- If you're in the business of publishing
books on the Amazon platform,
are you ever worried about breaking the rules?
I know quite a few of you are
and there are some that you may know about
and some that you may not know about
and other things in-between.
So today we're gonna talk about how to publish books
on Amazon without breaking the rules, stay tuned.
(light rock music)
This is Self-Publishing with Dale
where you'll learn to publish books that sell
and build an unstoppable brand.
Stick around to the end so I share
exactly how you can safeguard your account
against termination or suspension at the very minimum.
Also if you haven't had the opportunity yet
and you're new to the business of self-publishing on Amazon,
you may want to take a look
at my Self-Publishing for Beginners video.
Okay so this video is going to be for people
that have published on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
or published somehow in the Amazon
be it through an aggregate publisher
or are planning on doing this.
Today I'm gonna talk about the eight
most common violations when it comes
to Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.
One, opening multiple KDP accounts.
This one, believe it or not, a lot of people get messed up
and you might be saying well Dan,
why do people open up multiple accounts?
A couple of times it could be by accident
because they forget their login
and so they just do another one
and other times, some people want to split off
into different brands
and they wanna separate their accounts.
Sadly, according to Terms of Service,
you can only have one KDP account per household.
In the event that you want to say split off
and use different accounts,
you may want to reach out to the KDP team
and tell them exactly what your plans are
and they'll clarify whether or not
you can or cannot do that.
In most instances, you probably can't do that.
Now if for some reason you function
much like my wife and I do,
we have two separate business entities and it's not an issue
and I think early on we might have reached out
to the KDP team and it was not an issue
and we haven't had a problem since day one.
So stay clear of doing multiple KDP accounts,
don't try to game the system,
they all quite frankly, they'll just terminate your account
and you're gonna be starting
at square one from somewhere else.
Summary books or unofficial guides.
Okay, don't get too like caught up on this one
and go ah, that's gonna get me suspended or terminated?
It's worked for some people
and other people it doesn't work so well.
Now summary books could be something
as simple as say like the book
by Tony Robbins Unleash The Power Within,
someone could probably do a summary book
and it seems like a good idea
and it seems like it would be very profitable
and there have been some people on the market
that have done it pretty well.
Unfortunately, it gets into that gray area
and I've known of some people
having their accounts suspended or books being blocked
or even having their accounts terminated altogether.
I would highly recommend you just steer clear
of the summary books and unofficial guides
because it may get you into hot water
at some point or another.
Price gouging.
This is a fairly interesting phenomenon
that actually was shared on The Book Marketing podcast
with Dave Chesson when he had guest Derek Doepker on.
They talked a little bit about when CreateSpace,
it used to have this weird fluke,
you would say for instance
have your paperback priced to 8.99
and then you decided to say bump it up to 19.99.
Well what ends up happening is
it almost always corrects on Amazon's platform
to that higher price point
but because you might have chosen expanded distribution,
what happens is it takes a while and a bit of a delay
to communicate with the expanded distribution platforms
about that price change,
it can take upwards of six to eight weeks.
So Amazon immediately says, oh wait, hang on a second,
it's at a cheaper price somewhere else,
we're gonna price match so it'll cross that line out
and drop it down.
Well the nice thing is and this is where it becomes
a little bit of a heartache and hassle
is they will pay you at that higher price point
by any sales that come through Amazon.
Now a lot of you ne'er-do-wells
are probably saying, hmm, how can I work this system?
Well people have tried and they they have been successful
but in the same instance,
they've also been successful and failing at this
because ultimately what ends up coming back
is Amazon comes in and says,
no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do.
We know what you're doing, you're gaming the system
to try to get your paycheck up higher.
So folks, don't do that,
price gouging should not be something
within your business strategy
because eventually it'll come back to bite you.
If you do plan on increasing your prices of your print books
then do it because you see the value in your product,
not because you see the value in Amazon
giving you a larger paycheck.
Falsified page reads.
As you may know, if your eBook is enrolled
in the KDP Select Program,
you're paid for each page that is read
through the Kindle Unlimited Program
or the Kindle Owner's Lending Library
and with each page flip,
it also increases your bestseller rank,
it's a little bit of the unfair advantage
I talked a little bit about
inside the KDP Select Review video
but there are many ways that falsified page reads
or even some things that lead to false positives
for something like this that you need to be aware of.
So let's talk about each one of these underneath this
before we move on to the other issues.
Internal linking.
Now let's not be mistaken,
you can internally link within your book
and send people from one chapter to the next
but you can't directly coerce the reader
at the very beginning of the book
to click to the very end of the book.
You're probably saying well, I don't understand,
what does that have to do with anything?
Well here's the deal.
You can coerce somebody to go to the back of the book
and it'll send a signal to Kindle Direct Publishing
that that person has read the entire book.
Can you say scam?
Absolutely!
You're gaming the system if you're doing something like that
and I recommend you don't do it.
In fact, this actually happened back in late 2015 to 2016
until pretty much the folks over at KDP
said enough, stop that, we see what you're doing,
you're gaming the system and quite frankly,
we don't appreciate it.
Hiring VAs for nefarious purposes.
I understand that hiring virtual assistants
is sometimes a necessity
especially when you start to scale your business
but if you're hiring them to do certain practices
to escalate or raise up your books rank
or get more sales or get more page reads, then it's wrong.
You shouldn't be doing that.
In fact, some of the practices include
having them check out your book through various accounts
and flip through that so it increases
your bestseller ranking.
Not good, not cool, there are many indie authors
out there struggling and what you're doing
is taking food off their table they had otherwise have.
If your book is not good enough for your reader
to read from front to back,
you shouldn't be hiring out VAs to flip through your book,
you should be hiring probably VAs or professional editors
to clean up your manuscript
so people are compelled to read to the back
instead of gaming the system.
And the other thing is click farms.
You've heard this probably before
but if you haven't let me kind of break it down.
Essentially, the search engine algorithm
as I've discussed here on this channel before
functions on engagement
and the more clicks that come to your specific product page,
the more it raises relevancy.
Well click farms work in regards that,
They'll come in and they'll click repeatedly
onto your product page through various nefarious means,
I know this is my common recurring word
but nonetheless what ends up happening
is it raises relevancies but it's doing it in a false way
and it's doing it in a way
that is just it's dirty, it's sleazy.
And so some of these click farms
of course are gonna be the same type of people
that will go into your book and flip through it
or click a link to the back of it
so it registers in the Kindle Unlimited Program,
raises your rank and raises your paycheck, not cool.
Bonus books.
They closed up this loophole this past year in 2018
and I was really happy to see this
because a number of years ago I seen quite a few of these
would be self-publishing gurus
stating that you could really work the system of KTP Select
by putting a bunch of bonus books into one book.
Yeah it makes sense to deliver extra value to your readers
but you shouldn't do it in a way that it games the system
to where you're getting more page reads.
So let's just take for instance,
you have a short story and maybe it's 12 pages long
and let's say that you have a back catalog
of 20 to 40 short stories.
Well these people would take and put those
into that short story
so it would make it almost novel length.
In fact even the size of an Encyclopedia Britannica.
And then if someone flipped through the pages,
then naturally they would end up getting paid
far more in the Kindle Unlimited Library
or through the KDP Select Program
than if they were actually to get a purchase
of that short story book.
So Amazon came in and was like, we see what you're doing,
you're gaming the system, and it's not cool
and I know that this got
a lot of indie authors really worked up.
The people that really love this craft,
the people quite frankly
that kind of have the same mindset that I do
that you know this is just not right.
So Amazon came in and the official rule is
that if you're gonna have a bonus book,
it cannot make up more than 10% of the entire book.
So that means if you've got a short story,
you can have bonus content,
so that same 10-page sort story
that we were talking about before,
your bonus content better not be more
than about a page length.
Unpublish, republish.
Oh my goodness, this one for some reason just gets my goat.
(goat bleating) It just drives me insane.
I've even talked about this a couple of years ago.
So here's the deal,
there's a 30-day window that Amazon allots
towards new publications.
So if you've just published something, 30 days,
they kinda put a little bit of gas on the fire there,
they provide not only your category
of your particularly book
but they give an additional category
specific to new releases in that particular niche.
So it gives more exposure and it gets it
to where it's more searchable
and it really helps in getting your publication out there.
So let's just say for instance
there's some best-selling book,
it's been there for years at number one,
unfortunately, you'll never be able
to take that number one spot just being a new author
or brand new to the business
so they put that new release category
also known as the hot new releases back in the day.
They would allow that to be that spotlight,
here are the books that are doing good
in the past month or so and we want you to see it.
But herein lies the problem.
What happens after that first 30 days?
Well if you don't have a good business plan
or a good marketing promotion plan,
then that book tends to just drop off.
And that's not good, everybody can agree with that.
Well someone figured out in their infinite wisdom
that all you had to do was just unpublish
or delist that book and then just republish it
underneath a different ASIN
and there was like it's a brand new product,
you put it back on the market
and start that 30-day window again
as if it was a brand new publication.
All the reviews from the previous version
would end up getting wiped out
so if there was any low reviews of some sort,
those get wiped out and this is a brand new publication
with no reviews on it, it's brand new, it's got,
and here's the funny thing is
they would never change the title,
the subtitle or anything within the contents,
it was the same exact book
and they're just working the system.
So the unpublish and republish thing
is pretty much to my knowledge gone.
There are some people that have tried
to take advantage of this system but rest assured,
Amazon has a watchful eye on things like that
so I'd recommend that if your book isn't doing good
after the first 30 days, if you're gonna delist it,
just keep it off the market.
The poor customer experience.
Yes, here's the funny thing,
a lot of people said Amazon doesn't care,
well we can make the argument back and forth
about whether they care about us the indie author
or the people that are publishing through their platform
but one thing we can agree on
is they care about their customers' experience
because if the customers aren't happy,
then they're not gonna come back and buy from them
and they're not gonna make money.
So they've got a nifty little button there
on the Your Product page and if for some reason
they don't like it, if they found that it was really bad,
yeah they couldn't put a one star review
and they control you, you know, 'til the cows come home
but at this point, one of the most effective tools
the person that doesn't like your publication
is called report abuse and they can scroll on down
and say exactly why they've had a poor customer experience
and if you get enough complaints,
they'll come in there and they'll shut that account down
and I've known quite a few self-publishers
that have had their account shut down.
And in even one of the instances
someone was using Google Translate
for numerous iterations of their book
and what they would do is fully disclose
that it was done through,
and it might not even been Google Translate,
it could have been in some other software,
they fully disclose yes,
the translation might be slightly off
but you know you get the point.
No, they didn't get the point and what they did
was they reported abuse and said okay,
this is stupid I'm paying money for Google Translate?
Are you kidding me?
So they're asking for refunds and reporting abuse
and accounts get shut down.
Don't create a poor customer experience.
If you cannot provide good publications,
don't bother putting it onto the market.
Review swaps.
Here we go, this one's gonna light everybody a fire
because there's some people that go,
review swaps are good for you.
No account has ever been shut down, Dale.
Listen folks, first of all, calm down,
let's talk about review swaps and exactly what they are.
It is a quid pro quo system to where an author
will exchange their book with another author
and it started out innocent enough,
in fact, way long ago back at the advent of KTP,
Amazon was all for author review swaps
but then the ne'er-do-wells came on in
and they started to hire out other people
to exchange these reviews but they weren't legit reviews,
they were just fake reviews.
Quite frankly, if you're hiring out to get fake reviews
on your book just so you can get better exposure,
shame on you.
What you're doing is wrong.
Putting fake reviews on a product is just,
there's no other way to put it, it's sleazy,
it's wrong, shame on you for doing that.
And no, it's not good for beginners and no,
it's not good for anyone at all
within the self-publishing industry.
In fact, you're putting a black eye on this business
and if you're gonna do something like that, move on.
And then there's the argument that some people say,
well Amazon's get enough money,
they can go ahead and give it to me
so it doesn't matter if I have fake reviews.
Remember, this doesn't start out as Amazon's money,
this starts out as a customer's money
and if you're putting fake reviews on your products
so they come in and purchase it
with the belief that it's great, it's stellar,
oh it's got 25 five star reviews and zero no stars,
well that's where it gets really iffy,
it gets really strange
because you're not stealing from Amazon,
you're stealing from your mother,
your father, your brother, your neighbor,
your friends, your family, everybody else in-between,
you're stealing from them and not just Amazon.
So when it comes to review swaps and fake reviews,
stop doing it.
Are they banning accounts,
are they terminating or are they suspending?
No, but as I'd mentioned before,
Community Guidelines is a big one
and this is where I'm gonna go full disclosure on you,
a number of years ago I was told that review swaps
were 100% okay and I believed it
and I read every single book I'd review swap
because I love reading and I would put together
the finest reviews on the market,
I was like yeah and I'd get these,
well I'd be like oh this is garbage, what happened here?
And then they come to find out what the real process was
and sadly it was too little too late
because Amazon came in there
and revoked my community privileges.
I can no longer leave reviews, I can't comment on reviews,
I can't do so much as participate in any things
involved in the Community Guidelines
so if I ever wanna do a free giveaway through Amazon,
can't do it, it's not allowed
because I had those privileges revoked from me.
Now will your account get terminated or suspended
remains to be seen but rest assured,
if there's some kind of iffy black hat tactics
attached to your book and your account,
then you're definitely grabbing the attention
of Amazon KDP at some point.
But that's not it when it comes to mistakes
that you can make within this business.
In fact, I have a full video series
based on the biggest mistakes
you can avoid in self-publishing
and I started out with my story behind plagiarism
and how it could have nearly
completely put me out of business.
You're gonna wanna make sure
that you go take a look at that video
and I'll see you there.
Outsource writer access to my account
or did I allow my hired freelancer free reign
on the entire project?
It was one simple step that requires very little work.