It's just bad programming.

Exactly.  Whether it's an eBook (and especially if it's an eBook) or a PDF for paperback, whatever scripts or programs are used to scan the file should be able to determine there is content there and that the content is comparable to other "normal" books.

And if they are claiming that "during a review" they found the books lacked "significant content," and that is based on "journal" being in the title and not due to an actual review of the content, that's borders on being an outright lie.  If a human had reviewed it, they would have seen that's not the case.  If their bots or "AI" are too stupid to figure that out, maybe Amazon needs to hire better programmers.

Also, if they are banning or red flagging books as "low content" due to certain words in the title and not due to actual content reviews, that's just really really lousy programming.  Should be relatively easy to program something that can determine whether a book has content typical of a novel or typical of a "low content" book.

So, yeah, +1 on bad programming.  Maybe not just bad, but stupid and poor and lousy.

I spent yesterday and this morning iterating with the "Alert from Amazon?s Content Review Team" via email.  BOTs are destroying the world...

In setting up the pre-order ebook and paperback, I also created a "series."  The first email stated:

During our review, we found that the series was submitted for books(s) that lack significant content on the interior pages. This includes books intended to be filled by the user (e.g. lined journal, notebook, sketchbook, planner, calendar), ?gag? books that intentionally have blank interiors, and books used for a professional purpose like staging a house. As a result, we won?t be making the series page available on Amazon because low-content books are not eligible to be added to a series.

None of that is accurate, except the part about the BOT blocking the series.

Jumping to the end, it took me a while to understand that the email responses were coming from a BOT.   Once I realized that little diddy, I closely evaluated the thread.

The word "journal" is a red flag to the BOTs. I pulled everything down (archived), removed the word "journal" from the title, and put everything back up without issue.

Happy to answer any questions, as long as they don't need a journal.

R.C.


 

I agree. Congratulations.

 

The thing I did differently, was before submitting the book with version 1 instead of not specified, which is what I did last time, this time I got notified of 3 goofs before I did the submit, so had to upload a corrected version.

I wonder if you have to changes to the new version? Or, can you just hit the republish button?

My ranking was slowed by 1-2 days throughout the last last two weeks of my sale in, pretty much, all markets.

As an aside, sales on KDP reports are also delayed by about 12 hours. I republished my books today at higher price and got sales reports 12 hours later of books still sold a the lower earlier price.

I just saw this on a top 100 UK chart.

3 of my books taking all 3 places on Hot New Releases.

The first is my just released book, and it's #2 in the category. The second book is the pre-order for the next one. And book 3 is the book before the just released one.

Was this a fluke? Or has there been nothing new released in the category in the last 2 months?

Anyone seen it happen before?