Casey Swan

Amazon kdp is a sweat shop that doesn't look after its authors.

Read the email below. Don't buy from them!

Dear Jeff Bezos,

After eight years as a moderately successful author on Amazon kdp, I have today archived all advertising on AMS and unpublished the 41 books of mine that were up at Amazon.

There has been 3 weeks of frustration, 24 emails, and 4 call backs to Amazon kdp and customer services, all of which have directed me to enable or disable the two-step verification of my Amazon store account. No one listens when I say that seven times I have followed Amazon instructions carefully, only to be told “You have requested too many OTPs today,” when this is the FIRST ATTEMPT in several days (over the three weeks it has been 3-7 days between). When the two-step has been disabled, I have waited 11 times for an OTP that never comes (after 20 minutes I give up). Two-step disabled or not, I cannot make the needed changes to my amazon store account that might fix this problem. Yet all I get is useless links to help suggestions, or someone disabling two-step yet again, which I know does not work.

This may be because I live in New Zealand, and it is common here to not receive OTPs from around the world, or because I think I have an old landline number from eight years ago as the ‘phone to verify’ (landlines cannot receive texts), and Amazon has probably done an update recently that doesn’t like that.

I have suggested that customer service reach into my account and remove the landline number which may be causing the problems, and perhaps change ‘phone verification’ to ‘authenticator app’ which I have been trying to install (except I have the same problems as above). No one has listened to me, and there has never been a conversation about what is happening and what may be possible

Since I cannot access my Amazon store or Amazon kdp accounts, I am unable to access my tax records, change the mobile phone number to the current one, or update my credit card when it runs out. Without the credit card update I cannot advertise with AMS and selling on Amazon becomes impossible, so I am giving up writing and leaving Amazon kdp.

After a life of teaching High School mathematics, and now taking some senior yoga classes and running a choir, I had hoped to spend many happy years writing in my retirement. That hope has now been destroyed by your customer service people.

The customer service centre at Amazon kdp is a toxic place where psychopaths go to deliberately misunderstand decent people with a valid problem.

May they all rot in hell!

Warwick Gibson (New Zealand).

4 April, 2025.