Lauren: Hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. And today we are going to be breaking out of the jungle, escaping from the jungle, running far, far away from the Amazon.

Matt: Okay. I was like, jungle? First of all, we talked about jail. Like, being in Amazon jail. And then you said jungle.

Lauren: Well...

Matt: And I was like, what is she talking about?

Lauren: I know, but.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: That just wasn't as punny, honestly.

Matt: You are uncontrollable, you know that?

Lauren: I, I gotta, I gotta find my, find my, my moments of joy where I can.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: I got at least one compliment on the breaking news intro from that episode the other day, so.

Matt: Your sister doesn't count.

Lauren: It wasn't my sister.

Matt: Your mom doesn’t count.

Lauren: It wasn’t anybody related to me.

Matt: Alright. I'm still gonna challenge it.

Lauren: That's fair.

Matt: Just like a bad Uno card. I'm gonna challenge it.

Lauren: Reverse Uno?

Matt: I'm going to reverse it. Yes.

Lauren: Okay. That's fair.

Matt: Make you draw four.

Lauren: That's fine. That feels about right anyway.

[1:24] – Episode Topic Intro

Lauren: Today we are going to be talking about how you can rebuild whether you are forced off of Amazon, or temporarily frozen out of Amazon. Or you're just thinking about maybe your long term strategy plans for, I gotta get out of here, I don't want to be here anymore, but I know there's a lot that goes into that. So we're going to be talking through some of that today...

Matt: This is starting to feel more like an intervention than a podcast. The way –

Lauren: For who?

Matt: The way that you phrased this.

Lauren: The way I'm looking at you? Or the way –

Matt: No, the way that you phrased this. For anybody listening that's, that's, you know, using Amazon. It sounds like you're setting them up for an intervention at this point.

Lauren: I mean, honestly, it is.

Matt: Yeah. Well, I mean.

Lauren: It is. This episode idea actually came to us from a listener.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: And an author, who had this happen to her. She was – she had –

Matt: One of the tens of thousands.

Lauren: Yes. And this is –

Matt: But shout out to, to Sarah for emailing us.

Lauren: Yes. Thank you so much for the, the email and for the suggestion. Because I think it's something that, that happens to a lot of authors. Whether it's a temporary or permanent ban, and whether it's Amazon or so many of the other platforms. I literally last week heard about one of our friends lost complete access to their entire Facebook eco- like their, their profile, their page, like –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – everything that was connected to their like Facebook. And they had I think like, several tens of thousands of followers, if not close to 100,000 followers.

Matt: They didn't. Facebook did.

Lauren: Right. Right. And just the entire thing got wiped by Facebook with no recourse, no way to get it back, no, no way to fight back on that. And it's just gone. Overnight.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And so whether whether we're talking about the situation that Sarah presented to us with her books, she was six books deep into Amazon and Kindle Unlimited and KDP and lost it all. Or, or some other platform that this is happening, or you're just trying to take some preventative measures to avoid this happening.

Matt: And for anybody listening right now, that's probably thinking like oh, well that person probably violated terms of service, or had shady content, like, no. This happens to people with legitimate, like the most wholesome of content, like a cozy Amish romance. And all it takes is either one fake AI-generated complaint that you are fraudulent and that's not your content, it's somebody else's, or any number of other things, and they will freeze your account. And when your account is frozen for the investigation, it is frozen. Like, you don't have access to anything. If you have any moneys owed to you, that is frozen. If they choose not to reopen your account, you lose all of that. Like, you don't even get the money that you're owed.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: So this happens to people all the time for reasons that are nothing to do with something they did. AI is oftentimes the culprit on the Amazon end. They use it to check for things like IP infringement, copyright infringement, you know, questionable content, and the AI gets it wrong. So, it happens to a lot of people. A lot of people who have good content, has no business being frozen, or flagged. But there are other bad actors out there that are oftentimes at the wheelhouse of this. So if you're thinking oh, well, this would never happen to me, or oh, those people probably deserved it... Eh. Wrong.

Lauren: I've seen several people talk about this in different indie author communities like Wide for the Win – which is a great one to check out, by the way, if you're going through the process of either intentionally or unexpectedly leaving Amazon. But I've seen several, several posts where authors have talked about like, they had AI clones of their books on Amazon.

Matt: Oh yeah.

Lauren: And they reported they the author themselves reported it.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: And Amazon will just unilaterally freeze all accounts associated, including the author that was the one that initially reported it.

Matt: Yeah. And you'll have to prove it’s yours.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. We talked about that in the episode –

Matt: Which is not always easy, by the way.

Lauren: Right. We talked about that in the episode we did on copyright.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: And why it's important to copyright –

Matt: Yeah

Lauren: – your books. And, and this is one of those reasons. Again, whether you are somebody who is intentionally thinking about leaving Amazon, or you've been forced out, or maybe you just got scared. Like maybe, maybe something happened, you had an account freeze and you've moved past it now, but that shocked your system enough that you were like, okay, what can I do to, to put some safeguards in place so that if that ever happens again, I'm prepared.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: This is for you.

[6:30] – The Single Source of Failure

Lauren: A couple of the things that, that Sarah had mentioned in the email that she sent were some of the big pain points, and kind of like, really jarring realizations that she had when this happened. And I think the three, the three really big ones were... I mean, first of all, hello my, my primary distribution account just got –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – you know, some way or another frozen, disappeared, gone, suspended, whatever. Your audience, primarily. Especially if you are somebody who is, who's using Kindle Unlimited. For a lot of fiction authors, if you're relying very heavily on the, the built in audience and discoverability on Kindle Unlimited, that might be a big, like, fear and pain point for you. Is, is, oh my God, my whole audience was there. And then the promotional efforts that go hand in hand with Amazon, whether that's the built in promo efforts or your third party promo that might be tied to –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – your Amazon book listings. So we'll talk through some of those.

Matt: Yeah, that's a lot.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Like, you know, when you think about how much stuff you could actually have tied to your Amazon –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: – efforts, that's a lot. And hopefully nobody's in that boat. But we know that's not true. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah, we know that that the, you know, the unfortunate reality of this is that a lot of people are in that boat, and a lot of people don't learn that, to get out of that, that sinking ship until it's already halfway sunk.

Matt: Yeah. And before also anybody else out there starts thinking, oh, this is just another chance for Matt to drag Amazon through the mud... Yes it is. But you could also replace Amazon with anything else in this situation.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: You could replace Amazon with the word TikTok or Facebook or anything else that, that you don't own that audience, or that channel. It's still a single point of failure for your business. If you run everything through one place, and you've tied all your, your ad spend to it, you've tied your audience discoverability to it. You know, all of your short form or long form marketing content is tied to it. Your actual books are tied to it. Your sole source of revenue is from this channel. Like, you're just asking for it. Like, that's literally like building a stilt house right in the proven path of a tornado.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: You just, like – Yeah. So, single source of failure, single point of failure, like. That's, that's not a good thing. So it's not just me taking the opportunity to drag Amazon through the mud – which I'll gladly do at any point in time. And will debate that with anybody on the planet at any point in time. But you could actually apply this to, like you said your friend with the Facebook, or anything else. We talk about this all the time, but there's very real implications here. And this email from Sarah just reminded us that, you know, we hadn't really talked about this in a while, and it's really important for people to understand that it's not a matter of if this happens, it's, it's – For most of you, it's probably a matter of when this happens.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: On a certain channel. So these are some things that you can do to bounce back, to rebuild, to recover. And hopefully, if this hasn't happened to you, there's some things you can do in here, that we're going to talk about, that could potentially prevent this from happening to you.

Lauren: Yeah. And I also want to be clear that when we when we say prevent, or like, preventative measures, or whatever. I'm not talking about it in the sense of like, if you do this, Amazon won't ever ban your account. That's, that's not –

Matt: If you get off Amazon, they can never ban your account.

Lauren: There is that. But no, what we're talking about when we're talking about, like, preventative steps that you can take here, is something like, hey, if and when something like this happens to you, if you already have your books listed on at least one other retail site, hopefully you won't see a disruption in your sales because the, this one account is gone.

Matt: Well, you will see disruption. Hopefully this just sort of minimizes the amount of –

Lauren: It's –

Matt: – disruption.

Lauren: Yeah, it’s preventative in terms of –

Matt: If you, if you're on another channel.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah, hopefully that helps minimize it. If again, like we talked about, that's your sole channel and this happens, you have nothing as a backup to minimize that, that damage. So you have to move very quickly to, to try and get things back on track. And when they freeze your account, like I said, you don't really have access to anything. You're kind of at the mercy of their investigation until they decide they're done with it. And if it comes back that they see what you've done, quote unquote, as, as wrong. That's it.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: There, there is some sort of an appeals process, I believe, but it's, it's not any easier than the initial process. So.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. At least if you have some things spread out, if you've gone wide, you know, or there's some sort of backup plan, at least you have a way to minimize the pain. But if you're, if you're one of those that this is your single source, like, and this happens, you got to move quick. And here's some things that you can do to, to try and get back on track fast.

Lauren: Yeah. We are also not going to talk about specifically things that you, like, steps you need to take on Amazon in terms of like, this is how you appeal, or this is how you try to regain access to your account. That's not what we're going to be talking about here.

Matt: Well, and quite frankly, that's not very clear.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: Like Amazon purposely makes it very unclear on how to do those things. And you’re basically –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – stuck communicating via email with them. And that’s –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: – that's pretty much it.

Lauren: And you may or may not even be speaking to a person.

Matt: Oh, you're definitely not.

Lauren: Yeah. Yes. And I also don't want to, you know, I don't want to scare people up front. This is, this is a very real fear. And this is a very realistic worst case scenario. But I don't want you to, to think of this as like, this is the ultimate kiss of death. This is the death knell for my author brand –

Matt: Right.

Lauren: – everything is done. Like, it's not. This is something that happens to a lot of people. A lot of people bounce back from it. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying that like, oh, this is a blessing in disguise, whatever. I'm not trying to minimize the pain of, of what it would be like to have this happen to your account. But all hope is not lost. So if you are here listening to this.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Don't don't let it keep you up at night.

Matt: Agreed.

[13:03] – Problem One: Your Amazon Account is Banned

Matt: Alright, so. You get the infamous email.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: Your account’s been frozen, there's been some sort of violation. You can't log in because it's been frozen. But you'll try to anyways, because everybody does. So you're forced to respond to that email, and you’ll wait, because it's a bot at the other end, and you'll go into the queue with all the rest of the people trying to figure out what's going on. What do you do?

Lauren: First thing you do is save anything that you have access to. Even if you can't log into your account. If you can... if you can find your book listings, if you have a Kindle that's on airplane mode and your books are downloaded on that Kindle, take a screenshot so you can see –

Matt: That’s a shot in the dark.

Lauren: – all the metadata. Like, you know, whatever, what – literally whatever you can. Just immediately do whatever you can to secure things like... if your book is tied to Goodreads, because Goodreads is owned by Amazon.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: If your account has been frozen, if you get that that email immediately, maybe you can still get on Goodreads and pull all your metadata and your reviews from Goodreads.

Matt: There's a good chance –

Lauren: Like –

Matt: – it’s still cached in your laptop or whatever.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: So yeah, that's –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – a great point. If you are on Goodreads or whatever, go there immediately and see if you can grab screenshots –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – and stuff like that. Because, yeah, once that stuff's frozen you don't, you don't have access to it. And if you didn't, if you didn't save any of that previously when you loaded your books into Kindle, if you didn't save the blurb that you used for your book description somewhere else, if you didn't save, you know, the BISAC categories that you chose and the Amazon categories that you chose, like, you're starting all over again. So. And you're not going to find that anywhere. I don't care where you go.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So, you know, pro tip, write all that stuff down, or keep it in a Word Doc, or whatever.

Lauren: Absolutely, first recommendation for preventative measures or for minimalizing – minimizaling? – minimizing.

Matt: Minimizing.

Lauren: Minimizing the, the catastrophic damage here is to make sure that you have backup records of all that kind of data. Your, your sales data, whatever you have access to, your BISAC codes, your book metadata, the things that you used for your copy and stuff like that. Get in the habit of periodically downloading updated versions of anything –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – so that you just have it. You know, once a month, once every other month. It doesn't have to be a daily thing, but have backups. That's, that's really important. Because you never know. I mean, I would say that for, for anything. It's the same reason that for our podcast episodes, I record our weekly data in a Google Sheet.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: That data is all still accessible in every single one of the accounts that we have –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – our podcast loaded to, but just in case one of them shut down, I still have all our historic data in a, in a Sheet somewhere.

Matt: Just in case we got banned because your shenanigans?

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: We'd still have all our data.

Lauren: It's not my shenanigans I'm worried about, honestly.

Matt: You should be. I'm worried about your shenanigans.

Lauren: In terms of getting us banned?

Matt: Just in general.

Lauren: Kay.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: You should be.

Matt: Yeah. So, yeah. Immediate response. Don't freak out, but you're going to freak out.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Just try to find anything you can, that you don't already have, that you might need in order to start rebuilding with that title, or those titles. So, again, you know, if you don't, you don't have your metadata saved somewhere, and your book description, your BISAC categories, all those other things, go somewhere and try to find them real quick before those get frozen as well. But hopefully everybody listening has that stuff stored somewhere. Has been a responsible adult, has backups saved, and everything's good.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: So the next thing you want to do is start planning out how you're going to rebuild.

Lauren: Yes. And the first thing that I would do there is try to get your books back out onto the market as quickly as possible. If they're not already. If you are not already –

Matt: Well, let's move forward as if this was their single source.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: Like –

Lauren: Great.

Matt: So, single source was Amazon.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: It's in a freeze right now because Amazon thinks you... I don't know, you know, plagiarized –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – or stole or whatever.

Lauren: Yup. Which, in that case – and we're talking freeze not, not permanent ban yet. We're not sure if it's an immediate –

Matt: That's the thing. You don't know –

Lauren: Right.

Matt: – until they decide.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: That’s how it usually works.

Lauren: So I would say start taking action before they decide.

Matt: Oh yeah, a hundred percent.

Lauren: And as soon, as soon as you're even, like, temporarily suspended, start taking action –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – immediately. And, and the first thing that I would do is get your books listed on another retail channel so that you are not seeing a complete disruption in your sales. And this will be relevant for some of the other things we're going to talk about a little bit further on in the episode too. So, you know, whatever it takes. It doesn't have to be all at once. If your response to this is somehow like, oh man I knew I was, I knew I should have been selling direct, and I am going to start selling direct, I'm in the process of doing that, this just happened before I was ready to do that. Do not wait until you are ready to start selling direct. Get your books up on a third party retailer and then continue on with, like, whatever your original plans were long term with that. But I think it's a, it's a really just, you know, get them back out there. And I would recommend doing it in a way that minimizes the amount of delay.

Matt: Minimalizes?

Lauren: Minimalizes. Maximalizes and minimalizes.

Matt: Maximalizes. Are you distro maxxing?

Lauren: Ugh. Oh I hate it here.

Matt: So what, what are some examples of other third party retail channels?

Lauren: Well, might I recommend a little website called lulu.com?

Matt: You may.

Lauren: Because you can publish your books in the Lulu bookstore immediately.

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: If you are like, okay, I'm going to you know, I'm going to take this opportunity to distribute through Ingram and go into third party retail distribution. There is a delay there. There is an approval process. It might take weeks, possibly months for you to get through that. But if there is a way for you to get your books up next day, same day.

Matt: Yeah. So I don't think it's that long for Ingram. Like if you, if you were like, listen, I just need to get these books up there to sell, like. Yes, you can run them through Lulu for sure. We have a very quick approval process. We use software and tools that help us do that quickly. And not that weird, janky AI that Amazon uses. Ingram, and IngramSpark, I don't think they're, they’re months out. Or even, in many cases, I don’t even think full weeks out. Either way, those are probably your two fastest paths back to a retail market. I don't, I can't think of anything else offhand. I mean, if we're talking ebooks strictly... Yeah, there's no shortage. I mean, you could go to a bunch of other places. You could go to Kobo, you could go to, you know, wherever, Apple if you wanted to. But if you're talking ebook and print or just print... yeah.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: It's, it's Ingram or Lulu or both.

Lauren: Yeah. Any time that you're making an effort to go wide with your book sales, whether it was an intentional, thought out, long term strategy or this happened because you are in a panic response to –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – an account being suspended –

Matt: Hijacked.

Lauren: – or closed or hijacked or whatever. This is something that takes time. This is something that you cannot do overnight, not if you're going to do it right. And you want to do it right, because you don't want to find yourself in this position again.

Matt: Yeah, I've talked to people that have had their account frozen. It was frozen for a couple of days. They were freaking out. They're trying to figure out what to do. They had a game plan of how to go wide and do all these other things. Then Amazon sends them the email that says nope, sorry, this was a mistake. You're all good. They just go right back to what they're doing. And then literally months later it happens again. Like, it's not – like, this isn't an isolated thing, like. And it seems like one of those things like lightning strikes. Like people who actually get hit by lightning, they actually get hit by lightning again.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Like they're more of a magnet for it. Like the people I do know who have been targeted by Amazon for, you know, an unwarranted account freeze or ban or whatever, like most of the ones that I know that this happened to, it's happened to them again. And so, yeah, not taking the appropriate action afterwards and then falling victim to it again is like going on Survivor 48, getting voted out with an idol in your pocket, coming on to Survivor 50, getting voted out again with an idol in your pocket. Like.

Lauren: Is it also like getting voted out with an idol in your pocket after you already had that happened to you once, and then you also had a dream – you had a nightmare –

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: – about getting voted out with an idol in your pocket and then you still did it?

Matt: Well it was, it was referred to as a dream. But that is a nightmare, yes. Ozzy, please.

Lauren: What a time.

Matt: Come on my guy. You got to get it together.

Lauren: He – you know what, I did really appreciate him in the final tribal council, though.

Matt: Yeah. So listen, if you're unfortunate enough for this to happen to you once, don't let it happen again.

Lauren: No.

Matt: Yeah. Take, take some of these preventative measures. But back to what you were talking about. This is long term. There are things that you need to do. It's unfortunate if you're in this situation and this was the catalyst or the spark that gets you to take action and start going wide, or finding new places to sell your content, or build that direct connection that you've been wanting to do for the last couple of years, and you know it's the right thing to do. But, the – I think the important thing here is that you, you get started.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Like, get the ball rolling, get moving, get start on these things. We just told you, the immediate thing you can do is get your content into to Ingram and Lulu or whatever, you know, the, the fastest marketplaces you can get it into. So you can try to keep generating some revenue. But in the meantime you need to start, I think, taking some of the long term steps to really secure your author brand and business.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And we have created several different pieces of content that are specifically about how to lay out that long term strategy for going wide. We've done podcast episodes on it. We've got at least one or two blog posts on it, and at least one or two Lulu U shorter form videos on it. I will make sure those are all linked in the show notes. So if that's something that you're doing either preventatively proactively or reactively, go, go check out that for specific advice on how to do that and strategies for how to do that. But long term, just, you know, keep in mind that this is something that's going to take long term effort. It's not something that you're going to recover from overnight. But some of the some of the things that we've already talked about, and some of the things we're going to talk about in here, are things that you can do immediately to kind of like, you know... staunch the bleeding, slightly? Is that the phrase?

Matt: I don't think so.

Lauren: No. What's the...

Matt: You wanna stem the flow of bleeding.

Lauren: Yeah? Yeah. I don't know, I don't know. You're tying a tourniquet around the bullet wound.

Matt: There you go.

Lauren: You're also supposed to do it above the injury. Not directly on top of it.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: Stem the blood flow. Yeah, sure.

Matt: Yeah. Above it.

Lauren: Kay.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yes. Great advice on this podcast. So, you know, there's some things that are that are just quick fixes and then the long term strategy that goes with it. One of the things that you should do, whether it's as a part of this long term recovery or as a preventative measure, is try to own as many of your assets as possible. I know sometimes it's really appealing to use, like, publisher provided ISBNs for example, or Amazon has... is it ASIN?

Matt: ASINs. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. I understand why you’d – they're free, I understand why you would want to use them. Especially in the Amazon ecosystem you have to, because of course they're, they're specific with that and they're specific with ebook format files and stuff like that. But that's another thing that you're going to have to replace if you lose access to those. Whereas if you are using your owned ISBN, you keep those even if you lose access –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – to your, to your book or to your author account, those are still your ISBN because they're, they're separate from Amazon. So whatever you can do that you are using your own assets instead of proprietary assets that belong to whatever channel we're talking about here, do that. Do that moving forward, for sure.

Matt: Yeah, it's a great opportunity also though to, to reach out to your, your audience, whatever audience you've built so far directly. Whether that's through, you know, an email newsletter list that you're working on building. You know. Or again, go out on your social media channels and this is a great reminder to try and get everybody there to to come over and sign up for your email list or, you know. You've got to, you've got to somehow start building a channel that you own that nobody can, can take that, that away from you. But, you know, everybody loves a good Amazon sympathy story. So. After, you know, immediately not panicking, but then getting my content onto a few channels so I could try and make some money there. The next thing I would probably do is craft a nice email to, to my, my user base and – or my, sorry, my reader base and, and kind of lay things out and let them know that I'm going to be building a direct experience in the very near future. And then I would absolutely love their support so that I never found myself in this situation again.

[26:47] – Problem Two: Your Audience is on Amazon

Lauren: What a great segue to the next section of this outline.

Matt: Thank you.

Lauren: Yes, that is absolutely. So the next thing that is kind of a key problem that people have when this happens, or a key reason that people are like, I don't want to leave Amazon if I don't have to, is having that audience and that reader base that exists on there. That is not, or maybe you don't think of them as, your own audience, because they are Kindle Unlimited readers that just happen to be reading your content on there.

Matt: Yeah. Well, I mean, they're not your audience.

Lauren: They're not, but they can be. And this might – you might be surprised by how much this could potentially be the impetus that gets them to be your audience and not just reading your content on a third party platform.

Matt: Well, you will be surprised at how many people actually, come over when you ask them to come over, because prior to that, you have no idea. You don't know who your audience is, who's been buying your books. If you don't have any, a dedicated email list, if you don't have a direct sales channel, you know, Shopify store or something like that where you're selling directly and capturing that data, you have no idea. So until you go and ask, you know, your social media followers or your Q readers or whatever that is, to to come over and sign up for your email list or to buy directly from you, and you start to accumulate that data, you have no idea. So you very well will be surprised –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: – if you go to Facebook or TikTok or, you know, whatever, Goodreads, or wherever you can get into and talk to people who may or may not have read your books and say listen, I'd love for you to come support me directly over here on my newsletter, or whatever. Yeah, you might actually be very surprised at how many people have read your books and enjoy them and will come over and support you directly.

Lauren: Yeah. Now that we're talking about audience and, and the fear or loss of audience on KDP, on Kindle Unlimited, whatever, I think that that's one of those first reaction things you should do, is tell your audience in every way that you can. This is one of those opportunities where you do want to maximize your reach as much as possible. Go on all of your social channels, send an email out, if you – even if you have an email that you've like, you've literally never actually sent an email before. You've been building an email newsletter list, but you haven't gotten around to actually sending one yet... I don't care if you have to BCC a hundred people on a Gmail, like, this is – this is when you want to tell everybody. And, you know, cautiously and conscientiously. Be solution-focused and not incendiary. Yes, yes?

Matt: I just want to back up a minute.

Lauren: Okay?

Matt: Why would you BCC a hundred people in your Gmail account?

Lauren: Because you have to get word out. You know, I'm not saying –

Matt: Why wouldn't you just use your email list?

Lauren: Maybe you haven't set it up yet. Maybe this is panic mode.

Matt: I see.

Lauren: Maybe you're reaching out to –

Matt: Gotcha.

Lauren: – not readers, but you've got a nebulous list of other authors and creators and influencers and people that you've worked with before...

Matt: Gotcha, yeah.

Lauren: That isn't a formal newsletter list, but you're –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – just trying to get the word out.

Matt: It's basically your contact list.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah, your network, your whatever. This is where you want to say to people hey, you know, FYI my account has been suspended on Amazon. I am working through recovery right now, but I just wanted to let you know, like, I'm not gone. If you're looking for me and you can't find me –

Matt: Don’t, don’t say that, that's boring.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: So this is actually a very underutilized. You're going in the right direction. This is a very underutilized way to give your email list to jumpstart. And a lot of people don't do this. But if I was going to be set up an email list, I'd go get an account somewhere like Kit, where you can start building for free. You don't have start paying until you get like, I don't know, 1,000 contacts or 5,000 contacts or something like that. So go open up a free account Kit or one of these other email programs, but then go back into your Gmail and literally shoot an email to everyone, on BCC so not everybody's there, but leave it a little more ominous. And just be like, hey, just want to let everybody know I had some, you know, something happened to me recently that really kind of threw my business for loop. And I want to tell you all about it. So please sign up for my new newsletter and I’m gonna, I'm gonna share the whole thing with you. The whole sordid like, deal. Now everybody's like oh crap, what happened to Lauren? Oh she's got this – I'm going to go sign up on her email because I need to know what, I need to know the tea. So they're going to go sign up for your list. Boom. You got immediate opt in.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: So, you know. Yeah there's going to be some friends and family in there. But who cares. Then your very first newsletter is, you know, you getting thrown in Amazon jail and how you're going to work your way out of it by building a direct connection to your readers as well as going wide with your other distribution choices.

Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely.

Matt: So you're in the right direction. You're just getting a little boring with it.

Lauren: Well, that's okay. I – I just, I was –

Matt: You got to create some suspense.

Lauren: Create some suspense, that's fair. I was –

Matt: Like the suspense of when we're actually going to see a Disney EPCOT passport from you.

Lauren: Is now a good time to tell you that I, I need time off because I have another trip booked?

Matt: Yeah. You can have eternity off.

Lauren: Great. Looking forward to it. I'm going to run out of money real fast, but what a way to go.

Matt: Yeah. Please comment on this episode if you'd like to be my new co-host.

Lauren: The position's wide open for the taking.

Matt: Leave a link to your LinkedIn or your –

Lauren: No, don't bother. You can just, you can have it. First person to claim it can have it.

Matt: No, I don't want to be sitting in here next to somebody I don't like.

Lauren: I will take that as a compliment.

Matt: I was going to say I've been doing that for the last two years. I don't want to do it again.

Lauren: Well, then you've had plenty of practice.

Matt: Alright.

Lauren: And it shouldn’t matter who's sitting in this chair.

Matt: So.

Lauren: Great. Anyway.

Matt: Email your contacts.

Lauren: Email your contacts. But also I would post on social, because that would be my – if, if I was somebody who followed an author, I am somebody who follows multiple authors on Kindle Unlimited. And if all of a sudden I went and one of those authors was suddenly gone and their books were suddenly gone, I would go check for their social media accounts and see if it said anywhere what happened to them.

Matt: But you might not recognize they're gone right away. So, you know.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: As an author, being proactive and just like you said, I think going out there and talking about it and trying to get people to come over and sign up on your email list –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: – that's –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So you're gonna, you're absolutely going to want to have like some kind of immediate CTA in, whether it's in an email or on social or wherever, where you're saying, hey, sign up for my newsletter so I can keep you in the loop about what's happening here. Or follow me on Instagram so that I can, so that you can know what, what's going on and where I'll be next. And, and, you know, as, as this story unfolds, you can follow along or whatever. But you're definitely, like, this is not something that you need to stay in the dark about. This is absolutely something that it is okay to go out in public and talk about it. And in fact, I would. Not, not just okay, but I would go talk about it, because your readers are going to be looking for you. But because it is something that people are gonna notice over time and not immediately, where I was getting boring, was I that I would caution you to not be like, super reactive with this. Because if you come out swinging and are like, oh my god, I'm going to burn Amazon to the ground because of XYZ that they did to me. Like that's, that might not be a good look on you a month later, you know? And I'm sure your fans will be outraged on your behalf. So you, you stay solution-focused and let your fans be the ones, be like, oh my god, did you hear they banned so-and-so author for absolutely no reason? Can you believe it? Like, like who does that? Like I'm so, I'm canceling my Amazon subscription.

Matt: I don’t think anybody would be surprised. But also, sadly, nobody's canceling their Amazon subscription.

Lauren: I know.

Matt: That's the problem. Okay. So you're absolutely, you want to go out and secure any of your existing audience that you can.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Whether it's on your social media channels or through your personal email, contacts, or anything else that you can get your hands on. Any other way that you may have been collecting reader information, if possible. And yes, you know, try to be graceful when you speak about it, but it's absolutely okay to speak about it. Just, you know, the goal is to move forward and start anew, but do it with a way that's more intentional and so that you have more ownership over all this stuff, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Alright. So the next thing you want to do is try to get new readers. You're gonna go back to the thing that you do anyways, as an author, which is trying to gain new audience.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Right?

Lauren: Yes. Which I know is a thing that, that terrifies a lot of people when it comes to this situation. I think this is probably the number one issue that a lot of authors have, is that fear of Amazon is where readers find books like mine and authors like me. And if I'm not on Amazon, no one's going to find my books and read my books. And realistically, that's not true. It's just not.

Matt: Agree.

Lauren: I mean, we've, we've spent 120 something episodes at this point talking about how that's not true. So yes, absolutely. There are some readers that rely very heavily on the algorithms and discoverability and ease and accessibility of Kindle Unlimited. But that's not the entire, entire reader base out there.

Matt: No. And in fact, I would say it's actually a small reader base.

Lauren: It's smaller than you think it is.

Matt: The only people that are frequenting KU and finding new authors that way, I would argue, are mostly fiction and mostly romantasy.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: And, you know.

Lauren: Or romance in general and different subgenres within romance.

Matt: Right. Yeah, sorry, romance in general.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: But yeah, outside of that, like if, if your books, you know, everything on your Amazon account was, was nonfiction, there are business books. Or it, it was fiction, but it wasn't romance-based it was, you know, whatever, horror or something like that. Like KU is probably not anywhere near a significant part of your, your book sales or your audience discoverability efforts at all. So, again, you know, not being on there is not the end of the world for most people. If you are one of the ones who writes and turns out romance ebooks pretty frequently through KU, then yeah, this could be a big part of what you, you know, have been currently relying on in terms of revenue and discoverability. But for everybody else, like, it's a drop in the bucket.

Lauren: Yeah. And I also think that even, even that is, is on the decline.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Even that is – yeah. I actively have noticed that it's getting worse and worse on KU when I'm looking for new books to read and I'm like, it's just recommending the same books to me over and over and over again. Like, I'm just getting the same recommendations, the same authors, the same – it's not updating the genre, it's not giving me new recommendations. I've ignored these for like a year and a half, and it's still not giving me new ones. Or I can tell these ones are paid because, like, there's no, there's absolutely no reason that this should be making it into my algorithm. This is so far out of the realm of my interests, so clearly this was a paid promo. And so I think that discoverability, even in the genres that it is still the most, like, effective in, is still getting progressively less effective. Especially if you're not interested in pay to play discoverability.

Matt: Yeah, yeah.

Lauren: Which is why we've done so many episodes on discoverability. We've done a bunch of different ones recently. I will link some of them in the show notes too. But literally in the last, like, fifteen episodes, we've done at least three that I think could, could kind of help people with their book discoverability efforts in a way that has nothing to do with using Amazon.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So if that's a fear or hesitation of yours, I promise you there are other solutions out there. We've got resources to help you, and there are plenty of other resources out there too.

Matt: Yeah. I mean, it's such an outdated notion. That, that Amazon is, is this discoverability engine. It definitely was, back in the day, but there's a lot of data now that supports the fact that it's just not anymore. But what you can do, and what you should be doing under the bucket of preventative measures, is making sure that you are taking good care of the contacts you do have in your email list. If you don't have an email list yet, again, go start one. There are several providers that will let you have a free account until you get up to a certain number of contacts in there. Kit is one of them. I know there's a few others.

Lauren: MailChimp.

Matt: MailChimp, you know, Beehiiv, there's no shortage of them. And they're all basically the same for your purposes until you really start getting up into the tens of thousands of, of contacts. So just go pick one, you know? And start.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And again, the easiest place to start is in your, your personal email. And then outside anything, you know, like Lauren said, go to your social media channels and start trying to get people to, you know, come over and sign up for your email list. Even if you only end up with 25 in the first week you're doing this, that's 25 dedicated people. That could be 25 book sales right out of the gate the next time you launch a book or whatever you're doing. I mean, that can't be underestimated. 25 people buying your book directly from you, by the way, is a least a 5x profit increase than 25 people buying your book off Amazon.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So there's also the math.

Lauren: Absolutely yeah.

Matt: But.

Lauren: This is also... If you're somebody who has been hesitant in the past to ask people, you don't know how to ask people to sign up for your newsletter, you don't know how to incentivize people to do it, this is a great reason. Or maybe if you're, if you're looking for ways to incentivize KU readers that are, you know, you're afraid that they're not going to want to buy your books from you because they're used to getting them for free with their subscription. Maybe you say, hey, sign up for my newsletter and let me know which of my ebooks was the one that you read over and over again on KU and I will send you a free ebook download of that, or I will send you bonus content from that, or something. Something to incentivize, like, this is a reason for you to come to me instead of KU.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. You have something on here that I thought was really, really smart, which is, you know, something that can really help out in a situation like this is, you know... In your personal life, if you have something happen that's considered tragic or traumatic, the first thing you do is you turn to to friends or family, your network. You should be able to do the same thing as an author. And so, you know, preventative measures around this would be, you know, this would look like, you know, building a network of other authors and peers, influencers and creators that work within your niche or your, you know, your genre or whatever it is you're doing. That's not the part, but the part I like that you put in here was working out a disaster strategy –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – with them. So, you know, in your little group of peers or authors or creator friends, this could happen to any one of you. And it probably has or will. Having like a group disaster plan or strategy for like, when this happens to one of us, here's how we'll all –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – jump in and help. We'll amplify the fact that you're setting up your own email list and then, you know, we'll tell our audiences, like. Having some sort of plan for the group when this happens to one of you as an individual... That's a really cool idea. I like that.

Lauren: Yeah, I thought that would be a really kind of interesting experiment. Even if, if for no other reason than going through the practice of doing that might make you say, oh, why am I waiting for this disaster to happen? Why, why can't I just start doing some of these things now? I should be doing some of these things now. Which you should be, obviously.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: It’s what we’ve been saying over and over again here. But if you have a backup in place where you can sit there and say, okay, my account just got banned on Amazon, but these six authors that I'm friends with are all just waiting for me to send them like, the the next step. And they're going to send that out to their whole email list and say, hey, our friend so-and-so had their account banned, but you can still find them on their website here, or you can still find them on Instagram here, or you can still buy their books here, and maybe go show them some love.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: You know? Like we, we did an episode recently on, on how to get your readers to sell your books for you. And this is another one of those, like, rallying calls to action from a fan base. But absolutely, if an author that I loved send out an email and was like, hey, an author that I love just had this thing happen to them, go show them support, I probably would. I don't know if I'd buy their book, but I would at least like, go amplify their social posts or maybe subscribe to their newsletter and check their books out.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And see – like, you know, I would do something to, to show some support for that author in this situation.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So I think don't underestimate the power of your network and your network’s network.

[45:15] – Problem Three: Your Promo is Tied to Amazon

Matt: Beyond audience, you probably had money tied to Amazon –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – in other ways. You were probably doing some promo, either directly with Amazon or through third party. You know, maybe Written Word Media stuff or, you know, whatever, BookBub or, I don’t know, one of the twenty different services that exists out there –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – that you can tie in to your Amazon stuff. So you obviously need to, to take account and assess. Take an audit, if you will. Lauren's favorite word.

Lauren: I was – I left it out of the outline, but I was wondering if I was going to get you to say it.

Matt: It's forever ingrained –

Lauren: I know.

Matt: – in my memory, so. Yeah.

Lauren: I know.

Matt: But I appreciate you not putting it in front of me.

Lauren: That was just for you. But, but yes, this is, this is a good opportunity for you to do an audit of all of your existing promotional efforts, or your standard default promotional efforts. And I would say sort them into three different categories. So these are all my ones that are built in on Amazon. These are all my ones that are third party promo but are connected to Amazon in some way. So like the Written Word Media, BookBub promos. And then some independent promo that you are running. Whether that's independent because you're doing, like, earned and paid promo, like newsletters or –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – or anything, or something like social media campaigns. That's – technically you're not using a third party service to run those for you, so you're managing those on your own.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But you're gonna wanna kind of take an accounting of all three of those, because you're going to have to make changes to all three of them. Realistically.

Matt: Well one of ‘em’s dead at this point.

Lauren: One of them is, is completely –

Matt: Flatlined.

Lauren: – defunct.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: But the reason that I would say to include that in your accounting is, is literally for accounting. Because if you know that you were spending X amount of money every month on running these, these promo ads, reallocate that budget.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: To wherever would be the most helpful for you in this moment. So, you know, make sure you know what what's dead in the water on Amazon so that you can turn that around somewhere else. And also, I mean, even if your account is just suspended, like, do you really want to keep giving Amazon money after they've scared the shit out of you like this?

Matt: No, you definitely don't.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: But –

Lauren: So.

Matt: You also have to be aware of, you know, some of those third party ones require you to link to an Amazon...

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: – book, product page, however you want to phrase it.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: And you're gonna need to know which ones those are, because those are clearly defunct now too. And not working.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: And again, you'll want to take those funds and reallocate them back to, you know, a third party service that will allow you to link to wherever you're selling your book, not just Amazon.

Lauren: Yes. And if you're looking for preventative measures here, that is something to think about in the future. Before you sign up for some of these big third party promotional sites.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Is an Amazon account a requirement for these? And if it is, is that really worth investing in? Especially if you think maybe there's a chance one day you're not going to be on Amazon. By choice or, or not. But then also, you know, those third party – not third party ones, the independent ones that are not necessarily beholden to any of these, like the existence of your Amazon account or whatever. I would still, you definitely want to make sure that you're you're going through there. Because if, for example, you're running a evergreen Facebook campaign that's just promoting your books –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – in general. If all the links that you have tied to those ads are linking to your Amazon author page, you're going to want to make sure you update those ASAP.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: Which is why I said one of the first things that you want to do is get your books back out into the market. Immediately. Because then you can just relink those –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – those, running –

Matt: You got to have the links though, yeah.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Exactly. And of course, in that scenario, preventative measures... Maybe, maybe don't run campaigns that link to your Amazon account. Maybe this is a really good reason that you should be selling direct and that you should you should link your campaigns to an owned channel and not rented land. We've talked about that a million times before, but this is another example of a scenario in which that could wind up burning you more than you realize.

Matt: Or at the very least, you know, again, have multiple channels where, you know, if, if one of them does get frozen or shut down or, or hacked, you can go and switch the links out at these, you know, independent and third party promo spots to just another one of the links to the sales channels –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – that you currently occupy or utilize. So, yeah, if you're not selling direct or you're not ready for that yet still, then at least have multiple sales channels with multiple links that you can use.

Lauren: Which is, which is why I think, as an overarching kind of preventative measure here, I would always have an author website set up. Like, you want to own that domain name, even if it is the most basic, bare bones, black and white on a, like, you know, there's... the, the page has like, more hopes and dreams than any, than any real value. At least it exists. And even if you are not yet set up to sell direct. But that is something that you're – you know, maybe down the road, maybe not, whatever. It's a great place to aggregate your buy links.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Even though we ultimately would not recommend that you drive traffic to your own website just to then turn around and send that traffic away again, at least that is – If you're, if you're doing paid ad promo and you're linking people to the buy page on your website where people have the opportunity to find all of your, your buy links together on one place, at least you don't have to replace that.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: If one of those buy links goes away.

Matt: It's a good point.

Lauren: Yeah. But also, author website. Now is the time. Author website and email newsletter list. If you are not already doing those two things, right now. Right now is the time to start. Let's go. Whether it's because this horrible situation has happened to you, or because you want to make sure that you have a plan in place if and when it ever does. Stop listening to this episode and go secure a web domain.

Matt: Well, they could do that while they're listening.

Lauren: You could do that while you're listening.

Matt: I've literally bought domains while we were recording a podcast before.

Lauren: I believe that.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I have no doubt in my mind about that.

[52:14] – Episode Wrap Up

Matt: Alright. The number one takeaway here is never create a single point of failure for yourself.

Lauren: Correct.

Matt: So never have all your eggs in one basket. Never put all your money on one horse. However you want to look at this. Don't do it. Right?

Lauren: If insert name of platform collapsed tomorrow. If you woke up tomorrow and this platform was gone, would your entire brand disappear with it? And if the answer to that is yes, it's time to do a very, very serious reevaluation and strategy planning. Immediately.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Cause that's not sustainable. And if that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.

Matt: Well, probably some, some good old fashioned Stephen King or something like that. First time I ever saw It, I was thoroughly terrified.

Lauren: You know what's really funny? Is It actually made an appearance in the other episode that I was outlining today. So, it's funny that that you brought that up out of, out of all possible examples here.

Matt: It's one of my favorites.

Lauren: It's, it's one of my favorites, too. It's, it was the first Stephen King book I ever read.

Matt: Oh, mine was The Shining.

Lauren: I'm terrified of clowns. And then I got tricked into seeing the movie. I mean, I knew what it – I knew what it was, I went into it – But I got, I got bullied into going to see it, and I loved it despite the clown. And so then I read the book, and it was worth it.

Matt: Very good. Alright. If you made it this far, thanks.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: If this has happened to you, our condolences. But do the right thing. Set yourself up for success.

Lauren: I hope that most of our listeners have not had this experience. But if you have, I'm sorry. And I hope that you are recovering from it. And if you are not, there's still time. You can still rebuild. This – don't, don't take that as, as the end of your author brand. But more importantly, if you have not yet found yourself in this scenario where your entire content brand lives or dies on a single point of failure... Take this episode as your sign to start putting a plan in place, and proactive measures in place, so that you are not at the mercy of one platform.

Matt: No notes.

Lauren: Great.

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: Yeah. Now that I've renewed your disdain for Kindle in every way, shape, or form, what print book are you going to go spite read?

Matt: The same one that I would have done without –

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: – this episode, but.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: I am moving on to Strange Buildings by Uketsu. So, I’ve done –

Lauren: That's the third and final one?

Matt: Yes. Yeah. I just finished a book called Suspicion by... now I can't remember his name, but it's the same guy who wrote Tokyo Express. And Tokyo Express was cool, Japanese suspense thriller. Suspicion not so much, I was a little disappointed. It's a novella. Like, you read it –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – in like, hour and a half, something like that. Not so much, so. Oh well. I guess they can’t all be winners. But. So far the first two Uketsu books were good.

Lauren: Alright. Well I hope – Are they, is it a connected trilogy? Or...

Matt: Yes, yes and no.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: Like, it's one of those where there are some connections, but they're not, like, meant to be like a trilogy –

Lauren: So it’s –

Matt: – in the traditional sense.

Lauren: Yeah. So it's not like the, this is the, like, climax of –

Matt: No.

Lauren: – three books worth of plot?

Matt: Not at all.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: No.

Lauren: Well, in that case, I hope, I hope it continues the status quo of the first two.

Matt: Me too.

Lauren: Because that's always disappointing when it doesn’t.

Matt: We'll see.

Lauren: And to our listeners, if you're, you're reading anything good and you want to recommend it, let us know.

Matt: As long as it’s not romance.

Lauren: You can recommend romance to me. Absolutely, for sure. But I'm always in the mood for book recommendations. I gotta find something new to add to the TBR.

Matt: Don't send us an Amazon link though.

Lauren: Definitely not. Definitely not. But you can send us recommendations at podcast@lulu.com. You can leave us comments or reviews on YouTube, on Spotify, on Lulu's social media channels. Actually, I would love to hear from our Apple listeners. Let me know if you're somebody who listens on Apple, on the Apple Podcasts app, if you are seeing our videos on Apple.

Matt: Yeah that’d be good to know.

Lauren: I would appreciate that. Hopefully you are, and hopefully you will see another one next week when we're back with another new episode.

Matt: Yep. Later.

Lauren: Thanks for listening.