Aunty Debbie Talks Terms & Conditions

Here's Aunty Debbie trying
out her mother-of-the-bride
headwear!

What’s new on the internet Problem Pages? Aunty Debbie’s been seeing a lot of posts recently about the great God Amazon blocking or pulling books and terminating accounts. It seems the bots are on the rise and the use of AI isn’t helping. 

So why would Amazon want to terminate your account? After all, when you sell books, you make money. And when you make money, Amazon makes money. Not much on each transaction – a commission on the sale, maybe a delivery charge for the ebook, a profit on the cost of printing and shipping physical books – but if you multiple that for every one of your sales and then every account on KDP, and it all adds up to a significant amount of money in Amazon’s coffers. 

So there is no reason for Amazon to rain on your parade, is there? 

Is there? 

Well yes. You see when you set up your Amazon account, there are pages and pages of those pesky little terms & conditions. You know – the ones that pop up your screen when you set up any kind of online account, the ones you scroll through looking for the little check box to click on. I agree. You agree to abide by the terms & conditions, and it turns out that Amazon cares about such things. A lot. 

You agreed that you would only have one KDP account. Only one. That means you can’t ignore that account you set up a few years ago just to have a play, with a different email address and you can’t remember the password for. You can’t have an issue with your account and just set up another one to start again. 

You agreed that if you opted in to KDP Select to get money from page reads from the Kindle Unlimited Lending Library, then you wouldn’t make more than a certain percentage of your ebook available online anywhere else. That’s not just selling your ebook, but simply making it available – including on your own website, on Wattpad or anywhere at all. Amazon doesn’t care that you used to be wide and your ebook was for sale on an obscure ebook site in another country, and that the site won’t answer your emails or take your ebook down. Amazon cares even less that your ebook has been pirated and is on FreeEbooksRUs.com. 

You agreed that you would own or have licensed the rights to everything in all of your books. That includes the content obviously, but also the artwork on the cover and any illustrations, plus any commercial fonts you are using. Publishing is a business and you can’t simply use another person or company’s intellectual property without permission. That includes the image you found on a site that said royalty-free so you assumed it was fine. That includes the images your designer that you found on Fiverr for a few quid who said all his images were legal and he got them from FreeImagesRUs.com. Amazon doesn’t care – you are the one who agreed to the T&C. That includes the lyrics from the songs you thought you’d use as chapter headings (fair use doesn’t apply to lyrics). It includes all the intellectual property online that was free for personal use – as before, publishing and selling books is a business and you may require commercial licenses. 

You agreed a lot of things, even the things you didn’t read or understand. Even the ones you don’t agree with. 

Break the rules and you risk being caught. You risk losing your books, your KDP account and any money not yet paid. You are barred from ever opening another account. And if you try to sneak around and load via an aggregator, they are likely to catch you there too. 

So what can you do if you get the dreaded email? Well firstly, be honest. Wringing your hands and wailing on social media that you don’t know why just makes you look silly. Have you broken the rules? You can try eating humble pie, apologise and hope for a second chance. You can ask for a review by a human. Amazon increasingly polices its websites with the use of AI and AI is still very fallible. You can try The Society of Authors or The Alliance of Independent Authors who may be able to help. Tactics change all the time, T&C change all the time. At the time of writing the KDP t&c were updated in September 2024.

Best advice of all? Know that what you are doing is correct from the start. Don’t try and cut corners, save money, employ dodgy third parties.

Here's Aunty Debbie's complete compendium of Really Useful Advice. You can also find links to all her books which are absolutely fully-compliant with Amazon's T&C.