Amazon Illegal Book Practices That Will Get You Banned! What You Need To Know About Reviews & More

Devlin Blake Author

Amazon's legal secrets: book reviews, fake reviews, shady practices, policies, account suspension, spot fakes, stay informed.

Transcript:

No, I was not banned from Amazon. However, sometimes Amazon just bans you for both legitimate and not legitimate reasons.

There’s nothing you can do about the illegitimate reasons. But I’m going to show you some of the most common reasons authors get banned which are legitimate, but authors don’t even know they’re doing wrong.

Because it’s an easy mistake to make.

Hi novelteers, I’m Devlin Blake, Novel Writing & self publishing Expert, Coach, published author, and former ghostwriter of over 200 books. If you’re writing a book, be sure to check out my Novel Writer’s Club, featuring self directed courses, weekly crits, ask me anything, group coaching and more. You can find out more about it at the link below.

The first reason Amazon will ban you is for violating any kind of copyright. And I did want to preface this by saying I am not a lawyer, I am a writer who takes a copyright law for artist course a few times a year, so if you have any detailed questions or aren’t sure about something, do ask a lawyer.

At first, not using copyrighted stuff seems an easy thing to avoid, but if you haven’t written professionally before, you might make this mistake. For example, it’s common for a writer to want to use a line from a poem, movie, or song in your work.

Don’t.

Using any kind of quote you didn’t write can end up getting you trouble with copyright violations. This is especially true with songs. Sure, it might be fun to have your character sing a line from the American Pie song, but it’s also a violation of copyright.

It’s true with movies too. Recently, Disney actually trademarked some of their most iconic phrases from the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did their other ones too.) Which means those phrases have enhanced legal protections.

I’m bringing this up because if you’ve only ever written for social media, you might not know this. Now, you can use the titles of songs. That is, unless that title is a made up word like Margeitaville, which is trademarked.

Another way to violate copyright is with retellings. Retellings, or reimaginings as they are sometimes called, are great things to write and can help build your career if you specialize in them. However, if you plan on doing a retelling of something like beauty and the beast, you’ll have to go back to the original version, NOT the disney version.

Disney changes the stories a LOT to get copyright. Sometimes they even change the genre of these stories to make them fit the disney brand like the did with the little mermaid and Snow queen.

If you were writing a beauty and beast retelling, you’d have to go back to the original story. There was no gaston. Belle was not an only child. There’s no enchanted furniture or cursed castle. Her father was a merchant, not an inventor, and in fact, she wasn’t even named Belle. They just called her ‘beauty’. Lots of characters in the old time fairy tales didn’t have names.

If you only look at the Disney version of a fairy tale, you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.

Another mistake which is Amazon illegal (though it’s not actually illegal from a legal standpoint) is saying that this book is a mix of this book and that book. You see it sometimes on Facebook Ads. If you love Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, you’ll love this new series…This works on facebook. It does not work on Amazon. Don’t try it.

Similar to this is committing liable, which is defamation in print. This basically happens because in an effort to make their stories seem ‘real’ they mention real places, like Starbucks and Walmart.

And while these places usually don’t care if you mention them, (it’s free publicity after all,) they’ll care very much if you portray their businesses in a negative light.

For example, if your character is attacked outside the Starbucks, you just called Starbucks unsafe. If your character buys an ugly bathing suit at Walmart, you’ve just said Walmart bathing suits are ugly.

The companies will not be happy about that. It’s better to say someone was attacked on their WAY to a Starbucks, or that your character just bought a bathing suit at Walmart and leave off the unflattering descriptors.

If you’re going to say something unflattering, it’s best to make up a business, this is why you have names in shows like Poopsie cola, The Buy N Large, and the Wall-to-Wall Mart.

The same is true for actors and other political figures. Your character can see them, see a movie with them and so on, and even offer an opinion if they think they’re a good actor or not, even offer opinions on if you agree with something they said, But what you can’t do is let the public figure be a character.

They can’t have actions or words, because that affects their image, and they guard that carefully.

Instead, you can have your character be obsessed with them in a way that the public figure would not be comfortable with, such as the movie; Be My Cat, which is about a fan’s obsession with Anne Hathaway. And the movie is really more about him than her. You could replace any actress with her and get the same result.

So That’s really about it for the three big things that will get you banned from Amazon.

If you’d like to learn more about how to write a novel, be sure to check out my Novel Writer’s Club at the link below.

Also remember to like and subscribe to see more videos on writing and publishing your novel.

Until Next time, this is Devlin Blake, saying Write on.

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Categories: : storycrafting, Writers Block, writers marketing