Hello again!
So, I got kicked off Amazon this morning. Author account canceled, all my books deleted.
Why?
Short answer: China.
Long answer: I translated my 36 books to many languages (including Chinese) a few months ago and made them available as ebooks. Someone over there didn't like that.
"Mystery Shopper Menace!" had some mild cracks about the Chinese government and their stranglehold on information. (No other book of mine even mentions China.) That's the one they cited that killed my account. No appeal process, can never open another account or publish on Amazon (aka KDP: Kindle Direct Publishing) again. In their words:
"The following book(s) do not comply with our Terms and Conditions; therefore, we terminated your KDP account and your KDP Agreement.
Title: �N�W - ASIN: B09B3C4T5Q
As part of the termination process, we closed your KDP account and removed your books from Amazon. If your books are enrolled in KDP Select, they are ineligible to receive any Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) royalties.
Additionally, as per our Terms and Conditions, you are not permitted to open new KDP account and will not receive future royalty payments from additional accounts created."
China is the global overlord now. American companies do what China wants. There are infinite examples of this, but even major American actors are scared:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/actor-john-cena-apologizes-after-taiwan-comment-n1268526
And that's John Cena. I'm nobody.
Too much money at stake, so that's that. China's just crushing bugs because they can. America misbehaved over the centuries as this nation was the big daddy of global empire. China's turn now. I mean, they're currently committing racial genocide and everyone's like, "Oh well."
When preparing foreign translations of my 36 books, I actually considered not publishing a Chinese translation of this one for fear of offending China. But that felt like a cop-out. My choice as the author of Mystery Shopper Menace was: be a coward or be a reckless idiot. I choice idiocy. Was a dumb idea to poke the bear, but I did it with full awareness of what I was doing.
Honestly, I'd actually rather be canceled above-board like this than have them hack me or mess up my bank accounts. And I'm surprised they actually cited this one as violating some nebulous, unnamed "Terms and Conditions." They didn't lie or cite any of the hundreds of English or foreign translations of my dozens of other books. They actually pointed to the book that lightly criticized China and said that one was the reason for my cancellation, making it abundantly clear that they're doing this because they can.
The book isn't even available in China! Their Chinese domain, amazon.cn, is nearly impossible for authors to reach. Too many hoops. But they killed it just in case anyone might smuggle an e-copy in over the firewall. (Bad news: people already own this book, including me. Genie's already out of the bottle!)
Every single one of my B.P. Kasik and Phony McFakename ebooks and print books are gone. Yet oddly, as of this writing, they didn't delete my one audiobook:
Can I sell my book elsewhere? Yes. Barnes & Noble and other platforms exist. But they do not provide anywhere near the visibility and availability of Amazon the Great and Powerful. And Amazon requires authors to publish work EXCLUSIVELY with them if they want to get the benefits of promotion and Kindle Unlimited readers. So I had all my eggs in that basket and now that basket is suddenly and irrevocably gone.
So hey, I'm a literary figure who suffered global and permanent financial consequences for criticizing China! You're reading the words of a free speech martyr!
A little excitement on an otherwise slow Thursday.
UPDATE: I totally forgot about this, but nine of my books are still available as ebooks over at Barnes and Noble! Go support that much more small-author-friendly small business and treat yourself to my books!
-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename, Former Published Author
