John North
In early December 2024, I logged in to check on the ads we'd been running for some of our published books. Nothing seemed amiss until after I clicked the Login button.
That was when I was greeted with a screen that really raised my blood pressure.
Instead of the usual dashboard with all of the books we had published, I was tersely informed that my account had been deactivated because Amazon had "found it to be in violation of the 'Conditions of Use' at Amazon.com."
Over a year later, I still have no idea what this means. What did I do wrong? All Amazon could ever do was gesture vaguely in the direction of a treatise of a terms and conditions document.
All I knew for sure was that my account had been closed. It took me a moment to reckon with the scale of what had just happened.
My Amazon account was connected to a lot of things:
- All of the books we had ever published.
- All of the reviews and ratings we had gotten.
- The entire sales history of our books stretching back over a decade.
- The royalties for all our books.
- All of the ads we'd been running for those books.
- Any Kindle books I had paid for with the account.
- Any Audible books I had paid for with the account.
- My Amazon Prime membership, which includes access to the streaming service and any movies I had paid for.
- My Ring alarm for my house? (Luckily, Amazon hadn't forced me to login with my Amazon account, so I could still access my Ring alarm)
Had I just lost...all of that?
See, your Amazon retail account is a bit like a driver's license in that it authorises you to access many places. If you lose that... you lose everything.
The first thing I did was check the Amazon pages for some of the books we had published. I breathed a sigh of relief when I found that they were all still there. You could still purchase them.
I even searched for a book I knew I had been running ads for and found the ads on the search page.
It was really like nothing had happened. Nothing had changed from the perspective of the average visitor.
...and then I realised how bad the situation really was.
All of the books were still there! Anybody could purchase any of our books, and we wouldn't be able to collect any of the royalties, because those controls were all locked behind the Amazon account I couldn't get into.
Amazon was going to continue collecting royalties for our books, and while they would continue paying us our royalties, we couldn't login to change the deposit account or see the sales distribution of all our published books. This makes it impossible to figure out which of our authors are owed which royalties.
Amazon would also continue to run ads for our books every month until the budget was reached. Amazon would continue billing us for the ads, with no way to stop them. I'm sure you're unsurprised to learn that Amazon Ads is impossible to contact unless you login, which we were unable to do.
I couldn't continue reading any of the books I had bought either because they had also been taken away from me, but that was the least of my problems.
I went to Amazon's support page to attempt to contact them as I had done in the past about any issues I had with their platform...but I discovered it was impossible to access the page after access to my account had been revoked.
There was no phone number to call and their customer chat was closed to me. The only option I had to contact their support was that email address on the login page I had seen earlier. So, I sent an email to them.
It would be days before they responded to me (and the response was completely dismissive), but in the meantime I went looking.
As a very last resort, we considered sending a DMCA takedown notice to Amazon to get all our books removed, as we couldn't remove our books without being able to log in. I even drafted said letter, but we never ended up using it.
It's not just me!
I went through dozens of forum and Reddit threads and Facebook groups. I found plenty of authors to empathise with. They described the exact same thing happening to them: their accounts had been closed without warning, apparently by automated systems with no specific reason provided.
Some of these authors had been publishing books for years, and for many it was their primary source of income. I even saw someone who had launched a new book just a week earlier, only to be locked out.
I was honestly shocked how many people had similar experiences to mine. Unfortunately, few of them had any real solutions. They were just screaming into the void.
That's when I found the consulting company.
$2,500 to solve a problem Amazon created...
I found a consulting company that offered a service I was in desperate need of: reinstating your Amazon account.
If Amazon had closed your account and you wanted it back, they would help you navigate the appeal process. They'd make sure you draft the right letters to send to their support teams. Because they knew which escalation paths existed, they understood what Amazon's teams needed to see to get things moving.
Their fee was $2,500.
This consulting company's business was based around fixing an issue Amazon had created. And they weren't the only ones! There was an entire cottage industry based solely on helping authors and other unfortunate Amazon customers navigate their support maze for a chance at getting their accounts back.
I even had a call with them, really thinking through whether paying the money would be worth it. I came very close...but I didn't pay it.
Instead, I spent two months writing emails and escalating through every channel I could find. This didn't help, in the end. I still don't have access to any of my purchases and I wasn't able to stop the ads.
I have the screenshots.
What was this all about, anyway?
I did some detective work of my own, and I think I found out what caused the issue. I had two accounts on Amazon with the same credit card, and Amazon's automated systems probably didn't like that.
I eventually got an email informing me that one of my accounts was reinstated, but it unfortunately wasn't the one connected to my KDP account. However, I got another email several months later for the other Amazon account connected to my KDP account...but to this day, I still can't actually login.
So in the end, the robots got it wrong, but I had to do all the work to fix it. No one at Amazon wanted to help me.
But in the end, I did get access to KDP again!
After a lot of research, we found a way to merge our existing KDP account with another one, and I finally got our books, sales history, and access to our royalties back. I did get everything back in the end.
The biggest challenge is Amazon works in silos, so one department won't talk to another one. The KDP and Advertising departments could not get their heads around us not being able to login and had no way to talk to the department that could actually help us. That department is uncontactable except for an email address, but they take weeks to respond from there.
How is any serious author supposed to do business this way?
Amazon is hardly alone in this behaviour, by the way. This situation happens on a lot of platforms: you spend years building a following, but one day, they decide to ban you. Just like that, you're out of business.
That's a lot of control for one company to hold over you, isn't it?
The elephant in the room no one wants to think about...
Regaining access to our books was a big relief, but the problem hasn't gone away. This whole experience has made it abundantly clear something that has always been true.
As a publisher who distributes their books through Amazon, we don't that arm of the publishing business in any meaningful way. We were a tenant on Amazon's land. They're in charge, and they kick us out for any time, for any reason, and they don't even need to tell you why, let alone give you a grace period to collect your own stuff. Instead, if you have anything valuable in your metaphorical apartment building, Amazon will continue selling it "on your behalf".
That's not a criticism most people make, because Amazon does genuinely useful things for authors. It really does give them a lot of reach. KDP has given thousands of writers a publishing path that didn't exist before. I'm not dismissing any of that.
But there's a difference between using a platform and depending on it completely. And most authors (including us, for a long time) had become dependent on Amazon without noticing.
Every book in my catalogue. Every review. All of our royalties. All of it was sitting inside a system we didn't control, run by a company that had no loyalty to us.
And actually, there's plenty you have never had access to, like who your readers actually are and who clicks on your ads.
What I spent the next 18 months building after this confronting experience...
I started asking a different question.
What would it look like to build something that was actually mine? A place where my books existed on my terms, where readers could find them without the whole thing depending on whether an automated system decided I was still welcome? What if readers could be sure they still had access to their books regardless of what happened to us?
That question took 18 months to answer properly.
GetMyBook.Store is a bookstore built for authors rather than for the store. It has clean pages with no ads, no competing titles, and links to every retailer that carries the book and every format it is sold in. We also have a direct sales option, which means some readers end up in the author's list, not Amazon's database. SellMyBook.app sits behind it: royalties tracking, direct sales tools, email subscribers, everything needed to run a book as an actual business rather than a listing on someone else's platform.
It's live now! We have all our books on GetMyBook.store here: https://getmybook.store/bookstore/publisher/1/evolve-global-publishing
We're not saying you should avoid Amazon. Just don't rely on them.
Let me be completely clear: nobody serious would suggest you pull your books from KDP and pretend the largest bookstore in the world doesn't exist.
Amazon is still where most readers go. That's not changing any time soon. Our goal isn't to replace it.
Our goal is to stop treating Amazon as the only place readers can buy your book, because it isn't. Our goal is to give authors a place to manage at least one part of your business that you actually own; something that can't be closed without warning by an automated system at 2am on a Tuesday.
If you've been publishing for any length of time, you already know of the anxiety I'm describing. You're always dimly aware that your entire publishing operation runs on infrastructure you don't control and can't appeal to.
You don't have to absolve yourself of that anxiety completely, but it only takes one step to start.
Your book might already have a page on GetMyBook.Store. Claiming it is free and takes about 60 seconds.