Amazon KDP Terminates Author’s Account, Seizes Over $1,500 in Royalties for Unspecified Reasons

Rose Bak
3 min readSep 12, 2022

Kindle Account Review Team refuses to answer questions related to the specific violation.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

It’s every author’s nightmare — and the kind of thing that authors have been talking about in author groups for several years: the capricious and unexpected closure of an author’s publishing account. It’s one of those things you pray never happens to you. But this weekend, it did happen to me.

This author has been publishing books on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing for over five years. Despite diligently following Amazon guidelines, my author account was closed without warning, and over $1,500 in previously earned royalties were seized by the multi-billion dollar company.

On 9/10/22 I received a message from Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) saying that they were immediately terminating my account for a “misleading customer experience”. I immediately wrote back protesting the termination and asking what was “misleading”.

Twenty-four hours later they responded that they’ve reviewed my appeal and reiterated that they were terminating my account due to a“misleading experience” as per content guidelines.

They did not specify what the “misleading experience” is, nor did they give me the

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Rose Bak

Rose Bak is a freelance non-fiction writer as well as the author of more than 50 books. Find Rose's books at bit.ly/AuthorRoseBak .