#PublishingReinvented 187 How To Get Banned By Amazon + Hamartia Anyone?

Did you know that your Amazon account can be deleted permanently without notice if you break Amazon book content guidelines?

For instance, authors are often advised to put a link in the back of a book to a mailing list sign up form. Please don’t do that. It’s specifically against Amazon rules.

Here is the list of prohibited external links in a book/ebook:

• Links to pornography

• Links to commercial eBook store sites other than Amazon

• Links to web forms that request customer information (e.g., email address, physical address or similar)

• Links to illegal, harmful, infringing, or offensive content

• Links that are malicious in intent (e.g., virus, phishing, or similar)

People have also recently been losing their Amazon KDP accounts for putting keywords in their subtitles to rank higher on search results. Keep your subtitles relevant to the title and show them on the cover. And remember, print subtitles can never be changed.

And print editions can never be unpublished. That’s another of Amazon’s unbreakable rules.

They want to maintain a second hand market for print editions, which would not work if we could just unpublish a print edition.

Many people have gotten away with breaking the link and subtitle rules, but reports have come in of people’s accounts being terminated and royalties seized recently, and distress all around. It looks like Amazon is tightening up. You have been warned.

So how can you build an email list? Social media and ads.

Read Amazon’s full ebook Content Guidelines here. Seems to get longer every time I look at it!

Hamartia?

This is the concept of the Tragic Flaw, something that drives a character to ruin. I’m exploring this and other story tools to add depth to the plot of my new book. Script writers have some good tools for story structure…..I found a great explanation of Hamartia in this YouTube video.

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