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Carole
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Nov 25, 2017 07:35AM
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I think the headline is misleading. Amazon isn't punishing authors for running legitimate promotions. Its automatic bots just temporarily rank strip any book that shows a sudden and suspicious jump in sales until their humans can look it over and make sure it's legit. The title should be "Amazon's Protection Against Scams Occasionally Catches Innocent People Until They Can Verify Origin of Sales"
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Troubling, but it's not going to stop me from running ENT discount sales. This whole marketplace is so complex it won't be long before we all will have to hire lawyers to keep us apprised of the latest ins and outs. Life is too short for this nonsense...and besides, who among us is up to taking on Amazon?
This is very damaging to Authors I think there will be a move back to country sites and Authors will move away from Amazon.
C.L. wrote: "I think the headline is misleading. Amazon isn't punishing authors for running legitimate promotions. Its automatic bots just temporarily rank strip any book that shows a sudden and suspicious jump..."You make it sound so harmless. From the comments of the article:
"After a 3-day paid promotion for a discounted book bundle back in July, I was rank stripped and had my Pages Read also stripped. While Amazon returned my ranking after a week, they refused to return my pages read, which was over 1 million pages. I have repeatedly sent emails and have gotten absolutely nowhere. They accused me of manipulating page reads, which I absolutely have not done! As of this date, they have refused to answer my emails. I’m heartbroken and out thousands of dollars."
David Gaughran also wrote a post about this happening to Phoenix Sullivan: https://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2...
It's expected that bots will tag false positives. But if the bot is in error, Amazon customer service needs to rectify the situation, which means restoring sales ranking, restoring KU page reads, and making sure it doesn't happen again. Instead, they're taking their sweet time to restore ranking, and accusing reputable authors of doing things they haven't done.
