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So Amazon has blocked your book. Now what?
Recently, while trying to publish a book on KDP, Amazon blocked my book. I saw this message in the KDP dashboard.
I wasn’t even able to make edits to the book. After months of struggle, I was finally able to get my book un-blocked and published with no changes. Here’s what I did. (Spoiler: This is yet another case where my membership to the Alliance of Independent Authors paid off.)
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Why did Amazon block my book?
If Amazon blocks your book, the first thing you need to ask is, Why? Unfortunately, getting the answer isn’t straightforward. When I eventually talked to the Alliance of Independent Authors, they explained:
Amazon is fighting a very difficult battle with scammers, fraudsters, and plagiarists on the KDP platform, in which immediate and decisive action is often required by them and in which they use AI tools to assist. Unfortunately, sometimes self-publishing authors can get caught on the wrong side of this, and we do all we can to help.
So if you are a scammer, fraudster, or plagiarist and your book has been blocked from publish by Amazon KDP then you needn’t wonder why your book was blocked. It should have been.
But if you’re an honest author making a good-faith effort to publish a book, the short answer is, one of Amazon’s algorithms unfortunately wrongly flagged your book. I got several messages that essentially looked like this:
So there could be many reasons why your book has been blocked. I initially thought the issue was with my claim of having sold 100,000 books. I responded with proof of that, but my book was still blocked.
If you want to know all the details, read my income reports, starting with this one, but basically, Amazon, or their algorithm, didn’t like that I was selling a book with the word “book” in the title, and they especially didn’t like it that it also had “book” in the subtitle.
As you can see in the email, my book was titled, How to Sell a Book: What I’ve Learned Selling 100,000 Self-Published Nonfiction Books. I thought that was descriptive and harmless, but Amazon’s “Content Review Team” did not.
The advice I got from other authors was to change the subtitle. For one, this wasn’t possible, as my book was blocked and I didn’t want to anger the Amazon gods by re-submitting. For two, the book was already published through my Shopify store, and on IngramSpark, and the ISBN had already been registered. For three, f*@k that, I’m not going let Amazon dictate how I title a book that already has a perfectly-reasonable title.
How did Alliance of Independent Authors help me un-block my book?
I went back and forth with Amazon’s Content Review Team for a few weeks, and I’m not certain I ever corresponded with an actual human on that team. But then I contacted the Alliance of Independent Author’s Member Care Team.
I already keep an Alliance of Independent Author’s membership, not only because of their author advocacy work – such as standing up for indies during the “Audiblegate” scandal – but also because they have lots of useful coupons for services I use, such as a free IngramSpark revisions coupon, and free BookVault upload coupon.
These coupons make a membership quickly pay for itself, but it’s hard to put a price on how they helped me get my book un-blocked.
I sent them a detailed report detailing my case numbers and demonstrating that I had attempted all possible avenues of resolution, such as contacting support a few different times. After providing all that, I got a message from ALLi’s Member Care Team that said:
I’ve passed this along to our advisor now to review. This process can take some time so we must ask you to please not expect immediate results. We will be in touch as soon as we have more information to share and often Amazon will reach out to you directly.
So apparently ALLi has some contact person at Amazon who helps with this stuff. They asked me to be patient, and patience was required. After two months, I got a message out of the blue from the KDP Content Review team saying:
We need some additional time to review everything. We’ll be in touch within 5 business days. We appreciate your patience.
Great! I thought, an actual human is reviewing this case. Then I got:
We’ve reviewed your book(s) and determined that the title(s) is still misleading to customers.
Followed by the same vague list of things that could be the problem.
Again, the full details are in various income reports from September 2024 on, but there was a bit more back-and-forth, including receiving a message that my title had been approved and that I need only re-submit it, followed by another rejection email.
Each time my book was rejected, I checked back in with ALLi’s Member Care Team, and they got on it.
Finally, after three months of struggle, my book was published on Amazon, with no changes required.
Step 1: Consider making a change; Step 2: Join ALLi
As you can see, getting your book un-blocked from Amazon requires a lot of patience. If you can figure out what they have a problem with and it’s not too much of a hassle, it could be worth making a change, even if they’re dead wrong.
But if that’s not an option, or if fairness really matters to you, I strongly recommend joining the Alliance of Independent Authors, then contacting their member care team.
