Interesting. I’d heard people were starting to get threatening emails from Amazon about pulling their books down for spelling errors. I’d even heard some had their books pulled. I just hadn’t received any emails myself. I use multiple layers of professional editing and as a result, my books (not my blog posts; they are not edited!) often contain the phrases “Well edited” or “Well written” in their reviews.
Last week I got one of the emails, about Saving Grace, my biggest selling book, and, now that it is permanently free in ebook form, the highest downloaded. Together, the result is that over 500,000 people have this book in their hands. It is the driving force behind the $75,000 I estimate I make per year from Amazon, based on sales in the last six months. And if I make $75k, Amazon makes about $30k. (I did that in my head. I’m an author, not a mathematician, so I don’t give a flying flip what the exact figure is, in case you wondered.) Anyway, that’s considered very successful in Amazon terms. The books has over 1300 reviews and a 4.4-rating. Recently I updated some common sections in all my books and reuploaded them, including Saving Grace.
And I got one of “those” emails from Amazon. They found “spelling errors” in it and a forced page break. They didn’t specify what the “spelling errors” were, but the KDP upload page has a spell checker, and it identified one, only it wasn’t an error. The page break had existed in that book for three years, but I consulted with tech support for Pressbooks, and we fixed it, and I reuploaded it.
I was unsettled, but I’m always happy to fix a problem. Here’s the actual string (read from the bottom up, like you would in real email):
***
Hello Pamela,
Thank you for your response.
Based on the information you provided, this content will remain live and available for sale.
Once you make the necessary corrections, please resubmit the content for review. Please follow the steps below to upload the updated content and replace your previous submission:
1. Log in https://kdp.amazon.com and go to your Bookshelf
2. Find the book you want to edit, and in the ‘Other Book Actions’ column, click “Edit Book Details.” (If you see a gray ellipsis (“…”) button, click there first, then select “Edit Details.”)
3. Scroll down to Section 6 and under the text “Book Content File,” click “Browse.”
4. Find the revised file of your book’s content and select it.
5. Click “Upload Book.”
6. Click “Save and Continue.”
You’ll also need to reconfirm Content Rights and click “Save and Publish.” The new file will overwrite the old file within 24-48 hours. The “Look Inside” sample should update within a week of republishing your book.
Once you upload the updated content, please write back and let us know, so that we can assist you further.
If you’ve any issue or need further clarification, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re happy to resolve the issue for you.
Thanks for using Amazon KDP.
………………………………………………………
Did I solve your problem?
If yes, please click here:
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If no, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A3TMDYCYUUZQVQ&k=hn
………………………………………………………
Regards,
David M.
Kindle Direct Publishing
http://kdp.amazon.com
=============================
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—- Original message: —-
I just double checked for “spelling errors” generated by the KDP system. Here’s a screen shot. This is NOT a spelling error:
I am in touch with Pressbooks.com to see why the extra page is being introduced. However, I just looked at the file, and it is ONE blank page. I will get it fixed, but, as you can see from my 1300+ 4.4-star reviews, people think this book is well written, well edited, and well formatted. I beg you, it is critical to my sales (which Amazon benefits) from, and I have a bookbub promotion running TODAY, please leave this file up while Pressbooks fixes the one forced page break in the entire file. It is possibly the ONLY ERROR in the entire file, which is far better than 99.9% of the books for sale anywhere.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention, and for working with me to resolve the page break.
Pamela
From: “Amazon.com” <[email protected]>Subject: Kindle Quality Notice: [Saving Grace] [B009FZPMFO] [0036245254 ]Date: May 8, 2015 at 7:33:41 AM CDTTo: Pamela Hutchins <[email protected]>Reply-To: “[email protected]” <[email protected]>Hello,Thank you for resubmitting your content to us! We have reviewed the new content, but some of the problems we notified you about previously still exist:• There are some words in your book that our spell check dictionary could not identify. If any of the words are not spelled the way you intended, please update your content. You can also email us at [email protected] to let us know that the words are spelled correctly. Here are the words and their locations.• A forced page break appears in the middle of the body text. This can be confusing to readers, who may think that content is missing from the blank section. Please remove any similar breaks and resubmit your content. You can see this issue at location [62, after the text “events is just a lucky coincidence….”]After you’ve made the correction, please upload your revised content through the ‘Book Content’ section in your KDP Bookshelf. If you have further questions, please reply directly to this email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.For further information regarding specific book errors (including why some errors are more critical than others), please see the Guide to Kindle Content Quality Errors at https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=200952510.Thanks for using Amazon KDP!Best Regards,Best Regards,Amazon KDP
http://kdp.amazon.com
***
Note text in bold in their original email above. Don’t see the words that threaten to pull down the book? That’s because they’re not there. The threat is implied. They are telling you to fix your book. And I know personally of authors I am friends with on Facebook that had their books pulled, so I take any contact from Amazon very seriously.
Today I got another email, this one accusing me of failing to fix the spelling errors from the original email. Only the original email didn’t tell me what the errors were or how many there were (see bold above, my reply, and their response), just directed me to find and fix any. I replied that the one identified error in the KDP system was not an error, and they responded positively.
But this email did specify the spelling errors. There were TWO. Two in the WHOLE BOOK. I’ve never found a book, ever, that had that few errors. But I got a threatening email. Here’s the email string:
The errors had not been specified to me before, so thank you! I strive for perfection. They have been corrected and the file re-uploaded.
On May 12, 2015, at 5:23 AM, Amazon.com <[email protected]> wrote:Hello,
Thank you for resubmitting your content to us! We have reviewed the new content, but the problem we notified you about previously still exists:
• There are some words in your book that our spell check dictionary could not identify. If any of the words are not spelled the way you intended, please update your content. You can also email us at [email protected] to let us know that the words are spelled correctly. Here are the words and their locations
Error Description: “on his check” should be “on his cheek” / Error Location: 1085
Error Description: “mosty empty” should be “mostly empty” / Error Location: 3520
After you’ve made the correction, please upload your revised content through the ‘Book Content’ section in your KDP Bookshelf. If you have further questions, please reply directly to this email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
For further information regarding specific book errors (including why some errors are more critical than others), please see the Guide to Kindle Content Quality Errors at https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=200952510.
Thanks for using Amazon KDP!
Best Regards,
Amazon KDP
http://kdp.amazon.com
Now, I want a perfect book, so I was elated to learn of errors I could eradicate. I fixed the two misspelled words and reuploaded it as requested within five minutes of reading their email. I just find it extremely odd that a book with two editing errors in 85,000-words would merit attention, and that if they truly wanted them fixed and the book to remain available that they wouldn’t identify them from the beginning.
Oh well.
I’m waiting now to hear from them on all my books. It would be great to get rid of that last .0002% of error that I assume exists in my professionally edited books, like in all professionally edited books. I just don’t want to be targeted, and I can’t help but feel that way over being pursued for two misspelled words out of 85,000 when I read books from Amazon every week with five, ten, twenty, even 100 times that many, books that I know have not been threatened with removal. Even if Amazon didn’t use those exact words.
We’ll see, I guess.
What about you guys? Have any of you heard from Amazon? What do you think of their new policy and how they are enforcing it?
Pamela
Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes award-winning and bestselling mysteries 
and hilarious nonfiction, chairs the board of the Houston Writers Guild, and dabbles in employment law and human resources investigations from time to time. She is passionate about great writing, smart authorpreneurship, and her two household hunks, husband Eric and one-eyed Boston terrier Petey. She blogs on writing, publishing and promotion at Skip the Jack and on her beleaguered family, and much-too-personal life at Road to Joy. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start). Check out her USA Best Book Award winning novel, Going for Kona, her permafree mystery (and series lead), Saving Grace, her writing/publishing/promotion Bible, What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?, and her newest mystery, Heaven to Betsy.
It does feel strange and I certainly wonder about the randomness of it. Does this mean that their systems crawl all books and this just happens to be the time they got to SG, or did some other action of yours flag the book for this type of Audit?
Anyway, I think the important message to everyone that you put in your blog here is: Don’t ignore the requests by Amazon to make corrections. They have unlimited right to do what they want to with your book, “fairness” doesn’t even come into the equation. If they say jump, you say how high? It is the unfortunate reality.
Yes, don’t ignore Amazon. If you hear from them, it’s a big deal. Start jumping.
So sorry you went through this, Pamela. I wonder if maybe SG was targeted because it is doing so well and they think of it as a high visibility book?
I have not experienced this… yet. *Knock on wood*
I think all of this is just a bit of what’s to come in the future. With the onset of ebook publishing, there’s no more gatekeepers, right? Well, has anyone considered that these books will never go out of print? You think there’s a lot of ebooks now? Give it a few years. So yeah, I would imagine Amazon is eventually going to step up with a little gatekeeping, and this might be the first sign of it. Scary. but it just might be necessary to keep the whole market from taking a nosedive.
I don’t see it as a negative development if it is done evenhandedly and books aren’t pulled for minor or non-issues. I see so many books that are poorly written and poorly edited, and honestly, mine are not poorly edited. Mine are edited very, very well. I would pit them against any book out there. So as long as the ones riddled with mistake are getting this help to fix mistakes, then it’s good. And as long as it’s not on stylistic issues; grammar usage is often a stylistic choice. Sometimes as authors we choose to break the rules artistically, with run on sentences, or words we coin, or in dialogue (etc.). Commas: to Oxford or not to Oxford?
But if feedback from Amazon or a reader or a reviewer or a lamppost results in less errors in my books, that’s a good thing.
Today I got an email that said this:
****
Hello,
Thanks for letting us know you’ve republished an updated version of your book. Our quality team will review your file and make it available for sale again once they confirm the issues are resolved.
Thanks for using Amazon KDP.
***
Think they’re not pulling them down even if they don’t explicitly say they are? For two spelling errors. Neither should have made it through editing, but that is a standard that no book meets. And, they are no longer in the book and I am happy about that.
Thanks Kate!
The same thing happened to me regarding Unspoken Bond. Amazon sent me an email telling me to correct 2 mistakes that a reader had alerted them to. Huh? Who does that? Anyway, I sent Amazon an email explaining that the book had been harassed before and I felt this was harassment, and besides the book is two years old. Amazon backed off on this saying they wanted to keep their authors happy, blah, blah, so I didn’t have to correct the 2 mistakes.
I see mistakes in traditionally published books by big name authors, and I wonder does Amazon send them a snarky email telling them to correc it? I doubt it.
Considering all the crap eBooks on Amazon that have numerous glaring mistakes that stay that way forever, it makes me wonder why they target some books and not others. Do they base it on ranking or reviews? Are they picking the books they think are a success or could be?
Regarding my next book, I have corrected and re-uploaded to Amazon based on a review complaining of using the word “flummoxed” twice in 5 pages. Not sure how that one got by me because I do a search on words I think I use too much.
While I don’t read my reviews, my husband does, and he tells me if there is anything I need to know: good feedback on errors or reader-issues. It’s because of reviews and his feedback that I brought an earlier character back as a major player in my next book, for instance. I welcome good-spirited feedback.
My editor has a traditionally published book. There are thirteen glaring errors in it, and there are others that don’t stand out. It’s well-edited, but not fantastically edited. She can’t get her publisher to correct them and upload a clean copy. Mine has outsold hers by a magnitude that doesn’t bear calculating. Why doesn’t Amazon target that book? (And I don’t want them to do bad things to good books, this is just an example.)
I just want the playing field to be level.
I have not had this experience with Amazon. If they intend to do this for every book in their files, there will be a lot of books pulled. I almost never read a book that I find no errors in. I can’t imagine that they are doing anything other than attempting to be helpful.
If I hadn’t gotten sternly worded threatening emails to them on a number of issues in the past, I’d probably be more likely to feel they were helpful. They are just usually too heavy handed to elicit that reaction from me. Maybe they’re just trying to help themselves, though, by selling better products. I just humbly suggest that they’re wasting their time on my books and should focus on some with issues. 🙂
You know I haven’t made it to Amazon (yet!), but all I thought as I read your post was, “WOW! Big Brother is definitely watching…..”
They monitor EVERYTHING. I try not to bite the hand that feeds me, but sometimes that hand is so heavy. On the other, um, hand 🙂 I do want to fix any problems anyone can find in my books. It’s a mixed bag.
I forgot to add that your responses were polite, professional, yet firm. You got all lawerly on them.
I had an expensive promotion running that day, and an expensive one the next day. Nothing would make people madder than being directed to go download a book that they didn’t have access to. I was honestly terrified they’d pull it down. It’s hard to regain traction once lost. And thank you.
yikes!
But think what good marketing this is for professional editors: Amazon will pull your book if you don’t present with professional level editing 😉
This is a great post. If Amazon is going to do quality control, they shouldn’t leave it at spell check. As you demonstrated, the word ughs is not a misspelling though it always shows up as one on all spellcheckers. So you have the inane situation of a quasi editor using a mistake checker that itself, makes mistakes. And there is no senior authority to catch these mistakes? What’s wrong here? It is the attitude that if a few books are unfairly penalized, that is okay if it keeps out badly edited books. That being said, if I want my book to be read and for it to sell, it needs to be fully error free. So this post makes the point that if I need to proofread my book 6 times carefully, that’s worth it or ask the the people who test read your book to give you a heads up on spelling errors or anything that possibly isn’t clear or possibly kicks them out of the story. Self publishing has certain disadvantages but if you write your book, you need to make every effort to make it as perfect as possible before self publishing it. That is very important to keep in mind.
Larry B.
We should be doing all we can to give a reader a near-perfection reading experience. Honestly, me proofreading six times or a team of beta readers doesn’t do it. If anyone reading this is relying on that, and not on someone removed from the book with professional skills who is staking their professional reputation on the quality, you are missing a lot. Never EVER seen it otherwise. That being said, yes, the Amazon spell checker NEVER caught the two errors that ultimately I was guided to correct, but did catch “errors” that weren’t errors. If this quality control tool is perfected it will be fantastic for amazon, the author, and readers.
If proofreading 6 times and beta readers is not enough that is good to know. But if I am thinking of self publishing then it probably is important to find an outside professional editor to help get my book ready to self publish even it means it will be expensive. It would be great if there were a post on the best way to do that. When writing I think that model of endeavoring to give the reader a near perfect reading experience is good to have in mind in the early stages. Maybe after the book is the best you can do and you have gone over it and rewritten whatever seems off and you can’t think of anything else to do with it. Only then work on finding a professional outside editor. Always one thing at a time and don’t feel overwhelmed.
My last book: two professional editors, me, and 20 betas. Mistakes found since publication: seven.
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