They came after me.
Let me be clear about this. Amazon KDP
didn’t try to remove my book. They simply eyeballed my book’s material during
the standard publishing procedure. And they didn’t like what they saw. So they
totally tried to remove my book.
This is publishing death by algorithm. It is
removal by default.
I’d conducted one of my periodic reviews. My
Kindle books house hyperlinks leading to the outside world. Occasionally, those
links go bust. Either I remove the links or update to better ones. If you
change a single thing or many things then you are republishing.
My deal with my cover model, Totenbraut, included
this gem: I’d provide links to her online presence. In the past, I offered multiple
links. My recent review showed one link stopped working across several books.
Time to update.
I hired her again to provide a new cover for
a book. An updated cover means republishing the whole thing, and submitting the
work for review. You can’t update the cover by itself. It’s a fairly painless
process, if damnably slow. I’d also need to update the link situation. Line
your ducks in a row and then bomb the whole waddling crowd at once…
One change or many changes, the arrival of
the update e-mail is slooooooooooooooooow. So make many changes at once. Don’t
change and republish, change and republish, change and republish, not for one
book, all in the same day. Oh, the sun
has set. When did that happen?
This wasn’t about updating one book. I don’t
leave any books behind. No. I check all the files, update what’s necessary, and
republish everything on the list anyway. Whether Totenbraut is on the cover or
not, whether some books need updated links or not, everything is checked and
it’s all published again.
Then the material sits in a folder that’s done. Latest book folder blah-de-blah, insert date here. This is
a hell of a lot more convenient than the way I used to do things.
(I
knew what was updated based on whether or not the book file had a back-up file.
Fiddly, and easy to miss in a sea of files. Therefore…)
Your one-stop-shop really should be a
one-stop-shop. Everything is updated. No book is left behind. Here are the
latest copies. No quibbles.
And so…
Updating one book with a cover, and updating
several books over a busted link, I reviewed the rest and found one thing that
needed fixing across all books. Looks
like I’ll be publishing all books all over again anyway, and with good reason. Time
to update that folder in full.
And then…
I slogged through the fixes. Checked.
Double-checked. Triple-checked. One by one, the books went from LIVE to LIVE plus a note. The note tells you the book is under review, and
reviews could take up to 72 hours.
This is an arcane process. You republish
books one, two, and three…then see book three finish the marathon first. An
e-mail eventually states your book is now live. Publishing order depends on the
size of the book and the number of alterations. Also, the weather plays a part.
And, possibly, chicken bones feature in the equation.
One by one the books cleared the last hurdle,
in no particular running-order. I missed an extra detail, and had to go in and
publish one file again. That’s why you quadruple-check the stuff you
triple-checked. This took eternity.
My
wayward nag passed the hurdle the second time. And then, out of a clear blue
sky, thunderclouds formed. Oh no. One aircraft from the squadron hasn’t
returned. Should be back by now. Everyone else landed and went off to the pub. Pilots.
Roaring drunk, the lot of them. Thunderclouds formed.
Not gradually. This was an instant
thunderstorm. Dehydrated. Just add water. And maybe an algorithm. I wasn’t the
only one conducting a review. Amazon reviews everything you put out there. And
then clears it. That’s what Amazon does.
Amazon cleared this particular book over
three dozen times since I first published it. Going by the e-mail archive, that
is. I updated or changed a load of links, many times. No drama. I even changed
the file when their outdated format was replaced and no longer supported. If I
added, subtracted, or altered material, I republished the book. And I never had
a clearance problem publishing or republishing the text.
Did you hear thunder? Must be an incoming
e-mail from Darth Bezos…
During our review, we found that the following book(s)
appears to be a derivative work based on previously published content:
INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS. by RLL (AUTHOR)
• All underlying content is in the public domain
• The underlying content is under copyright and you have the rights to use it
In order to publish the book(s), please take the appropriate action below
within 5 days:
Option 1: Provide information for underlying public domain works
If your book(s) is based on a work(s) that is in the public domain, reply to
this email and provide the following information for the public domain work(s):
Underlying work information:
1. All author names:
2. All author dates of death:
3. All initial publication dates:
4. All initial publication countries:
5. Website link(s) to confirm:
Option 2: Provide information for underlying works under copyright
If your book(s) is based on a work(s) that is under copyright, reply to this
email and provide us with documentation and/or verification showing you hold
publishing rights.
Examples of documentation we cannot accept include:
• A personal statement by you that you have the publishing rights
• A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed
• Contracts that have not been signed by all parties
For more details about publishing public domain books, visit Help:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200743940
Please reply with the requested information within 5 days. Otherwise, the
book(s) will be unavailable for sale on Amazon.
If you have questions or believe you've received this email in error, reply to
this message.
Thanks for using Amazon KDP.
I’d never
received one of these Nastygrams™
before. Well. Fuck.
Why is this message bad? REALLY BAD. WELL
AND TRULY BAD. If you don’t comply then the book is gone, and, if
you are a repeat offender, Amazon can shut down your entire account. You aren’t
allowed to open another account to start all over again. No more publishing on
Kindle for you.
They
put you up against the wall, offer you a last cigarette, and shoot you before
the tobacco-related cancer kicks in.
Worse than that, you can be banned on your
first time out of the gate. You don’t even gain the luxury of being accused of
repeat offending. Whether you are farm-fresh to the Mighty Amazon or you’ve
been plying the trade routes for years…doesn’t matter. If this message lands on
your doorstep, then it is – to use a highly technical term – some serious shit.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
It happened on a Friday, close to midnight.
I read the message during a late check-in on e-mail. Midnight rolled around. I
now had four days in which to deal with the problem, and not five.
Weekend days. If I replied on Saturday,
would I see any response before Monday? It’s careless to load a book into the
system and then disappear for two weeks to the Bahamas without reading e-mail.
So…never do that. You might return to a ban. Of everything you’ve ever
published.
I had to respond, or else. Amazon KDP didn’t try to remove my book. But they
totally tried to remove my book. This is publishing death by algorithm –
selecting my title seemingly at random. It is removal by default – if I don’t
respond in the five four days left to me.
What to do? Sieve. Sift through the
corporate speech and note the important points. Sadly, the important points were
generic. We think you messed up, but we
aren’t going to tell you how. Why not?
Software selected you. Congratulations. You’ve lost this lottery.
Had I published material that was already in
the public domain?
No.
Had I published material that wasn’t mine to
publish?
No.
Did Amazon contact me in error?
Yes.
I had to respond within five four
days and tell them so.
What was evidence? I wrote the material.
True. But that wasn’t evidence. They couldn’t accept this on my say-so.
Now an
affidavit from a thunderstorm, or a few words on oath from a heavy shower,
would meet with all the attention they deserve.
Well, what else could I offer? I turned to
the interwebs to find out how other people dealt with this. Oh no…
A few examples proved…less than helpful.
Unhelpful. Okay, fucking useless. A scammer or two dropped hot truth bombshells
on a crater-infested landscape. They’d been caught out trying to sell the
Kindle version of snake-oil and Amazon insta-killed their bare arses – which,
incidentally, they were all showing on the High Street. And here’s how to get around the problem…
No fucking use to me.
I stared up at the Sword of Bezoscles
dangling over my head by an electronic thread. What to do? Write myself out of
a hole, obviously. How to say what needed to be said? Swearing wouldn’t cut it.
I could ask for further clarification first, instead of arguing my case.
But why bother, if my response cut the
argument off at the knees? Save a lot of pointless e-mail tennis, back, forth,
swish, goal, no, it’s offside, wait, that’s not cricket. Without swearing.
Swearing wouldn’t cut those knees. I had to base my reply on the facts. Facts I
had to back up somehow.
And no swearing. Also, swear ye not. Oh, and
don’t fucking swear.
I wanted to say What the fuck, Amazon?! without swearing. The Amazon e-mail accused
me of ONE of two things. Either, reading between the railway lines, I was up to
some sort of scam by publishing material in the public domain…or I was
publishing material belonging to someone else without permission.
What is the public domain? There you’ll find
material that is out of copyright. Don’t confuse this term with the public arena. They are not the same
thing. I have placed my blog post in the public arena. You can read this post online, very publicly.
But I
haven’t relinquished, re-assigned, or surrendered the copyright in this text.
The blog post you are reading is © to me and it is not in the public domain. The copyright is mine. It hasn’t
expired. Barring further changes in copyright law, it won’t expire until 70
years after my death. So, as I sit typing, I’m glad it hasn’t expired – this
tells me I am still alive.
Amazon believed I’d published my book…but it
was old material by someone else and it was out of copyright. Maybe I was
scamming people with that. And there are plenty of scams that tried their luck
on Amazon Kindle, based on stuff that’s out of copyright.
Option two…
Amazon thought I’d published my book…but it
was material belonging to someone else and still in copyright to…whoever. I
know a few Romance Writers. They’ve told me the romance industry is full of
that shit.
Grab
someone else’s book, slap a cover of a rippling male torso out there under a
new title, and…get exposed by an entire internet of romance readers polishing
their magnifying glasses and sharpening their kitchen knives.
Hunky
Detective Dude becomes Spunky
Mountain Rescue Dude. True to form, the mountain guy spends much of the
book investigating a murder. Like a detective. Chad Bradley becomes Brad
Chadley, and no one notices. Right?
Fucking wrong, you fuck-muppets. Why do you
keep doing this? Evil romance writers, for frock’s sake. Romance writers. You
were meant to provide hope in the world. Damn it, Darth Bodice-Ripper. You were
the chosen one. Lady Lace-Gusset threw over Lord Chinstrap’s country estate
for…Duke Brad-Chadley the Detectionist?! And his horse. Buick!
Fuckwits.
Anyway. Amazon needs to confirm one or the
other.
One. I have put out material that’s from
some other century, this is not a scam, and the copyright expired so here’s all
my working.
The other. My book really is my book and
I haven’t published anyone else’s work as my own without permission signed in
blood.
Either it’s in the public domain and I’ve
followed the rules, so Amazon can fuck off, or it’s in copyright and the
copyright is mine. And Amazon can fuck right off. I’m forced to explain myself
without swearing.
And
so…
My response is to deny the first point and
move on to the second point. Easy. My book is my book. Or, no, let’s look at
this in detail…
We need to confirm one of the following:
• All underlying content is in the public domain
• The underlying content is under copyright and you have the rights to use it
All underlying content is in the
public domain? No. Job done. First point denied. No evidence. Just flat-out
denial. Moving on to deal with…the underlying content is under copyright and I
have the rights to use it. Yes, the work is copyright, and yes I have the rights.
Job done, bitches. But how to prove that?
I turn the cogwheels in my mind, trying to
work out what tripped the sensors. There’s an obvious point. Let’s open at the
start.
During our review, we found that the following book(s)
appears to be a derivative work based on previously published content:
Is this it? INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS is a
collection of short stories. There’s an earlier article in there. And I
incorporated blog posts into the text. Those blog posts told the story of
building up to publishing on Amazon Kindle.
I own the copyright in this blog, and in the
article I wrote, so I am fine with work published previously elsewhere. Yes,
the blog posts were previously published – by me. I own the paperwork on the paperwork. Did I fall foul of an
automated process?
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
I can
publish collected articles in one volume. They are mine. No big deal. But
there’s also Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Select.
If I enrol a
book in that programme, I agree the material is exclusive to Amazon – and
hasn’t been published elsewhere, not even on a blog, so help me, Bezos.
Of the books I published, two, and only two,
were outside the KDP Select programme. One contained an introduction taken from
a blog post: that book was MIRA E.
Eventually I kept the material inside the book, and deleted the blog post so I
could transfer MIRA E. to KDP Select.
Removing the blog entry from the public arena made MIRA E. available as exclusive under the Select contract.
Now I only have one book outside KDP Select.
INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS
still has the blog posts inside. Those posts are still live on this blog. There
shouldn’t be a problem here. The rights are mine.
Along
with all the rest of my books, I published this book again. There was a
hyperlink I had to deal with. And that was about it for the text. No other
great changes.
Did I somehow accidentally enrol the book in
KDP Select when I republished? If I did that, I’d be in violation of the exclusivity
agreement, as the blog posts are still in the public arena. Amazon could have
run an internet check on the text and found portions of the text online in my
blog. And slapped me. However…
You must actively
enrol in the Select programme. It’s not automatic. You choose. I was sure I
hadn’t fucked up on that score. (Spoiler for this story: I didn’t fuck up on
that score.)
Okay. I hadn’t breached a Select agreement –
there was no Select agreement to breach. I didn’t select Select. Yes, I’d previously published the content elsewhere…but I
didn’t breach Amazon guidelines. Also, it was my content. No exclusivity
contract could mess this up for me – if I didn’t sign it. I didn’t sign it.
What the fuck else could it be, then?
Bearing in mind, they never told me in detail. Just said I’d done a no-no. Oh no I hadn’t. What if this is about
the first point? The public domain stuff? Is it the title? It’s a jokey title.
Like writing an Unauthorised
Autobiography.
Maybe the detectors at Kindle HQ picked up on
incomplete and uncollected and tried to match them to public domain collections.
Collected letters. Complete collected poems. Along those lines. Short works. This seemed the more likely
case.
OR. Someone
put out a public domain anthology and added essays that are copyright to them.
And my title triggered a more complex conflict in the Amazon searchlight.
So have I stumbled over a mutant hybrid
combination of point one AND point two, leading to a case of mistaken identity?
(I’m
often confused with the Venezuelan rocket scientist of the same name.)
My
book is electronically mistaken for a work in the public domain based on a
similar title, but there’s also new copyright material in this other work and
I’ve been labelled in breach of that as well? Amazon isn’t bolting an arm to a
torso, in the style of Frankenstein, surely?
No. It’s all bullshit. This isn’t about
point one and point two merging on the slab, down in the lab, fuelled by
mistaken identity, unidentified flying conspiracies, or too much/too little
booze.
Get into tiny detail, then. It can’t be a
title thing. For a start, there is no copyright protection in the title of a
book. (Though there are other protections and remedies available. I won’t go
into the finer details here. This blog post is long enough as it is.) Did they
think a title of mine was too close to a title by someone else? Well, they
never told me. So I don’t know.
My opening defence would be…there is no
copyright protection in the title of a book. Also, I check titles on Amazon to
see if someone else has written a book with the words I intend to use. That’s
at the start of the story writing process, not left to the end of the
publishing process.
I am puzzled. What have I done? Or…
Wait, no. What has Amazon done? Down the Kindle years, I’ve become aware of all sorts
of scams on Amazon. They flare up, are spotted, and then they are squashed. Was
I caught in a net cast for another fish? Did I walk into someone else’s
surveillance operation?
The net tightens. Well, it’s always tightening. Amazon upped (or
downgraded) its game and now the devil take the hindmost. Did they use
Artificial Intelligence to save on a thimble of perspiration? Maybe. Are we
going to see more of this bullshit? If it saves money, and it does, then as
sure as night follows day…yes.
On the topic of Artificial Intelligence, as
I went to republish these books I was asked if I’d used any Artificial
Intelligence in the creation of my works. No. More galling than that, when I
went to check on my potential Amazon ban, I was hit with an advert for making
money on Amazon.
And it came across as the scammiest Amazon
advert I’d seen. This woman offered me the secret of using Amazon to make
money. Eventually, she told me about Amazon publishing. And, hell, I didn’t
even need to write the books myself. I could use Artificially Intelligent
tools…
The only artificially intelligent tools I
had to deal with were the robotic ones on Amazon trying to remove my work on a
digital fucking whim. Okay. So. Leaving much subtlety and nuance in copyright
law aside for the sake of fucking brevity…
(It’s a bit
late for that.)
The only thing that matters is this: my human
response squelches Amazon’s robotic objection.
No swearing. I swear mentally as I type. The
best position to start from was the one they threw at me. If I received their
complaint in error, I should say so. And I open right there.
I believe I have been sent this message in error.
No shit, Sherlock. But,
luckily, I HAVE been sent this message in error…and so I immediately channel
their response in that direction. I follow up with the original publication
date. So they know it’s been published on Amazon for years with no problems.
Until now. And I tell them the book is a collection of my own short stories.
All true.
But wait a bit. They want
evidence.
Examples of documentation we cannot accept include:
• A personal statement by you that you have the publishing rights
• A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed
• Contracts that have not been signed by all parties
Basically, I am telling them I have
the publishing rights. They can’t accept that as evidence. But it is worth
telling them. Assert ownership over your material. I tell them I wrote the
fucking stories without swearing at them.
What’s this next piece of legal nonsense?
They won’t accept…a copyright application
for which the registration has not been confirmed. That’s American copyright law: a quaint notion
Robert Louis Stevenson hoped they’d get around to some day.
As Scottish as Stevenson was, I needn’t
register my copyright anywhere. (Oh, services exist for that purpose. For a
fee, of course.) My copyright exists in the work from the moment of its creation.
However, there is a place to lodge your work: a library of record. So I fire
that salvo at them. I tell them the work is lodged as a matter of record…
This is a quick e-mail, fired off under the
stress of that sword hanging o’er my head. I don’t provide documentary
evidence. But I tell them plain. And I can back that with documentary evidence
if I really have to.
Even the blurb – the Amazon product
description – tells readers this is a collection of my own work. Is that
evidence? Add it to the pile. Can’t harm to put it in. Wouldn’t think of
leaving it out. Assert your ownership of the material.
Then I really get into the part they won’t
accept as evidence.
Listen, fuckers. My fucking book is mine to do with as I fucking please.
You’ve never fucked with it before. Well now you fucked around and you fucking
found out.
All the fucking times I fucking republished the fucker with minor
emendations, and you come to me now, like an ungrateful cunt in a Mafia movie
on a wedding day, and you don’t like a minor fucking update to the opening fucking
text?
Not even part of the fucking story. The fucking preamble. Don’t shit
down my fucking neck and tell me it’s raining chocolate. How much do you love
your pet horse, Jeffy? I’ll fucking see to it that Jeffy the horse gives you a
big wet cuddle when you go to bed at night. Make you an offer you’ll never
forget in a fucking hurry. And what’s with the cheese? I stick motherfucking
provolone in my socks at night so they smell like your sister’s crotch in the
morning.
Yours, sincerely…
Scotsman with a grievance. Ray of sunshine.
P.G. Wodehouse. Google it.
I didn’t phrase any of it that way. And I
don’t recommend writing to Amazon with that level of spleen. I did all that
without swearing. Out loud or in print. Mentally, though, the text was spot-on.
In your head, that response is the only place for that response. I was calmer
and more measured in the e-mail.
Anyway, I told them the work was my
copyright, it wasn’t in the public domain, and that was that. To them, it’s not
evidence. But tell them, tell them again another way in the same response, and
shuffle the words around to tell them a third time. Amazon says it isn’t
evidence, but it’s fucking evidence to you, hell, and definitely to me.
I looked for duplicate book
titles, just in case. Nothing. Again, that’s no crime in copyright law anyway.
I returned to the business of their error. A computer search lumped me in with
another category by mistake. I invited them to look into this. And I asked them
to state, explicitly, the nature of any passage that troubled them – given that
they’d offered me a generic error message with nothing to go on.
Then I ended with the
accusation that an algorithm was at play. In other words, don’t come to me and
tell me that it is up to me to prove my innocence over a vague issue. You tell
me what I did wrong. And show evidence of that. You can’t? I knew that score
the moment yon dreadful e-mail landed on my digital doorstep.
But I didn’t swear. Aloud. Or
in print. You’ve made a mistake, Amazon. Where’s your evidence, author? Come on, Amazon, you tell me where the evidence
is. Shtrict rulesh of golf, Goldfingerrr.
EMMA STONE: No, Jeff. You be trippin’.
Long story short, too late, as soon as this went in front of a human pair of eyes, the matter was resolved.
The following book(s) you recently updated have been
reviewed and were successfully passed:
I received a separate e-mail telling me the book was now live in the
Kindle store, where it remains. Looks like they’ve added a glitch to the metadata,
but that couldn’t have triggered the initial investigation.
At least the book is there. I wonder if the
page-count was a factor. Could be…they thought it was a public domain scam with
the same 30 pages repeated many times over, for the page-turn farmers to click
through, possibly. Doesn’t matter.
They never said.
Advice. If they come after you
and you are a scammer, tough luck. But if they go after you purely as the
result of tightening their steely grip on scammers, keep your cool. Gather the
facts. Present them without swearing.
If they come after you when you’ve made a
genuine mistake and you’ve fallen foul of the regulations, hope it isn’t the
end of your account. Try not to fall foul of the set-up in the first place.
So much is published that they
can’t check it all. They rely on automation. So. Put your complaint in front of
a human being. Legitimise your case by simply turning up to argue that case.
Scammers are less likely to put in an appearance. Assert your ownership of the
material. Don’t swear in the e-mail.
Much swearing went into the making of my response to
Amazon. On the electronic page, the profanity was all in digital invisible ink.
