Amazon's content review process is SOOOO impressive!

[Kasumi_Lee]

Last month, I commissioned a Japanese translation of one of my ebooks, and it's due out this Sunday. Everything seems to be fine except for an email I discovered in my junk folder dated this past Friday (several weeks after the ebook was approved for preorder) from Kindle Content Review - they use a bizarre alphanumeric email address system that keeps getting their emails flagged as spam, but it's definitely from Amazon - and it read as follows:

During our review, we found that your book contains sexually explicit images or language and therefore the title won’t surface in our general product search.

It's so nice that Amazon's content review system is so diligent in checking for adult content, especially when you consider that I very deliberately clicked the option in the KDP setup page specifying that the ebook does indeed feature sexually explicit content that renders it inappropriate for anyone under 18. I also selected all three erotica categories available in Amazon Japan to be extra explicit about what kind of ebook it is, assuming quite reasonably that this would automatically exclude the ebook from the category of "general products".

Fortunately, the ebook's book page is still live, and the email was kind enough to provide a link to prove it:

We have confirmed that your book is live and you can view your book’s detail page here:

Two cheers for Amazon and its oh-so-rigorous content review process!

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Trust me, it's not just erotic content that faces these challenges.

I have an author friend who writes and publishes scholarly non-fiction books on biblical principles. He recently attempted to publish a four-volume encyclopedia through KDP, both as paperback and Kindle versions. It took weeks of haggling with the "bots" to finally get each separate volume published. The Kindle would go live but the paperback would be blocked. Then, the opposite would occur with the next volume. Every time one volume version would get approved, another one would get rejected, even if it had been previously approved.

It appears close to impossible for anyone to interact with a real human on KDP issues. I advised my friend to send an e-mail to someone at Amazon corporate and he finally achieved success. I'll share that person's contact information but there are other executives available through a simple web search.

Candi Castleberry-Singleton
Vice President of Inclusive eXperiences Technology (IXT)

 

[Kasumi_Lee]

Trust me, it's not just erotic content that faces these challenges.

I have an author friend who writes and publishes scholarly non-fiction books on biblical principles. He recently attempted to publish a four-volume encyclopedia through KDP, both as paperback and Kindle versions. It took weeks of haggling with the "bots" to finally get each separate volume published. The Kindle would go live but the paperback would be blocked. Then, the opposite would occur with the next volume. Every time one volume version would get approved, another one would get rejected, even if it had been previously approved.

It appears close to impossible for anyone to interact with a real human on KDP issues. I advised my friend to send an e-mail to someone at Amazon corporate and he finally achieved success. I'll share that person's contact information but there are other executives available through a simple web search.

Candi Castleberry-Singleton
Vice President of Inclusive eXperiences Technology (IXT)

I've had more interactions with KDP's content review process than anyone should be compelled to endure, mostly with bots. In my experience, replying to the email and specifically requesting a human reviewer tends to work. There's no need for that this time around because they didn't take my book down, but the fact that they noticed that my book contains erotic content several weeks AFTER I specifically declared that fact when setting up the preorder is both comical and alarming.