wall of unhelpful automated responses and vague policies from KDP. The problem stemmed from a mix-up with metadata on a second version of the book published through IngramSpark, which was mistakenly merged with another book by a similarly named author. After identifying the issue, the author removed the problematic version and complied with KDP's demands to restore their account. However, the paperback version of the book remained delisted, requiring further persistence to rectify. The experience has led the author to decide against exclusivity with Kindle Unlimited, advocating for a broader distribution strategy to avoid such vulnerabilities in the future.

Opinions

The author perceives Amazon KDP's handling of the situation as evasive and uncooperative, with employees providing robotic, boilerplate responses.
They believe that KDP's opaque rules are designed to avoid resolving actual issues, effectively using these rules as a shield.
The author deduced that the root of the problem was a metadata mismatch leading to the merging of their book with another author's work, highlighting systemic issues in Amazon's content management.
After much effort, the author had to capitulate to KDP's demands to resolve the issue, which they found unsatisfactory but necessary.
The author advises others to avoid exclusive agreements with Kindle Unlimited to prevent similar situations where a single platform can exert excessive control over one's work.

My War with Amazon KDP is Over

But the scars remain.

Not long ago, I detailed my battle with Amazon KDP over their incredibly vague assertion I had violated someone’s copyright in my novel The Game Called Revolution. I didn’t, of course, and I fought them on it. I went back and forth with seemingly robotic employees who didn’t even try to work with me and kept recycling boilerplate emails. Basically, they were hiding behind their cryptic rules to avoid having to actually deal with the situation.

Eventually, I deduced what I believed the problem was. I had published a second version of TGCR on IngramSpark but it didn’t have the same metadata, so when IS put it on Amazon, the two versions didn’t merge. Further complicating things was the fact either Amazon or IS merged it with an unrelated book with a similar author name.

Photo by author.

As you can see, KDP thought the two books were the same (note the URL which says it’s TGCR, but the other parts of the page say it’s Loki’s Game). I figured this must be the problem, although I couldn’t be certain because KDP flat-out refused to tell me anything.

Bottom line, I needed to get rid of the second Frankenstein version. So, I contacted IS and had them remove it. I then capitulated to KDP and agreed to remove all offending content.

I am happy to report that my KDP account was restored following this — mostly. For some reason, the paperback version of TGCR was still delisted. That meant I couldn’t order author copies to sell at events. It took weeks of badgering KDP to finally get it reinstated.

Thus, it’s finally over. It sucked but it taught me a valuable lesson. It’s too risky making your eBooks exclusive to Kindle Unlimited because KDP can hold them hostage and you can’t stop them. With that in mind, I’m continuing my plan to go fully wide, and all of my books will be off KU in late June.

I hope everyone can learn from my experience. Thank you.