Imagine waking up to a message from Amazon, saying your KDP account has been terminated, effective immediately. Every book you have ever published is gone from the store, and the royalties Amazon owed you are forfeited or suspended. The email doesn’t tell you why, or it does tell you why, but the words are so vague that they don’t make any sense.
This is happening to more authors than ever before. Some of them broke the rules. They’re scammers, and Amazon caught them. But many of them did nothing wrong. They got swept up by a bot enforcing rules, and bots make mistakes. Scammers also deploy their own bots to take down the competition, flooding accounts with fake page reads or malicious traffic that trips an automated system. Automated systems can misread your metadata and decide you’re a fraud, and they can even claim you’ve violated the copyright on a book you wrote yourself.
Don’t think it can’t happen to you. It happens every day. And here’s the part nobody wants to hear: Amazon is not really your partner. They’re a platform. You’re the tenant, they’re the landlord, and they can change the locks at any time.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that termination isn’t always final, and you have options when things go wrong. You can get your account back, and you can keep it from getting canceled in the first place. It is far easier to prevent a problem than to solve one.
Don’t do what many authors do when this happens. Don’t panic, don’t fire off angry emails, and don’t open a second account. That’s almost always guaranteed to make things worse. Our guest today co-founded one of the largest Amazon consulting firms in the world. She has personally helped thousands of sellers and authors claw their suspended accounts back from the brink. She is also an author herself, having written The Amazon Incubator, which means she is in the trenches along with the rest of us. Lesley Hensell, welcome to the Novel Marketing Podcast.
Lesley: Thank you so much for having me. That was a dire picture you painted to start, but unfortunately, very real for many people.
Why are authors who go all-in on Amazon so exposed?
Thomas: Authors who are all-in on Amazon face the biggest risk because you make the most money when you’re exclusive, or mostly exclusive, to the platform. The default path for most authors is an e-book exclusive to Amazon, a print book wide, and an audiobook exclusive to Audible.
For those authors, the smart move is to skip straight to the prevention section. What are the most common causes of account suspension, and how do you keep that from happening?
What do you do when someone posts a knockoff of your book?
Lesley: One of the biggest causes of suspension is the copyright issue you mentioned, and I can tell you why it happens. You’ve seen the scammy thing where someone makes a copy of your book, or a scaled-down, shortened version of a nonfiction book, and posts it on Amazon for sale.
The best defense is to play offense. You have to watch the platform and catch these scammers when they put up copies of your book so you can proactively report them and get them taken down. Because once they start getting sales, they’ll claim that you’re the infringer instead of them. If they’ve built a sales history, Amazon may just accept that claim and suspend you for your own book.
Thomas: Many people ask me why I recommend registering copyrights when I’m so vocal about not really believing in the copyright system and how expensive it is to fight a copyright battle in court. Setting aside the recent AI company settlements, which changed the calculus considerably, registering your copyright is not really about the U.S. court system.
If you have a registered copyright from the United States Copyright Office with a date on it, you can show that to Amazon and say, “I am not the imposter.” Without it, you have no government evidence that you wrote your own book, and it becomes a he-said-she-said situation where the scammer is far more sophisticated at manipulating Amazon’s systems than you are.
Lesley: That’s very true, because for some of these people, this is how they make their living. They spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week on various scams, or they’re part of a professional ring. Many of them operate overseas, so U.S. law cannot touch them. There’s a great deal of this activity in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China.
If you have that piece of paper from the copyright office, it is your best defense. Most authors who sell on Amazon spend very little time on the technical Amazon side. Their time goes to writing and marketing. If you have that registration, you don’t have to be as sophisticated as scammers who make fraud their entire livelihood.
Thomas: If you’ve registered your copyright and you see a suspicious book, like a similar or abridged version of yours, what do you do? Because sometimes what they’ve done isn’t a copyright violation. They can write a commentary on your book. How do you navigate someone trying to coast on your success?
Lesley: If they argue it’s a commentary or a summary, you tell Amazon two things. First, it reproduces a substantial portion of the book and its main ideas. More importantly, tell Amazon it is causing confusion for buyers. Those are your keywords. “This is causing confusion for buyers.”
It doesn’t matter whether what they’ve done is technically legal. What matters is that a consumer going to Amazon and seeing your book alongside the knockoff cannot tell the difference. That’s the argument that lands with Amazon, because while they do care about intellectual property theft, it’s not their primary mission. But they hate causing confusion for buyers and ripping customers off.
What’s the secret to communicating with Amazon effectively?
Thomas: What you just said contains the key to becoming an Amazon whisperer, and it starts with internalizing some harsh truths. Amazon does not care about you. They don’t care about the law because the law is whatever the most expensive lawyers say it is, and they have the most expensive lawyers. Threatening them with the law or telling them they were unfair gets you nowhere.
What do they care about? They care about the customer.
If you can reframe every email around how something is harming customers, you trigger their core DNA. For years, Amazon kept an empty chair at every meeting for the customer. It is a core part of their corporate culture. The customer is king, and the customer must have a good experience.
You need to articulate, from the customer’s perspective, why Amazon needs to change and why customers want to buy your book. If you’re too fired up to write that email yourself, use AI to rewrite it in a customer-centric way. Amazon really does care about its customers. They’ve found that happy customers will put pressure on the government and change the law if necessary. That’s how powerful this lever is.
Lesley: Absolutely true. To be even more Amazonian about it, use the word “buyer.” That is what their internal people care about. Say “this is a terrible buyer experience.” The buyer experience is enormous for them.
You can also say “This is a bad author experience,” because they care about the author category as a collective universe. But they don’t care about an author with one book. If you can frame it as a systemic problem for authors broadly, that might matter. For the most part, though, they care about buyers.
And frankly, I have almost clicked the wrong book myself. I think most people who buy a lot of books on Amazon have caught themselves and said, “Wait, that’s a knockoff.” Amazon knows exactly what you’re talking about when you raise this issue.
Thomas: As an Amazon customer, I wish there were a toggle to hide third-party sellers. I switched from eBay to Amazon 20 years ago because I didn’t want to deal with third-party sellers. Not in all categories, but I’d love the option.
This is why Amazon shuts down shady accounts. They’re trying to eliminate shenanigans, but sometimes they think you’re doing shenanigans that you’re not. So let’s talk about what else, beyond the copyright issues, can get an account suspended.
What does the data say about who gets suspended?
Lesley: In 14 years of working with suspended accounts, I’ve found it breaks down roughly into thirds, regardless of whether you’re a seller of handmade goods, a vendor, or an author in KDP.
A third of the time, the suspension was deserved. The person was doing the bad thing, and they knew it. A third of the time, it was the account holder’s fault, but they genuinely didn’t know they were doing something wrong. Perhaps an employee made a mistake, or there was a technical error. And a third of the time, it’s a false positive. This doesn’t include accounts run by people who just walk away from a burner account, because those people never try to get reinstated.
Among the people whose accounts truly matter to them, it really does break down that way. Two-thirds of the time, you’re a good person who made an error, or Amazon made an error.
I say this because many people assume that if you got suspended, you must have done something horrible. With Amazon suspensions, that stigma isn’t warranted.
Thomas: Both assumptions can get you into trouble, though. Many authors assume they are perfect and have never done anything wrong. Maybe they didn’t intentionally break a rule, but almost no one has read the Amazon terms of service. If you did, you likely didn’t fully understand it.
And Amazon is rarely explicit about exactly what you did wrong or how to fix it. They seem to put the pressure on you to figure it out yourself.
How did AI content get authors banned?
Lesley: Absolutely correct. And when you appeal, they expect you to know the rule and explain how you violated it.
This brings me to what happened a couple before AI was everywhere.
If you’ve been in the book world a while, you know people were creating travel books for places they’d never been, written entirely with AI. Some of these were very successful KDP sellers who decided to add AI travel books to their Amazon shelf. At the time, Amazon had no policy against AI content because this was early in the AI revolution. But many of those sellers were permanently banned. Using too much AI content in a book, they will detect it and suspend you.
Thomas: I remember when a prominent conservative commentator died, and the very next day, one of the top books on Amazon was a biography published that day. Someone knew it would be the big news cycle and rushed to publish an AI book. It was selling into high demand and low competition.
Amazon has complicated rules around AI. Plenty of authors use it without getting kicked off, but in certain categories, they’re very particular. The most famous example is a mushroom foraging guide that recommended poisonous mushrooms as safe to eat.
One thing that can get you in trouble is failing to disclose AI use when it’s discovered. But how do you even prove that? None of the AI detection tools is accurate. I have listeners who’ve taken books from the ’90s and run them through AI checkers that reported the book as 60% AI. The book was published in 1998.
How do you prove you didn’t use AI?
Lesley: That’s a great question. I’m an old-school writer. I used to be a journalist, and I graduated from college in the ’90s. My son ran some of my writing through an AI detector and got 74% AI. Apparently, very proper English reads as AI.
On those types of suspensions, most have been category-specific. The issue usually isn’t that AI wrote the sentences; it’s that the information in the book is incorrect. Think about those travel books. If you lived in that city, you could tell immediately that the author had never been there.
If you’re writing about something you know nothing about and factual errors surface, readers are very aggressive right now about flagging it in reviews. Amazon scrapes all reviews. If they see the words “AI,” “artificial intelligence,” “bot,” “false information,” or “obviously AI-generated” in your reviews, Amazon will flag your account and go through the content.
Thomas: So while some of you may think you’re safe, there’s another attack vector to consider. Someone acting maliciously could load you up with reviews containing those trigger phrases and trigger the system against you.
One thing that insulates you is a strong launch. If you already have 100 authentic reviews, you’re far less vulnerable to this kind of black hat attack. If you have three reviews and an enemy adds 10 that all call you a bot, now Amazon is trying to decide whether you’re human, and you’re left asking, “What do you want from me?”
When someone calls you about a scary email from Amazon, what do you look for?
Lesley: In traditional publishing, giving out galleys and review copies is completely standard and considered legitimate. Inside Amazon, it’s considered sort of legitimate. The problem is that Amazon is under intense pressure from the FTC over fake reviews.
Amazon’s enforcement against reviews that appear bought or friend-sourced isn’t because they hate authors. It’s because the federal government is watching. This creates a real conflict with the traditional publishing world’s way of doing pre-launch business. You have to be very careful in how you get early reviews.
You cannot compensate anyone for a review, ever. You cannot do anything that looks like compensation. Avoid giving away books or even sending links to books through Facebook Messenger. I know that sounds ridiculous because how would Amazon know?
But Amazon has a reciprocal data-sharing agreement with other platforms, including Facebook. So when people set up Facebook groups where everyone shares their book, gives out free copies, and reviews each other, Facebook sends that information to Amazon.
Amazon knows a great deal about you. When you sent your mother-in-law a birthday gift and had it shipped through Amazon, they now know she’s your relative. They know everyone you’ve lived with. They know everyone you share a credit card with. Add social media data to all of that buying history, and it’s very easy for them to link you to other people.
If you pay for reviews, they are going to catch you.
Thomas: This isn’t a surprise to longtime listeners of this podcast. I’ve been steering authors away from Facebook for almost 10 years, and everything you’ve said is part of the reason. Facebook places you in a social graph, a three-dimensional cloud of your network, and if a cluster of socially proximate people all leave reviews at once, those reviews are less likely to stick.
The more you interact with your readers on Facebook, the fewer of their reviews will stick to your Amazon page. Facebook is particularly toxic from a personal profile. Business pages are somewhat insulated because liking a business page doesn’t tell Amazon much about your relationship to that author.
My official recommendation is to do nothing on Facebook except advertising, and only after you’ve already exhausted Amazon advertising.
Content creation and interaction on Meta platforms is often more harmful than beneficial, and it’s very bad for your mental health. If you put your phone away and go for a walk, you’ll feel like a whole new person.
Lesley: Please avoid services that promise to get you reviews and claim they’re compliant with Amazon’s terms of service. They are lying. They will get someone to buy your product and then PayPal or Venmo them the money as a “rebate.” This happens with books just like it happens with other product categories. Any time someone is compensated this way, Amazon’s AI will catch it. People think they’ll find a magic workaround. They won’t.
The worst story I know involves a man in Texas who launched a product. His maternal aunt told all her friends at a book club in Colorado about it. About five or six ladies from that club bought the product and wrote positive reviews, and his account was shut down.
Thomas: It looks inorganic. If those five sales were mixed in with 100 others that day, they’d be lost in the noise. But if six sales came in and five of them traced back to one Facebook group, it looks extremely suspicious.
I know the terms of service say it’s okay to give a free book for review, and that there’s a special exclusion for authors. But it doesn’t hold, because the same algorithm sorts wheat from chaff across the entire platform. Amazon’s review system for books is not magically separate from what they use for toilet paper. Same platform, same rules.
Just because something is allowed doesn’t mean it’s favored. A reviewer who got a free copy doesn’t leave a verified review. It doesn’t count for as much in the algorithm.
One of the core principles of my launch team method is to never give away free copies to launch team members. It’s much better to fill your launch team only with people who genuinely want to buy your book. That one change changes everything.
Technically speaking, a fellow author leaving you a star review is also a terms-of-service violation, because Amazon considers authors to be competitors competing for readers. There’s a separate section where authors are supposed to leave reviews.
Don’t let authors join your launch team. Just because something is allowed doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Lesley: There’s a fine line on the compensation issue. Services that offer to get you reviews will often have someone buy the book and then rebate the purchase. You and I might say that’s just giving a free copy, which is allowed. Amazon does not see it that way because the reviewer shows up as a verified reviewer, and those are more powerful in the algorithm. They make your account and book look better. So you cannot do that rebate approach.
Thomas: If you want more reviews, I built a free tool called the Amazon Review Linker. It creates a QR code you can place at the back of your print book. A reader can point their phone at it and go straight to the review page, which allows them to skip seven or eight steps.
There are legitimate ways to get more reviews. Resist the paid shortcuts that promise reviews without the work. Good reviews must be earned. Learn more about getting legitimate reviews in the following episodes:
- How to Get More Book Reviews With Joe Walters
- How to Get More 5-Star Reviews With Beta Readers, Editors
- How to Get More Book Reviews With Jim Kukral
- How to Get More Book Reviews With Derek Doepker
What metadata mistakes can get your listing pulled down?
Lesley: Metadata issues are the biggest category of problems I see. And it’s not just the metadata itself; it can also be your listing detail page. You have to make sure your page doesn’t contain any intellectual property violations, like referencing another author’s title to say, “If you liked this book, you’ll love mine.”
Don’t put another title on your page.
In the metadata, the big problems are keyword stuffing and using branded keywords, especially in nonfiction. If a sales guru has a named system, “Joe Bob’s Sales System,” and you put that name in your back-end keywords, your listing will get taken down because you’re using his copyrighted term.
You also can’t stuff every holiday or every possible audience demographic into your keywords. Amazon’s crawlers need to be able to sort and differentiate results, and keyword stuffing makes that impossible.
Thomas: It’s not just dangerous, it’s also bad practice. Focused keywords targeting the specific reader you want to attract are both safer and more effective.
If you target the wrong kind of reader, or the right reader in the wrong mood, or you’re dishonest about what the book is, you might bamboozle someone into buying it. They don’t enjoy it, they leave a bad review, and that negative review can be very harmful, especially if it was avoidable.
Lesley: There’s another way keyword stuffing is harmful that most people don’t consider. If you stuff your back-end keywords with irrelevant terms and then run Amazon’s automatic ad campaign, which most people use, Amazon will pull from your metadata to decide who to show your ads to. That means you waste a significant portion of your ad budget on people who will never buy your book.
Metadata stuffing can get you suspended and also cost you a fortune in wasted ad spend.
Thomas: It’s a blessing and a curse. Amazon wants you to work with them to create a good customer experience. That’s how you avoid trouble.
What should you do in your first response to Amazon after a suspension?
Thomas: Let’s assume now that someone has accidentally broken one of the terms of servic, and they’ve already gotten that scary email. Or maybe they’re listening and starting to suspect they know what they did wrong. What’s the next step?
Step 1: Pause and Ask Around
Lesley: KDP suspensions are harder and more opaque than other types of Amazon suspensions. If you’re a product seller, it’s usually pretty clear what Amazon thinks you did wrong. With KDP, most of the time you’re given no specific reason. It’s just “you’ve broken our terms of service” or “you’ve harmed customers.”
Thomas: You broke one of their million terms of service.
Lesley: It’s very upsetting.
The first thing most people do is respond by asking, “Can you please tell me what I did wrong?” Don’t do that. That is a serious mistake.
Amazon assumes you know what you did. They will not explain the rules to you.
Think of the worst teacher you ever had who made you sit in the corner until you could tell them what you did and why. They expect you to figure it out.
On the KDP side, you don’t get many chances where they read your response. If they send back an email saying “you’re permanently blocked, we’re done,” ignore that language. I’ve gotten most people back, even after getting that email. But KDP has a very short fuse compared to other suspension types. They don’t tell you to try again. So do not blow one of your real shots on “what did I do?”
Take some time before you respond. Talk to anyone involved with your account, a mentor, a service provider, someone who’s helped you market. Run through all the reasons we’ve discussed today. Usually, you can suss out what they think you did. Brainstorm that before you ever respond.
Thomas: I got a useful insight into what this looks like from Elon Musk, of all people, in an interview about fraud detection at PayPal. He said that either 40% or 60% of customer support calls they received were fraudulent people trying to manipulate the support team. Not 5% or 10%. Nearly half or more.
The person you’re interacting with at Amazon is thinking, “Six of the last 10 people I spoke with were scammers trying to scam me.” They are deeply suspicious of everything you say.
The things you do to try to justify yourself, like opening a second account, make you look worse. Who opens a second account? Scammers. Instead of fighting it, they just start over. That looks very suspicious.
They are not giving you any benefit of the doubt. You have to articulate yourself very carefully and reframe everything around creating a better experience for the buyer. Use Amazon’s language.
Lesley: Amazon puts out a press release every year on how many fraudulent accounts it shut down and how many billions of dollars in potential fraudulent sales it stopped. We’re talking millions of fraudulent seller accounts. They deal with scammy people all day long.
If you have kids and you’ve ever had a toddler standing right next to something broken saying, “I didn’t do it,” that’s how Amazon feels all day long. So yes, you have to come in with credibility.
Step 2: Admit Something
Which brings me to step two, and this is the part everyone hates. You have to cop to something. Two reactions come up. One is, “But if I admit something, they’ll never let me back.” Have an open mind about what “copping to something” means. Two is, “But that’s not true.” There is always something you can acknowledge.
Here’s an example. I spoke with a bookseller who was suspended, and she suspected it was because of a fraudulent reviewer. She had reported that person to Goodreads and got their account shut down. That person then messaged her on Facebook, and she sent them a link to purchase her book through Facebook Messenger.
Did she do anything wrong? No. She was protecting the platform. But she can truthfully say, “Now I know I should never send links through social media or instant messaging.” She didn’t do anything bad, and that statement alone won’t get her reinstated. But we can build a story around it by saying, “Here is what we believe caused this false positive, and I will never do it again.”
“Copping to something” doesn’t mean confessing to a crime. It means saying, “I didn’t realize that putting every national holiday in my keywords was a problem. I understand now, and I won’t do that again.” You have to give them something.
Is it better to deal with Amazon’s humans or bots?
Thomas: Many people say, “If I could just get past the bot to a real customer support rep, they’d understand.” But that rep is just an extension of the machine. All their answers are pre-written. They follow very specific rules and have almost no agency.
A large language model has more flexibility than that person. They have to check a box that says a problem was fixed.
When Lesley talks about copping to something, you’re essentially giving them the box to check to close the case. The employee at Amazon doesn’t care about the buyer experience. They care about their personal metrics, and the biggest one is how quickly they close tickets. You want to make it easier for them to say yes than to say no. The more thinking you require them to do, the more analysis and judgment are involved, the easier it is for them to just reject.
When things get really busy, some just start saying no to everyone. At that point, you’d prefer a bot because it might read your email. Make it very, very easy for them to say, “Yes, I’m going to reinstate your account.”
Lesley: Here’s some data to back that up. They are supposed to address 20 tickets per hour, which is three minutes per ticket. They are not looking at your account history or past appeals. They have three minutes to make a decision.
When their queue overflows, they will hit reject just to push the ticket back out and deal with it later, because they’ll get penalized if they’re not hitting their 20 per hour. The worst part is that if they reinstate someone who reoffends, that is held against them. If they don’t reinstate someone who should have been reinstated and it gets overturned later, that hurts them too, but it happens far less often. So they’re better off being cautious.
The appeals that do get read follow a specific format. It’s called a plan of action, and it has three parts.
- Part 1: The root cause, what went wrong.
- Part 2: The immediate actions you took to fix it, such as removing the bad keywords from your back end right away.
- Part 3: How you will prevent this from happening in the future. Something like, “I educated myself on the rules. I’ll review them every three months. I’ve put a checklist in place.”
Keep it short but not so short that there’s no detail, because then they think you copied and pasted. But don’t write the great American novel. Write in bullet points with three to four sentences per section. They need to get through it quickly.
And please don’t use AI to write your plan of action. They will run it through an AI checker if they suspect it, and it won’t be taken seriously. Use AI to brainstorm ideas for what to say, then rewrite it in your own words. I have this from people who have worked and are working at Amazon. Just don’t do it.
Thomas: This is probably the main reason AI isn’t recommended. AI tends to be wordy, especially when you’re nervous and trying to check every box. If someone has three minutes and your email is padded with 200 extra words, those words are hurting you. They run out the clock before you’ve made your case.
Lesley: Plus, many people reading these appeals speak English as a second language. If you’re using flowery, AI-generated language, you’re not helping yourself with that reader. Aim for clear, somewhat formal business language, but keep it plain. Long words don’t help anyone read faster.
Thomas: The lower tiers of Amazon customer support are increasingly less likely to be native English speakers. Amazon is minimizing cost, and technical jargon or elaborate phrasing creates additional barriers. Keep it simple.
What do you do after your appeal is rejected?
Lesley: Two things can happen. You get a rejection that invites another appeal, or your email goes into silence. Sometimes you also get a “we’re done with you” message.
f you get silence, wait a full five business days. Response times vary dramatically depending on enforcement initiatives. Sometimes you hear back the same day. Sometimes they say they need 10 business days for a more complex investigation.
If they allow you to submit a new appeal, think more creatively. Did any of your wording cause confusion? Have someone who knows nothing about KDP read it and tell you if they understand what you’re saying. Make sure nothing is confusing and that it’s in the right order. Then submit again.
If you get two rejections or two silences, it’s time to escalate. Amazon has an escalation culture. People are afraid that escalating will make someone mad. It’s the opposite. Amazon tries to behave like an entrepreneurial startup even at its size, which means they build things that break and often don’t know it until someone from outside tells them. They appreciate when people escalate. They welcome it, as long as you are respectful and businesslike.
You can say, “This has devastated my income.” You can say that calmly. But as long as you’re polite, escalating is completely appropriate.
I’ll give you the one escalation address everyone already knows but thinks doesn’t work, and I’ll tell you how to make it work. The address is jeff@amazon.com. Yes, Jeff is no longer at Amazon, but that address still works. It goes to an executive relations team, but the queue is enormous. To get through, you need a compelling subject line. Puns work great. They love something that shows a sense of humor, or that grabs their attention instead of sounding like every other complaint email. If you can tie it to the topic of your book, even better.
Address the email to “Dear Executive Seller Relations,” so they know you know you’re writing to them and not to the guy launching rockets. Then open with a sentence that makes them care. Something like, “My family’s Tuscan cuisine recipes have disappeared from Amazon, and I’m devastated.” Include your KDP account ID in the first sentence or two so they can pull up your account quickly. Send this from the exact email address you used when you set up your KDP account.
Your email should have three parts.
- Part 1: Tell them why this matters and what’s happened.
- Part 2: Say what you’ve done to try to fix it. Give a brief summary of the plan of action you already submitted.
- Part 3: Include a clear ask, like “Please have a supervisor review my appeal.”
Then, close with your full name, phone number, and email address. It shows you’re a real person and that it’s important to you.
Sometimes someone at Amazon picks up the phone. If you get a call, that’s good news. It usually means they want to work with you. KDP authors who’ve been suspended have very good results with these Jeff @amazon.com escalations.
Thomas: If they call, they may have found a bug in their system and need more information from you to understand why your account got flagged. So ,approach it like that. Tech companies often genuinely need information to solve a problem.
If you can have a good interaction with them, you’re more likely to get your account reinstated. Plus, they can adjust the back-end process so that neither you nor anyone else gets flagged for that same reason. They’ve added nuance to the machine.
Lesley: Right now, KDP has no way to call Amazon or request a callback like there is for product sellers. But even for sellers, that option doesn’t help much and often produces wrong information that results in a wild goose chase.
What do I say if I get a call from Amazon?
Lesley: If you do get a call, listen far more than you talk. If they state something as a fact that you didn’t do, don’t argue. Just let it go. If they’ve taken the time to call you and you play ball, you’re going to get your account back.
If jeff@amazon.com doesn’t work, there are other avenues. Amazon has a social media presence, and sometimes reaching out there connects you to the seller performance team. There’s no dedicated KDP group monitoring social channels, but it’s worth trying if you’re stuck.
Consultants like me help authors navigate this process.
When does it make sense to hire a professional?
Thomas: If someone has received a rejection and they need someone to walk them through the process, what do you offer?
Lesley: I’m essentially your concierge through suspension. Amazon doesn’t want to hear from me directly because they consider your account confidential. I simply help you communicate with them, telling you exactly where to send the email, exactly what the subject line should be, what to say, and how to craft it so that you can send it yourself.
I also help with the upfront brainstorming to make sure you’re appealing the right issue. Sometimes other issues need to be investigated. I charge a flat fee. Beware anyone who charges hourly. This process can take one email or 20 appeals plus an escalation to a government agency. You want someone who charges a flat fee and sticks with you until you’re reinstated or every option has been exhausted.
Thomas: Sometimes, hiring an expert makes sense.
The wrong kind of expert for this situation is a lawyer. From Amazon’s perspective, this is a customer service situation, not a legal one. The moment you bring in a lawyer, you’re escalating to a framework where you have very few tools. You clicked “accept” on the terms of service, and Amazon gets to set the rules.
The PR approach of trying to drum up public pressure is also very risky and almost never works unless you’re already famous enough that other famous people will amplify it. The PR team at Amazon does sentiment analysis, and if the noise gets loud enough, someone can escalate it internally. But that’s rare.
Lesley Hensell, thank you for being so generous with your knowledge today. Hopefully, the prevention section will help you avoid these problems in the first place. But if you find yourself in trouble, reach out to Lesley. If you’re not sure whether you’re a good fit, she does offer a free introductory call.
Lesley: I’m always happy to talk to anyone at no charge about their situation and brainstorm with them. Many people then go try it on their own, and if they can’t fix it, they come back.
Go to my website, fill out the form, and I’ll send you a calendar link, and we’ll chat.
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