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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Jan 27, 2021 1:24:29 GMT
Hellos, I just read about this on reddit. Apparently amazon is sending ads to some people to enroll in amazon ads, and addressing them to their pen names, rather than people's real names. If your pen names are secret or embarrassing this could potentially be a problem for you. You can opt-out of receiving advertising through snail mail here - > www.amazon.com/gp/cpc/homepage#directmailI can't guarantee amazon won't send you something even if you do opt-out, but it's worth a try. I just did it. Here's the thread where I found out about it -> https://www.reddit.com/r/eroticauthors/comments/l4tzs2/physical_mail_from_amazon_addressed_to_a_pen_name/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eroticauthors/comments/l5dcbg/amazon_is_doxxing_pen_names_in_order_to_sell_more/ |
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Post by writeway on Jan 29, 2021 22:38:33 GMT
I am a member of The Alliance of Independent Authors aka ALLi and I suggest if any author is a member of the organization they need to let ALLi know though I am sure they know of this issue. But if you are a member and gone through this they can help get answers from Amazon and hopefully get this stopped. They are currently working on how some authors are getting banned from KDP for having multiple accounts even when they don't. It happened to an author who is a member and in the ALLi group, the organization says they are in contact with Amazon about this. Amazon is doing a purge of people with multiple KDP accounts (which isn't allowed) and like always, they've hit innocent authors during the sweep.
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Post by writeway on Jan 29, 2021 22:44:19 GMT
Also, is it just me, or is this a sign that AMS is in trouble? If Amazon has to go through the trouble of snail mailing advertisements to join the program, that sounds like they are losing authors or money on it. I stopped using AMS last year and don't ever plan to go back to it or any other click ads. I quit because the ads stopped working and I ended up spending more on ads than I was making. So this sounds like AMS could be in trouble. Would make sense. Why? Because of the state of the global economy due to Covid. Authors don't have the extra money anymore to run on ads. Books are not selling as well as they were, authors who worked have lost jobs, so it's a whole lot of things. And when an author starts struggling financially, you can bet the first thing they will cut are ads because there are many other ways to sell books that don't cost as much. We get to thinking we gotta depend on ads but we don't. Many authors don't use ads and sell. I've been doing fine since quitting ads. So glad I did.
Yep, the first thing I thought of was they are in trouble with AMS because if not, they would not be spending money (snail mail costs money) to spam authors into using the program.
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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Jan 30, 2021 19:02:45 GMT
That's a good tip for anyone who belongs to Alli to contact them about this. It's always scary to hear about authors losing their accounts when they've done nothing wrong. Amazon has such a terrible system for dealing with troublemakers.
I had published a journal where I used a "publisher name" for the author name because I saw so many other notebook publishers doing this. And then I get an email telling me to change the author name. So I go in and try to change it, but amazon's system won't let me because it had already been published. So I write back, explaining this, and get a response ordering me to change the name. I just told you, that your system won't allow me to do this! It was extremely frustrating.
It must be so much worse to be told you've done something wrong that you haven't done, and then be banned and have all your royalties taken. And when you try and counter, you either get radio silence or get re-accused.
I'm sure you're right about amazon losing money on AMS. They sell too many ads to too many people. I imagine the bids must be extremely high to get yourself seen at the top of the page. They probably hired a fly-by-night, outside agency to try and bolster their ads service, and the inexperienced, non-authors, not-super-techy folks messed up the mail and account name merge. Only the cheapest for amazon - never the best.
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