Thursday, November 17, 2022

Amazon/KDP Has Reinstated My Account

I conjecture that the case finally reached a human being, whether due to my efforts, someone else's efforts, or random chance. The response is still a form letter, given the reference to other titles that do not comply with the KDP content guidelines. The previous messages never claimed that any of my titles did not comply with their guidelines. 

They have not told me whether they are paying me the royalties accumulated between the last payment and the termination of the account, which their previous messages said would not be paid — my guess is not.

I am mostly through the process of putting Legal Systems Very Different from Ours up on Barnes and Noble and plan to complete it and see if I can, as I think is the case, publish with B&N and have the book on Amazon as well. I expect I will put the rest of my books back up with KDP.

My kindles appear to be back up on Amazon. It looks as though I have to republish the paperbacks but the information is still there, so it's just a matter of clicking through the pages. I am doing it for Machinery, will see if that works.

4 comments:

Anteros said...

I would guess that random chance was the least likely reason your case reached a real human being. If that's the case, then either your own efforts or someone else's efforts (provoked by your own) was the reason. Therefore your efforts have been suitably rewarded - congratulations and well done!

Patrick said...

David, I commented on an earlier post and mentioned bringing this to my wife, who is a lawyer at Amazon. She escalated the issue on your behalf, and that was what resulted in the reinstatement of your account. So Anteros was correct that your case didn't randomly reach a real human being. Rather, it was because your efforts: in this case, it was because you let your readers here know about the issue.

I'm not privy to all of the internal details of what happened, but with regard to the statement "you must review your catalog...," I think you are correct to interpret this as generic language intended to address a common reason that accounts would be suspended and not a suggestion that they think that you were actually doing anything wrong.

David Friedman said...

Patrick:
Thank your wife for me.

Jonathan said...

Today Amazon suggests to me by e-mail that I might like to buy The Machinery of Freedom, based on my previous purchases. Of course I already have it: more than one paper copy, and also the Kindle version. When I follow the link to the page where I could buy it, Amazon cheerfully tells me that I already have it.

Perhaps the e-mail suggestion assumed that I might want to buy in bulk, to decorate the house, and to leave copies lying around in public places.