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ℹ️ Excerpts from this article were originally published on Facebook by Stanley Umezulike.
Kindle Direct Publishing (or KDP) is Amazon’s e-book self-publishing platform which was launched in November 2007. KDP is like the digital version of a publishing house. The platform allows you to self-publish and sell eBooks, paperbacks, and hardcover books for free without hassles — These books can include novels, book series, children’s books, comics, cookbooks, journals, poetry, and even textbooks.
Amazon has started banning and “over-scrutinizing” Nigerian publisher accounts on its Kindle platform, no thanks to some greedy Nigerians who have exploited this platform over the previous months solely for monetary gains, not minding the low-quality end-value of the books that they are publishing.
Many Nigerians have refused to put in the necessary work but instead have opted for ‘short-cuts’ to illicitly make some quick money on Amazon KDP. As expected, such a “short-cut strategy” is not without its own pitfalls.
This abuse and violation have piqued the interest of the Amazon Compliance Team and now, even legit authors are not entirely spared of the consequences of the actions of these greedy lot.
Before we start, let’s look at a fault in Amazon KDP’s Return Policy that has made this illicit technique lucrative for abusers.
Amazon pays an author a royalty (a certain percentage) when a book ships in response to a paid customer order. However, If the customer subsequently returns the book to Amazon, no amount is deducted from the publisher’s KDP account. Amazon either disposes of the book or puts it on a warehouse shelf to fill the next customer order.
A screenshot of one of many such adverts on Facebook from supposedly online coaches. (NOTE: Name has been altered.)
Why Amazon is banning lots of Nigerian accounts on their KDP platform
Now that you understand why people do this and get away with it. I’ll be identifying common patterns found among KDP publishers that use this technique to game the system and make quick money illegitimately.
1. Plagiarized Covers
Copying the covers of well-selling books, or copying the image of an already listed book violates the Amazon KDP metadata guidelines. It is a guaranteed way to get your account banned.
That is why we should always read guidelines thoroughly. On the Metadata Guideline page, toward the end of the page, there is a section on guidelines for cover images, which clearly states that you are not allowed to create similar-looking covers.
2. Creating Multiples KDP Accounts
According to the terms and conditions of Amazon KDP, you can only have one account at a time. But today, we see individuals using more than 2 KDP accounts, which is against the guidelines and can lead to banning.
To make matter worse, you cannot register a second account with the same information if your first account has been banned. If you try to prove stubborn and create a 2nd account using the same information, they will surely catch you based on your I.P address and the new account will get banned too.
3. Copyright Infringement
This group of Nigerians don’t take the violations of laws and proprietary rights seriously, because if they do, they wouldn’t be publishing low-content and low-value publications without first understanding how book publishing works. Unfortunately, this practice doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon as we now have many self-acclaimed coaches on social media claiming that it’s possible to publish a book per day on Amazon.
Publishing a book per day on KDP is NOT possible unless you have been engaging in some serious copyright infringement.
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4. Thin Content
You would be surprised to find out that there are some books uploaded on the KDP platform with no more than three pages in them. What they (the authors) do is design an attractive cover, write a deceptive description and slap a price on the book.
5. Unpublishing And Republishing
Knowing fully well that Amazon gives a little boost to newly published books during the first month by ranking newly published books on the first page to test how it performs, these unscrupulous people resort to un-publishing and republishing the same books to trick the Amazon KDP algorithm.
Unknowing to them, Amazon employees are extremely smart and will definitely clamp down on these deceptive techniques which are aimed at increasing sales.
But let’s talk about those online coaches who coach these people on these illegal strategies that ultimately portray a bad image for Nigerians. They’ve caused more harm than good, and Amazon has begun to ban several Nigerian accounts on their Kindle Publishing platform as a result of their deceptive advertising and recruitment methods.
Here is how these “online coaches” contribute to this problem
- ❌ They will tell you that publishing books on Amazon “do not require you to be a writer.”
- ❌ They will show you how to use Google to find information from other people’s books, then you tweak it a little, and boom! It gets published on Amazon.
- ❌ To beat the plagiarism checks, what they do is download books from hot niches in different languages such as French, Spanish and other languages. Next, they will translate those books to English using software like Google Translate, put their name on them and re-publish them on Amazon.
- ❌ The majority of them acquire unsuspecting buyers by posting fake Amazon KDP royalty reports.
- ❌ They technically teach people how to steal other people’s content and publish them on Amazon KDP in order to get paid. The original authors of those books aren’t given credit for their works.
- ❌ They teach their students how to get around other plagiarism detection measures without actually focusing on providing unique content.
- ❌ The few books that are original content are not edited and do not have good cover designs. They are not properly formatted either. They simply upload them on Amazon without understanding how to publish books on Amazon.
It’s simple. They do this because they are looking for shortcuts to make quick money.
Most of them and their students publish books on Amazon Kindle Unlimited and disobey Amazon rules by publishing the same books on other platforms.
They also publish these courses on other popular platforms where they run ads and convince people to buy them in order to earn money in dollars. They are helping more people to learn the wrong thing while earning quick money by trying to beat the system.
The problem is that this has become a vicious cycle. These coaches were taught how to do this by other coaches and some of them don’t know that what they are doing is wrong.
What these coaches are doing is not just wrong, they are leading many young people astray.
Basically, they are teaching them how to make money off other people’s sweat. They also teach them how to get information via Google Search without giving the owners of the original content credit.
Some of them have published over 100 books on Amazon, and yet, none of them is their original content.
Over 90 per cent of courses on Amazon Kindle Publishing by Nigerian coaches teach people the wrong thing.
Let me use this medium to call out the Nigerian coaches who are teaching people the wrong thing about Amazon Kindle Publishing. Yet again, this is giving Nigeria a bad name. This is why Amazon is banning lots of Nigerian accounts. Their actions are hurting the efforts of hardworking Nigerian authors who are publishing their books on Amazon and other platforms while following the right process.
If you are teaching people courses online, learn what you are teaching very well and make sure you are teaching the right thing.
Only your original content should be published on Amazon KDP. If there is any information in the book that you got from other sources, you must give them credit on the reference page.
You can be sued in court for your actions. Be very careful and stop misusing other authors’ copyrighted content.
Write and publish your book while following the right process.
The purpose of this article is to draw your attention to these mistakes, and avoid them! Amazon KDP is not a get-rick-quick scheme, and I strongly advise you to read the KDP publishing guidelines.
Thanks for reading.
- 📝 Original Post by Stanley Umezulike on Facebook: Why Amazon is banning lots of Nigerian accounts on their platform
- 📝 Contributing Writer: Mercy Saviour
- 📝 Editor: Yusuf Odukoya
