Jade Summer, one of the most popular and best-selling publishers of low content books on
Amazon has recently had their account terminated so in this video we're going to take a closer look
at why and more importantly what you can do to minimize losing your account getting it terminated
due to trademark infringement. Now if you've not been to channel before then welcome my name is
Paul Marles and I do videos on how to make it keep it and grow it and that's your money I'm
talking about if you do like videos like that then please do give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe
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this. So Jade Summer one of the most successful publishers on Amazon, this is a publisher that
I often use as an example in some of my videos, has had their account terminated and you can see
these were the types of books being published. They were coloring books. And an announcement was made
on the website saying that on november the 15th the account was terminated, actually terminated on
november the 11th due to trademark related issues with the title and subtitle of two of the books.
Now, they thought this was a minor issue, they've contacted amazon but still their
account has not been reinstated and in fact they've lost all the income from their sales
from september the 1st until this very moment so it's serious. This is a serious problem
and it can happen to huge publishers like Jade Summer even though they are selling you know
thousands of books. They're still not protected. Now it appears that this was a trademark related
issue and it's a question I get asked about. Frequently usually it comes in the form of
I want to use these words or this phrase, can i do it? Will i be breaching trademark? But unfortunately
that's not an answer I can give. It's a bit like asking me, I want to buy this cryptocurrency
or this share or stock in a particular company, should I buy it or I've got this medical problem
I want to take this medication, should I take it? Well, the problem is, that then comes into the
realm of giving professional or legal advice and it's the same with the the trademark terms what
you're actually asking me for is legal advice. Now if you didn't know I'm not a trademark
lawyer so that's not advice that I can give because if something happens to your account
then obviously you've got take legal recourse and it's the same you know if I gave you
advice on a share or medication and it all went wrong, it's my responsibility. but what I can do
is show you the steps that I go through to minimize the risk of myself infringing trademark
and losing my account. now I want to stress this is about minimizing risk. There's no 100 guarantee,
even if you find those words or phrases that you think perfect they don't come up anywhere i can
use these, there's nothing 100% in this game or any online business game. It's all about
minimizing risk. So I'm going to show you what I do. So first of all you've done your research
and you've come up with terms or maybe keywords that you want to use in the title subtitle and
keyword boxes and yes you can breach trademark infringement by using words in your seven keyword
boxes just because customers don't see them or you think that Amazon doesn't see them. Well there are
ways, actually, that people can find out that you are using those in your seven keyword boxes. But if
you are you've still got the potential of losing your account even if you use them in those seven
keyword boxes so don't be tempted. I know people will use things like you know Marvel, spider-man,
superman or whatever in their seven keyword boxes, think they won't be detected, then all of a sudden
they've lost their accounts. So you've come up with the words that you want to use what do I do next?
I go over to the uspto.gov website there's also the equivalent website in the uk it's at
trademarks.ipo.gov.uk and this is the intellectual property office. I mainly use the one in the US but
it is worthwhile double checking in the uk and there's an equivalent site in europe as well.
i'll leave the the addresses to these two websites in the description below. Okay, so we go over to the
right hand side here where it says trademarks and then the test which is the search trademark
database let me just click on that and then click on basic word mark search and then you put in the
the term that you're that you're wanting to check. In this case i'm going to put in gratitude journal
and then you have the options of clicking on live and dead or just live. You can do either.
What I normally do is leave it on live and dead. If hundreds of results come up I then narrow it down
just by clicking live. Then the other box that iI look at is this one here. It says all search terms
and I usually leave it on all search terms or you can just choose the exact search phrase if you
like. Again I'll do that if I get lots of results. And then just click on submit query and then you
have all the lists of different word marks which are related to to your term that you've just
searched for. And then we've got the status here and it tells us whether that trademark is
live or dead. Now you can see here we've got four instances of gratitude journal but each instance
this trademark is dead and the only ones that come up of live are these here which is not the the
term that I want to use so in that case I would say to myself okay the risk of this is very low
I will go ahead and use it. Now let's look at an example where it comes up as live. So in this case
I'm going to use a search term bullet journal. Now you may know these as dot grid journals but a lot
of people particularly if they're starting out in this business, and I nearly fell foul of this
a few years ago because I was going to create a bullet journal until i checked on the trademark
database website. So bullet journals which are dot grid journals. So again submit query. Now we can see
this is slightly different. We've got one that's dead and we've got these three here that are live.
So already this is raising alarm signals. Straight away if I looked at that I'm very cautious. I would
go ahead and say do you know what I'm going to leave that. I have a little phrase that says if
in doubt leave it out. But you might want to just drill down a bit further and some people may say
no but you know this could be in the class that's not relevant to your book which is absolutely
reasonable. So, if we just click on one here, it says bullet journal and it gives us these classes
here 016 which is notebooks blank journals blank journals blank paper notebooks etc. I think that's
pretty plain. That's come up. We're producing these types of books so that tells me that
that's it, it's a no deal. It's trademarked for whatever we're producing. The next one 041
is a little bit more iffy. It's like educational services in the field of journaling ,note taking,
rapid logging, productivity. Sounds a bit more vague doesn't it? So you then start to think well I'm not
100 sure does this applies to me and some of the classes or categories can be even more vague than
this. And it might be, I don't know, production of paper material, clothing and you might go okay
it's it's not my class of goods that i'm creating in, I could go ahead and use this I think.
Now for me I don't do that. However, you may be confident that this is not in a class
of good that you're creating and you may say okay well I'm happy I'm going to go ahead and use it. Or,
what I advise doing if it does look a bit iffy, you're not sure, is going ahead and consulting
a trademark lawyer. Now I've been involved in a lot of legal work over the last 10 years,
in the line of work I was doing, and if something is a bit vague you may find the
trademark lawyer does come back and say look i'm not too sure, you're probably all right, but maybe
suggest not because they would tend to err on the side of caution. But they would give you more of a
definitive answer. However, that's going to cost you money and maybe not be worthwhile if it's
just to produce a low content book that you expect only maybe to get a few sales a month from. But it
might be worthwhile something doing if this is a project you've been working on for a year. You
anticipate good sales, making a lot of money and you know you can recoup the costs of legal advice .
However, when it is vague I have an issue in that Amazon may look at your book and they don't know
you've gone through getting all the legal advice and they may look at it and go hmm this is a bit
vague, they could well have infringed trademark. Now what is Amazon going to do? Are they
going to go and get a lawyer and say look we've got this book we're not sure, could you tell us ,you
know, whether they are infringing trademark. Well I think it's safe to say the answer would be no
and what might happen, is in the case of Jade Summer, is they may just remove your books
and close your account. Your account just gets terminated. And again, I get lots of
distressed people, and understandably so, contact me, and this happens on a weekly basis guaranteed,
that they've had their account terminated, what can they do? Well there's very little you can do.
There's very little recourse to this. Now you can contact KDP support but I don't think I've had
anyone, maybe one person, that's had their account reinstated. I think it's safe to say, if you do
get your account terminated there's very little you can do. Go ahead and contact KDP support but
it's very unlikely you'll get your account back. So that's why if I'm in doubt I don't use it at all.
Now this brings up another thing and that is diversifying your income. Now we can see on the
Jade Summer website that their coloring books are only available now on Lulu so you may want to look
at publishing on other platforms to protect your your sales. so that would be things like
Ingramspark, Lulu . I've never done those myself but it's something iIm now seriously looking at. So
if sales do stop on Amazon, and unfortunately you know most of your sales are going to come
from Amazon, at least you've got that other or those other platforms from which to get sales.
Now I did mention this in actually in a video last week on Jade Summer and that was looking at the
website in terms of marketing. But I also talked about collecting email addresses of customers and
I said one thing this website would benefit from would be an email collection box. So you could put
a link to your website in your books, try and get a certain percentage of those customers over to your
website and hopefully collect email addresses so that if your account did get terminated
at least you've got a platform. You've got all those email addresses and you can contact those
customers, let them know what's happened, let them know where they can buy your books and also give
them links to new books that you're publishing and so you get good sales of books when you when
you do first publish them. Now the last thing that might be worthwhile some of you doing and which
is what I'm doing at the moment because I have got a lot of books published and you never know
you know, you could have a book that you published three years ago and all of a sudden
a term that you've used is now trademarked. You know, there's nothing you can do about that
but again it's about minimizing risks so what I'm actually doing is going through all my books
looking at books where iIve never made a sale and actually unpublishing them. Again, just to minimize
the risks. With all of this you're not going to, you know, reduce your risk by 100%. It's about reducing
them so that's another thing that i'm doing. Now some people do contact me and they're so
scared about the issue of trademark infringement that they never actually get round to publishing
books which is which is a disaster. Really, it's a real big shame and all iIcan say on that is look,
you know, just do the steps I've showed you and using that information just minimize the risks.
Again it's never 100% but you know if you can reduce your risks, go ahead and publish. Please
don't let this stop you from creating and from going ahead and publishing and making a difference
to your life. Now if you are new to this whole publishing game of no content, low content books
then I've got a playlist here on my book tutorials playlist where I go through the steps of creating
your books and uploading to the amazon Amazon KDP platform. Thank you very much for your time, I hope
you found that useful and don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time goodbye.