Should I Be Mad at Amazon/KDP?
My previous series of posts describes the sequence of events. They sent me an email saying that, because I had multiple accounts and my accounts were connected with one that had violated their guidelines, they were terminating my account, would not permit me to open another, would not pay me royalties accumulated between the last payment and the date when the account was terminated. All of the books of mine that I had self-published vanished from Amazon.
I wrote multiple replies, pointing out that so far as I knew I had done none of those things and asking what connection they thought I had to what account. The only response I got was to be told that they had reviewed the case and my account was still suspended. All their messages were form letters. When I received two identical form letters responding to two quite different emails of mine, one sent three minutes after the other, both purportedly by the same person, I concluded that I was interacting with software, not humans.
Today I received an email telling me that my account had been restored. There was no explanation and the tone of it — "you must review your catalog and remove any other titles currently available for sale on Amazon that do not comply with the KDP Content Guidelines" — implied that I had done something wrong, although they were willing to forgive me if I behaved myself in the future.
The natural reaction to that behavior is to be angry at them, advise anyone who asked me about self-publishing to avoid KDP, and put up my books using one of the other services, something I had already started to do.
That would be the appropriate response to a human being who treated me that way but I am not sure it is appropriate here. KDP is not a human being. It is a firm that deals with a very large number of authors, some of whom probably do things that violate their rules — the obvious two being copyright violation and pornography. They ask for reports of violations. It would be nice if every time a violation was reported to them a competent staff member spent the time to carefully check out the report, but competent staff members are expensive. It may make more sense, from their standpoint, to use software to look for possible violations of their rules in accounts reported to them, even if the software doesn't do a very good job.
My interaction with them was irritating and it lowers my opinion of KDP, but I am not sure that if I were running things I could do better.