Jessica Park, an author in Manchester, New Hampshire, who has self-published seven books on the KDP platform, says she’s only had positive experiences with Amazon but expressed sympathy for authors whose works may have unjustifiably been banned. Such “manipulations” of Amazon’s KDP service are also grounds for the company to pull an author’s books from and terminate that author’s KDP account. This June, Amazon further clarified its publishing guidelines such that “disruptive links” are explicitly banned and bonus content should “make up no more than around 10% of an e-book.” Yet the book’s author is paid more for it. That way, the reader’s device sees that they have finished a book, even if a reader has only read just 5% of it. That business model, unfortunately, has led to authors who try to game the system by faking the number of book pages read - a scam called “ book stuffing.” One method involves scammers exaggerating or falsifying the number of pages read by adding a “disruptive link” at the start of a book promising “bonus content.” Clicking on the link jumps the reader to the end of the book, however long it may be. Thousands of authors self-publish on Amazon’s KDP platform across many genres, from fiction to business and investing. And each monthly payment is determined not by how many times an author’s book is downloaded, but by how many ebook pages are read. Instead of receiving a percentage of each book sold, authors are paid each month from one collective royalty fund. The catch: Authors whose books are available on Kindle Unlimited get paid differently than the rest of the book industry. If an author participates in Kindle Unlimited, it’s more likely their books will also be promoted elsewhere in the Kindle store, which can yield more sales.
The KDP platform has become successful enough such that Amazon, in addition to having its own book publishing imprints like 47 North and Grand Harbor Press, offers a slew of tools aimed at helping aspiring independent authors get started.īecause KDP has become a crowded platform, some authors who publish through KDP are strongly compelled to enroll in KDP Select, a program that offers enrollment in Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library for added visibility in exchange for book exclusivity with Amazon. In the years since, thousands of authors have flooded KDP with books across many genres, from fiction and romance to business and investing. Since it launched in 2007, the Kindle Direct Publishing platform has become a behemoth in self-publishing, cementing itself as one of the largest marketplaces for authors looking to independently publish their work. “As I’m sure you understand, we don’t comment on actions we take against specific author accounts, but we take attempts to manipulate our services very seriously,” an Amazon spokesperson tells Yahoo Finance. Four other authors Yahoo Finance spoke to on the condition of anonymity acknowledged they had somewhat similar experiences and were also notified that they had somehow manipulated KDP services, including Kindle Unlimited. But it appears the company has come down particularly hard on some KDP Select authors in recent weeks. Source: Michael-Scott EarleĪmazon, for its part, declined to go into specifics about why it banished these authors. Feedback from Amazon largely came in the form of a generic form letter via email:Īuthor Michael-Scott Earle, pictured with his daughter Betty, has self-published over 45 novels through Amazon. “We spent the entire vacation in the hotel worried if I was ever going to make another penny again and worrying about how I was going to pay off all of the expenses for everybody and if we could even afford to eat dinner that night.”Ĭipriano says he has yet to receive a clear, detailed explanation from Amazon beyond the assertion that he manipulated KDP services - services that include Amazon’s all-you-can-read $9.99 Kindle Unlimited - despite reaching out to customer support to explain the situation.
“It was the worst week of my life,” Cipriano said. Then in late June, on the first day of vacation with his wife in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, Cipriano noticed over a dozen missed phone calls and messages alerting him that his books had been pulled from the Kindle store and that his ability to publish through KDP was suspended.
Cipriano, says he has sold 143,000 copies of his novels through KDP - enough for him to leave his job as an electrical controls engineer in 2016 to write full-time. Jason Cipriano, a self-published author in Bakersfield, California, known to his readers as J.A.
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