I’ll keep this brief. If you are an indie author, Amazon doesn’t care about you (your money, yes—but not you).
I’ve been publishing books through KDP (Amazon’s self-publishing service) since 2010 (earlier, as a contributing author). Most of my work, however, has been published over the last five years.
Up until now, it was a pretty good experience.
However, over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed my reviews—across all ten books (plus one abridged ebook, making eleven)—disappearing.
I tried contacting KDP and Amazon, but the platform—literally—kept taking me in a circle. You CANNOT get a person, and even the chat says, “I can’t help you with this issue,” and refers you to some community board.
I know that Amazon changes its categories often. I also know it started allowing print books to list three main categories instead of two. Additionally, you have to add separate categories and keywords for ebooks and print books, and Amazon reserves the right to change or delete them if it chooses to.
After recently auditing all of my books, I updated categories and keywords to be as accurate as possible and in line with current categories. Therefore, when reviews began disappearing, I thought it was a metadata issue or indexing glitch (e.g., maybe they had some reviews listed under my trilogy compilation and others under individual books).
I’ve since learned that Amazon now automates audits, removing a large number of legitimate reviews if something trips their algorithm. Amazon also strips out reviews and posts by country marketplace. So, by perusing Amazon UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, India, Germany, France, Belgium, and Singapore, I could “see” many of my reviews that were not showing up in the U.S. under “global reviews.”
I asked ChatGPT to compile what reviews it could find and learned that Amazon prohibits “review scraping.” I also learned it now limits organic discovery. In other words, Amazon wants you to put money into ads—lots of ads. It’s not just actively not supporting indie authors; it seems to be making a calculated effort to harm us.
The funny thing is, almost all of my marketing and advertising (on Amazon and elsewhere) was designed to drive people to my Amazon Author page. So, this feels a bit like a betrayal.
I understand the “reasons” for such moves (legal concerns, brand trust, traditional publishers with large budgets and strong followings), but the casualty in all this is the independent author. And I can’t help but think that Amazon not only puts profit over people, but that it no longer cares about people at all.
Over the next six months, I will need to restructure my publishing and marketing approach to focus less on Amazon while tapping into other sites such as Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble Press, Draft2Digital, IngramSpark, Spotify, Findaway Voices, Libby, etc. (And if you’re an indie author reading this, I value your suggestions.)
Final thoughts? Indie author, Amazon doesn’t care about you. Instead of chasing Amazon reviews and pandering to ever-changing rules and regulations, I hope you’ll consider carving out a niche that’s more supportive and sustainable.
