It's happened again. Kindle Digital Press (KDP) has blocked my book Art Something. This is six years after it was first published.
"During our review process, we found that your book(s) violate our content guidelines. As a result, we are not offering your book(s) for sale on Amazon. As a reminder, violations of our content guidelines may negatively impact your account status and you may also lose access to optional KDP services."
As a result of this action, I have unpublished the entire "Strange Art" series from Kindle. The books, Art Something, Art Project, and Art Critic, remain available on Bookapy and B&N.
The online Brazilian Rainforest has shown its face before, and this is the third of my books that has been blocked. They don't provide any information as to what they consider to be a violation of their vague "content guidelines." The best I can guess in this case and in the case of "The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins" series is the relationship between brother and sister. It is probably covered in this phrase: "We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive."
Note that phrase "we determine." There is no appeal process and no definitive scale as to what they will determine. It is based on whoever or whatever is reviewing content that day.
It is possible that if you have purchased these books from Amazon, they might remove them from your device. It's happened before. You don't own the books, you license them from the provider. Recently, my Halo fitness band stopped working because Amazon declared that it was subscription hardware they were no longer supporting. I believe they will continue to assert ownership of intellectual property.
Please understand that I believe any bookstore has the right to sell whatever books they want to. But they don't own the books and they simply have to stop pretending to be morality police threatening authors.
If you are adversely affected by this and your eBooks no longer work, please let me know and I will replace them. I will probably not release any more books on Amazon. I really like Bookapy much better and have stopped producing paperbacks.
Enjoy!
Devon Layne