What the hell, Amazon?

This is apparently just not my month. Following Facebook's unceremonious removal of the Vengeance Unbound group, Amazon has seen fit to ban me from their publishing program and remove my books from their store. I'd previously published two books through their Kindle Direct Publishing platform, Wheels on Fire and Road to Vengeance, that were collections of my comic reviews.

This is the e-mail I received last week: "Hello. We are terminating your account effective immediately because we have found activities in your account trying to manipulate our services. In addition to closing your account: you will no longer be eligible to receive outstanding royalties, you no longer have access to your account (this includes editing titles, viewing reports, and accessing other account information), and published titles will be removed from Amazon. As per our new terms and conditions, you aren't allowed to open any new KDP accounts.  If you have questions, you can reply to this message."

Naturally, I had a LOT of questions. I'd been going around and around with Amazon over the last few weeks while trying to make my second book available on Kindle; they said my book should not be tagged in the "comic book" category, and I thought it should be since, y'know, it's about comic books. Keep in mind, both of my books have been available on Amazon for a few years now without any trouble. 

So when I replied to their e-mail and asked them why this decision had been made and what I could do to correct it, this was the response: "As per our policy, we reserve the right not to disclose any type of information we consider sensitive data. We are unable to elaborate further on specific details regarding our Terms and Conditions beyond what is available in the Help pages."

So they kick me off the platform and ban me from rejoining, then say they won't tell me why. Sigh. For those of you who did buy my books, I appreciate the support more than you'll ever know.  I admit, it was a really cool feeling to see books published with my name on them, especially ones connected to my favorite character.  To those of you who didn't get to purchase copies, I'm very sorry they won't be available anymore.  I can't even take them to another self-publisher, as I lost the digital PDF of the first book. I'm going to put all of the original reviews back here on the blog, that's why you're seeing new posts for those early Marvel Spotlight issues, but it's going to take some time. 

But I'm not mad. Nope, not one little bit.  It's fine.  Everything is fine.