My Amazon KDP Account Was Terminated Twice!! Mistakes to Avoid When Publishing Low Content Books

in this video i'm going to talk to you about getting my account terminated not once but twice welcome to my channel my name is caroline and i make videos to help you master your mindset and make money online so that you can build a life you love so like i say i had my kdp account terminated twice in one month and so i thought i'd do a quick video letting you guys know what happened why it was terminated and then after that i will give you some tips on how to not get your account terminated or things to avoid to avoid that happening and what to do if you do get your account terminated so this happened a couple of months ago and looking back now i've feel like i've always felt a little bit uneasy about publishing low content books on amazon don't get me wrong i love publishing those books and i am still making low content books and i don't mean that i was uneasy because i copy anyone or anything like that or i purposely do the wrong thing but the fact is that low content books things like notebooks journals and logbooks they are all really really similar and it's really hard to make something truly unique and truly different from all the other notebooks and journals and things like that on amazon and amazon is all about original content and there are so many people jumping in to publishing low content books like i say notebooks journals log books also things like coloring books activity books puzzle books planners and diaries and it just has to get to a point where there are so many bad quality books being uploaded that amazon needs to do something about it they are going to want to start tightening their reins on these types of books at some point and i think that is what has been happening lately i've heard of so many people saying that their accounts have been terminated and i think that amazon are really just going through and clearing up this side of their books it is a part of their book products that has really gone unchecked for quite a long time you used to hear of people uploading these books with keyword stuffed titles duplicate content copying other people's books and it was never a problem but i i really feel like they have started to clean up the low content books because there are so many being uploaded and unfortunately a lot of them are not great quality or they are copying other books or they're using trademarks they seem to be really tightening up on the titles you use the subtitles we use pen names and the keywords that we are using throughout our books and in our seven keyword slots but enough about that let's get into my account actually being terminated so it all happened on august 12th i woke up to the dreaded email from amazon kdp's content review team saying we have temporarily suspended your kdp account because you have published titles with intentionally misleading metadata we don't accept content that is meant to advertise promote or mislead because such content may lead to inaccurate or overwhelming search results or impair our readers ability to make good buying decisions you can see the violations reflected in the following title and there is one book listed there and then there are steps listed on what i needed to do next in order to get my account reinstated so at this point pretty much my heart sank i started to panic how could this happen i've been so careful trying to follow the guidelines what have i missed and how did i miss it and also another part of this is i have been working on a series of coloring books the few months prior to this and they were really starting to gain traction and they were starting to make a profit for me in fact throughout july i believe it was i was making around 500 per month just from that series of coloring books which were in quite competitive niches and they were just really starting to game gain momentum and i was getting really excited about that particular series of books i was basically getting them ready ramping them up for q4 and i was really excited about how well they were going to potentially do in quarter four but now all those books were just pulled from the marketplace and pretty much any momentum that i had been building was just gone so i will tell you specifically what kind of book it was that they specified in the email and the book was a dream journal i'd only made it a few weeks possibly a month prior it had been approved to be sold on amazon fairly simple book and before i uploaded this book and before i upload any book i do make sure that i meet all the kdp guidelines i had already checked trademarks so i knew that the words or the phrase dream journal was not trademarked my subtitle basically just described the book what it's used for how it benefits the user and actually in fact i had gone back and forth with kdp multiple times when uploading this book because they kept rejecting my title and subtitle or my subtitle mainly because i used the word journal in the subtitle and it was already in the title so i went back and forth with them quite a few times trying to get the subtitle the way that they wanted it and then they did eventually approve it when they were happy with it i checked the cover design against all the other books that were available on amazon maybe i had accidentally made a cover similar to someone else's now for this particular journal i did create about five or six books for the same interior all with different covers so i went through and checked for all of them but couldn't really find anything that was too similar i went through the interior i went through the interiors of all the other books that were on amazon to see if i had somehow done basically the same interior as someone else now dream journals they're a fairly simple book it's they're pretty much going to have very similar interiors similar kind of prompts inside of them but in saying that my interior still looked quite unique and and different in many ways to all the other books that were available on amazon so i put it down to that it wasn't the interior and obviously they did specify in their email that it was something to do with the metadata which is titles subtitles or something that affects the search results the keywords the seven keyword slots but at this point i just had no idea what it was and unfortunately although kdp does have guidelines when things like this happen they are very vague and they give you multiple reasons that it could possibly be but don't tell you actually which one that it is and it would just be so much easier if they just told you what you had done wrong or what it was that caused them to reject your book or close your account or whatever it is so according to the email that they sent me the action that i had to take was i had to reply to this email for them to reinstate my account i had to reply with the following declaration i confirm that i have read and will comply with the content guidelines and the metadata guidelines and that i will remove any previously published titles that do not meet these guidelines and i will review my catalog and remove any titles that do not comply with these guidelines until we receive a response from you regarding this issue your account will remain blocked and they included the links to those guidelines that they wanted me to read which i have already read many times before but i read them again thinking maybe i've missed something here and i read through the guidelines again trying to figure out what the problem was so i emailed them back as was required now because i was very stressed about this i hadn't had a reply or response from them in around 12 hours so i replied again thinking maybe my email didn't get sent or something like that so just to make sure i replied again with the same statement in that email and then i just waited it was a couple days later when they finally got back to me in which they said thank you for your email concerning the status of your account after reviewing your response we have reinstated your account and we will once again accept your titles for possible publication please be advised that all of your submissions must comply with our content guidelines and there is that link again upon restatement of your account you must review your catalog remove any other titles currently available for sale that do not comply and da da da da please note that your future submissions may be subject to additional review prior to being published so the problem here was that i didn't really know exactly what the problem was and i was worried that i had other books with the same issue that i didn't know about that could cause my account to be deactivated again or even worse permanently terminated i felt like there was now some sort of red flag against my account and that every time i uploaded a book it would get extra checks against it or just some sort of flag that was raised that any tiny little thing could just cause them to terminate my account so i unpublished every book that i had because i just didn't know what to do and i didn't want any books live that were possibly violating their guidelines and the reason that i was so worried is because i really did not want my account terminated permanently and not just for low content books now i have mentioned this in previous videos you may have watched but i do want to start building a bookshelf of high content books and ultimately i would really love to write a fiction series of books which is what i am planning or hoping to do next year in 2022. if my account gets terminated i can't do that and writing fiction books has been a dream of mine for a long time and i really do love making low content books i really do enjoy it and i love the design side of making low content books but i also really want to make high content books and once your account has been terminated permanently you cannot just go and create a new account or you maybe could go make one but it's very risky because you would always be or i would always be waiting for the day when they realize that i have created a duplicate account or an additional account when they have said specifically not to and then terminate that one as well which is a very high possibility so what was i going to do i took a couple weeks to think about it to try and figure out what i wanted to do going forward i also spoke to a couple of friends about it and got their opinions on the matter to see what they thought i also did ask them their thoughts on what they think it was that maybe got this this book or the problem with this book was that caused my account to get terminated and unfortunately i still sort of came out of those conversations without any real answers no one kind of seemed to have any specific idea of what it could have been i did email kdp to ask them for further clarification but all they do is refer you back to their guidelines which i had already read a hundred times before then two weeks later i woke up to this hello we are terminating your account effective immediately because we contacted you over two weeks ago regarding content guidelines violations of titles you submitted through your account and we have not received a response from you as part of the termination process we will close your account you will receive any unpaid royalties that you've earned you'll no longer have access to your accounts including your titles editing your titles viewing your reports and accessing any information within your account all of your published titles will be removed from sale on amazon additionally as per our terms and conditions you aren't allowed to open any new kdp accounts so obviously this was a mistake because i had replied to their email not once but twice saying that i was going to follow their guidelines and then they replied to me as you saw in the emails saying they had received my response and they were reactivating my account so clearly i had replied to them still very frustrating even though i knew this was a mistake so i contacted the kdp support team immediately explaining what had happened and i also replied to the person who had replied in regards to reactivating my account a couple weeks prior and explained to them what had happened so i emailed two different sets of people about this hoping that someone would realize it was a mistake and fix it and then i just had to wait and again it took a couple days and they did reply with the same email that they sent me the first time that they reactivated my account thank you for your email concerning the status of your account after reviewing your response we have reinstated your accounts and once again will accept your titles for possible publication and telling me to read the guidelines as if this was the first time they had deactivated my account i don't know what was going on and so in that couple of days as well when i was waiting to hear back from them i started to get even more stressed thinking what if they don't reinstate my account they don't have to what if they don't admit that it was a state a mistake and they sent that email that they often send saying we uphold our previous decision without even looking into your history of your case or your account or anything like that even if it was a mistake from their end they aren't obligated to reinstate anyone's account and i started to worry that maybe they were going to leave it permanently terminated and i also started to get really sad that there was the possibility that i wouldn't be able to publish fiction books of course there are other platforms that you can publish books on amazon isn't the be-all and end-all but as we all know it is a huge player and it would be a massive chunk that you would be missing out on if you couldn't publish your books on amazon so again i'm just repeating myself here but i was just still at the point of not knowing what to do i didn't know if i was safe to republish all my books and so i just took more time trying to figure out what i was going to do how i was going to move forward so i decided to email kdcp support again and see if i could just get some kind of response and i emailed them just saying how much i wanted to publish on their platform how much i wanted to follow their guidelines and i thought i was but i'm clearly missing something in their guidelines can they please explain to me what this problem was that caused my book to have my account terminated because i really wanted to avoid doing that in the future and finally somebody actually replied with an answer hello we hope this email finds you well you were sent a message regarding a book you had submitted this was an incorrect message and was sent in error we apologize for the confusion this has caused it would have been so much easier if they had just said that at the very beginning instead of sending all these emails saying you must comply with these guidelines send us a declaration that you're going to comply with the guidelines why didn't someone just say sorry whoopsie we made a mistake it would have saved so much stress it would have saved my books being unpublished for weeks and losing all that momentum i talked about earlier about my series of coloring books and instead of making out like i had done something wrong it could have been within a day they admitted that they had done something wrong or their computer had done something wrong so a lot of these processes are automated i'm not saying it was a person who physically did that termination but it just heightened my frustration with that whole process so where to from here well i have republished my series of coloring books and i'm not going to advertise them i've decided that i'm just going to let them sit there on amazon and see what happens with them organically and i'm not gonna run any ads to them or anything like that particularly from now to the end of the year because it is q4 things are ramping up for the q4 holiday sales and christmas sales and advertising costs are just going to increase and i'm just going to see what happens through q4 with these particular books just running organically i'm not expecting a whole lot but i'm just going to see and reevaluate that series of books in the new year any books that pretty much hadn't sold anything since i published them i have not republished because i don't really want books that don't really ever make a sale causing any kind of issues later on down the track i am considering selling low content books on other platforms and possibly even my own website personally i have always wanted more printing options and i've always wanted some more premium type of printing options things like spiral bound books books with linen hard covers they're really sort of that high quality journal kind of cover and i can get those kind of options with other print on demand printing companies pros of this is there are better printing options you make a higher royalty and you have the freedom to create books without somebody telling you what you can and can't do with every single aspect of that book but obviously the con of doing this is that you lose access to amazon's massive customer base and it is a customer base which is so loyal and that website amazon has a massive trustworthy factor with their customers i mean really i could do both it doesn't have to be one or the other but yeah i will keep you all updated on what i decide to do with that side of the business whether i do decide to take low content books off of amazon in addition to selling on amazon or just on their own so some tips on how to not get your account terminated and what to do if you do get your account terminated don't use any trademarked terms always check the us patent office website or whatever country it is that you publish books in always check for trademarks don't assume the title that you want to use is not trademarked you would be surprised at what is trademark and if you are active in any of the facebook groups that talk about low content books you might have seen a lot of posts recently about some people or groups of people who are doing mass trademarks against terms that are commonly used for low content books don't copy anyone's book don't even make it similar make it as different as unique as you possibly can and i know that is really hard with low content books as i said earlier it is hard to make them really unique and really different because they are just books that are the same don't make something the same or even similar because if amazon doesn't pull you up for it the owner of that book will most likely report you to amazon which will get your account terminated familiarize yourself with the kdp guidelines and if you don't understand something or if you do need clarification about the guidelines email kdp support for clarification don't have multiple kdp accounts you are not allowed to have more than one count account and if amazon realizes that you do you will have them terminated and as that email said earlier you are not allowed to open a new kdp account after you have had one terminated if kdp support email you telling you that you are doing something that is not following their guidelines take notice and fix whatever it is that they are telling you you are doing wrong because if you do it multiple times and ignore their emails they will just terminate your account and what do you do if your account does get terminated well not much unfortunately if you think it's a mistake contact the kdp support team and perhaps ask for them to review it or to appeal their decision be nice do not be aggressive being aggressive will definitely not get you anywhere but i mean what's the harm in emailing them asking them to review their decision the worst that's going to happen is that they're going to say no so at the end of the day once your account is terminated unless it was a mistake like in my case there's not much you can do about it so essentially it's really just a good idea to keep your account in good standing order and follow the kdp guidelines especially if you do want to be publishing books in the long term i really hope that it doesn't happen to any of you guys out there even if it was a mistake just like me if you have had your account terminated and then reinstated please let me know in the comments and let me know what happened i'm really interested to find out other people's stories around this sort of thing and if you did like this video please let me know by giving it a thumbs up and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: My Freedom Empire

Views: 27,729

Keywords: kdp copyright infringement, kdp trademark, amazon kdp trademark, kdp trademark checker, kdp copyright, kdp copyright issue, amazon kdp copyright, copyright amazon kdp, copyright kdp, trademark kdp, kdp low content books, low content book publishing, rachel harrison sund, paul marles, kdp publishing, kdp amazon, amazon kdp low content, kindle self publishing, kdp low content keywords, no content books kdp, low content kdp, self publishing on amazon, low content books kdp

Id: h3Fs26zc560

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021