Amazon Attacks Author's Autonomy (with AI)!
A Literal Literary Loser Launches Latest Lob
OK, so I’m exaggerating. Amazon didn’t attack me, per se. I simply liked the alliteration. But it has been a crazy couple of days. Here’s what happened:
The World Figure Skating Championships just ended. It’s not the Olympics, but thanks to the record-breaking performance of the young man with the six quadruple jumps and the 40 year old woman in the Pairs event who became the oldest person ever to win a World title, there was a bit of a buzz around it.
Last week, I wrote about Using News Nonfiction Hooks to Sell Your Fiction, and the success I’ve had promoting my Figure Skating Mystery series by tying it into what’s happening in the real-life skating world.
I had already made arrangements to do a month’s worth of ads on a popular figure skating discussion board. The owner of the board looked over my Amazon page and suggested a couple of tweaks to the copy to make the product more appealing to her readers.
I am always open to suggestions, so I went ahead and did what she advised.
That turned out to be a mistake.
Figure Skating Mystery Series (5 Books in 1) first went on sale in January of 2014.
Amazon had no problems with it for exactly a decade. But that was before books written by Artificial Intelligence began flooding the marketplace, and Amazon began using the same AI to suss out fraud.
When I updated my product description - only the product description, and nothing else - I had to, technically, re-upload my book. At which point Amazon promptly blocked it. And gave me no reason why. A week before my advertising campaign was set to launch, this was… not optimal.
I used the Chat Now feature to speak with a representative. The alleged representative (who could well be yet another AI), was utterly not helpful. They could not tell me why my book was suddenly blocked or what I should do about it. They only told me to email Customer Service. Which defeats the point of a live chat, doesn’t it?
When I asked Customer Service what the problem was, they emailed me within 12 hours to advise that:
During our review, we found that the following book(s) causes a misleading customer experience because it impairs customers' ability to make good buying decisions.
Figure Skating Mystery Series (5 Books in 1) by Adams, Alina (AUTHOR) (ID: 4438874)
Items that can cause a misleading customer experience include:
• Similarity of the contributor name to another author
• Similarity of the title to a previously published book
• Similarity of the cover to a previously published book
• Similarity of the publisher listed in the book details to another publisher
• Similarity of the description to a previously published known work
As a result, we will not be making the book(s) available for sale on Amazon.
I was, to put it mildly, a wee bit incensed.
I wrote back to point out that the book had been for sale on their own site for over a decade with no problems, if my cover design matched someone else’s it was likely because they ripped me off, rather than vice-versa, and that, yes, this work was similar to other works because I also offered each of my Figure Skating mysteries for sale individually, but that boxed sets were allowed by Amazon rules, and this was a boxed set.
And then I waited. And fumed.
In the end, my screed must have gotten to a human being, because the book was, once again, available for purchase on Amazon.
Is it a case of all’s well that ends well? I don’t know. The whole experience made me gun shy about making even the smallest of changes to any of my other published works, which makes me hesitant to continue using Amazon as heavily as I have been.
While I wrestle with my existential crisis, I will let you know if/how/when my latest promotion works out.
And since I am always promoting more than one title at a time, please enjoy my latest video, where my daughter and I review “Your Presence is Mandatory” by Sasha Vasilyuk, and talk the hipness of trauma, living multiple lives, and why my father is “so Barbie.” Plus, production bloopers!