PSA - Journal.. Yeah, no.

[R. C.]

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.


 

[TimothyEllis]

The word "journal" is a red flag to the BOTs.

Has been for a long time now.

The word is even banned from blurbs/covers because it was overused by low content. There's a list of them you can't use now.

The thing is though, if the low content box isn't ticked on the paperback, it shouldn't be flagged at all. But that supposes that people have been putting up low content without ticking that box. But also then, why would a book with an eBook version be subject to low content rules?

It's just bad programming.

[Post-Doctorate D]

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.

[TimothyEllis]

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,"

This was on pre-orders.

There is no content when most pre-orders are set up.

[Post-Doctorate D]

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,"

This was on pre-orders.

There is no content when most pre-orders are set up.

That makes it worse.  So, they are claiming a "lack of significant content" "during a review" of a pre-order where there is no content yet to be reviewed.