A Blockheaded Bureaucracy’s Futile Mischief
The gauntlet of self-publishing anthologies of web content on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
Usually on Medium I write for the paying audience, but this article is for a very limited audience, namely Amazon’s content review team.
You see, I collect my many Medium articles and self-publish them as anthologies on Amazon. I’ve done this eleven times now, and I’m in the process of publishing my twelfth anthology. At least twice in the past, though, Amazon flagged these anthologies, noting that their contents are “freely” available on the web. (They’re behind Medium’s paywall but leave that aside.) Thus, understandably, Amazon’s content review team wanted to ensure that I hold the copyrights to publish that content.
I’ve written twice about the Kafkaesque saga of battling those content reviewers, in 2021 and 2022. Amazon’s rules locked me in a catch-22 so that I had to find a way to prove that I own the Medium content. What I did was write some Medium articles that exposed the process of dealing with Amazon KDP, and that included my back-and-forth emails with the content reviewers. Of course, that proved that the Medium writer was the same person who was speaking with Amazon’s content review team and trying to self-publish some books.
