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Amazon KDP is banning authors who did nothing wrong.
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Here's how to fix it.
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You can follow every rule that you know and still get banned by Amazon KDP.
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They've been banning authors in an instant with no warning, no second chance.
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Their accounts are gone, their books are deleted, and they did nothing wrong.
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It's every author's worst nightmare.
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They come to us, they hit us up, ask us what to do about it.
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Here are six checks that you can make before you publish to make sure that your book doesn't get banned.
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If you're about to hit publish on your book or you've already published and you're not sure that you did everything right, this video is for you.
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We helped authors publish over 7,000 books in 91 plus countries.
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So we've seen pretty much every way that this goes wrong and every way out of it.
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So let's go through exactly what to check.
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There's six things in order that you need to check before you publish to make sure that your book doesn't get banned.
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Starting with number one, this is your trademark and your copyright.
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So do you own the originality or the original work of the book that you're publishing?
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I'll take this even a step further and say that you can't have real brand names, logos, or recognizable trademark designs on the cover and the interior art, or whether it's hand-drawn or not, you can't be passing off as, hey, insert big company represents us, right?
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So if you do that, well, then there's a decent chance that they're gonna reach out to Amazon and say, hey, stop having them do this.
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And then they can get your book taken down.
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Now, so if you didn't create it and you don't have a license for it, whether it's their logo or the actual content of the book.
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I mean, I think that goes without saying.
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If you're a scammer that's just publishing knockoffs of other people's books, you deserve to be banned.
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Screw you.
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Like this is just the lowest of the lows.
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So yeah, if you're watching this video, just stop doing that, right?
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Stop publishing work that you don't have the trademark for.
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This is the single highest lever check on the list.
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So do not pass go, do not collect$200.
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If you're publishing work that you don't have the trademark or copyright on, well, you're probably gonna get banned.
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But here's the check number two.
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This is a little bit deeper down the list.
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This is your AI disclosure.
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Now, there's an AI kind of checkbox on Amazon when you're publishing.
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So if AI touched your book at all, whether it's text, images, translations, anywhere in the book, you need to disclose it.
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Now, my personal thoughts on this are twofold.
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One, I think it's none of Amazon's business.
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They're using AI everywhere.
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So why do they care if it's used in the book?
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Now, I get it for the fringe cases where you know they don't want AI sloped.
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So they're just trying to protect against like just a mass of AI books.
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But if you're somewhere in the middle, you technically have to disclose it.
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Again, I think it's really dumb, but just follow the rules and you're less likely to get banned.
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So if you've used AI to improve the quality, whether it's editing, brainstorming, cleanup, which most people have, then you just need to make sure that you disclose that.
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This is not a bad thing, right?
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It's not like if you check this box, they're gonna ban you.
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It's actually the opposite.
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They just at least know, right?
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You're being honest in the work.
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So if you're mass producing undisclosed AI generated content, you're probably gonna get banned.
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So just don't do that, first of all.
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And if you do it, well, then you should check that you used AI to help with the book.
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Check number three, this is a big one, is your metadata and keywords.
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So I don't know if you remember kind of like the early days of Amazon, where gaming this is how you ranked on Amazon, is how you moved a bunch of copies.
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It was like kind of like SEO in the scammy SEO days where people were like, you know, just keyword stuffing and all this stuff.
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Obviously, Amazon doesn't want this on their platform, so you got to be careful about keyword stuffing, words like bestseller, like Amazon, other authors' names, other people's titles, subtitles, whatever else.
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You know, it's technically in the gray.
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Will you get banned for this?
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Probably not, but it is an easy and obvious way that if you
Load full transcript
do it and if you're scamming the system, yeah, you're probably gonna get banned.
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So you need to make sure that your metadata and your keywords is clean, there's no scammy, slimy stuff in there.
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Describe the book that you actually wrote, and that if you do that well, you probably won't get banned.
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Check number four is categories, right?
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So when you publish a book on Amazon, they give you a certain number of categories that you can pick.
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Those are the books that you know, categories where your book is ranked in.
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And people try to game this because they want to be an Amazon bestseller, they want to be number one in some category.
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First off, to kind of litmus test, your category needs to match what the book is actually about.
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Okay, so if you're just putting it in random categories, well then yeah, they might ban you for that, but also it's just kind of a dumb strategy.
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So what you should do instead is put it in one category with less competition, then you've got a real shot at either becoming a bestseller or staying a bestseller in that category.
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It could be a niche category, no problem.
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But it's just, you know, smaller category with less competition.
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Then you've got the big category that's for traction and for visibility.
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So those are, you know, whatever the big kind of top-tier category with the most competition.
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Sure.
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If you can rank in that, well, then people go to that category, they buy from that category.
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That's gonna help with your rankings, it's gonna help with your sales, all that.
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Hey, quick interruption: if what you're hearing right now is making you think about your own book, don't let that feeling pass.
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We've helped thousands of authors turn that exact feeling into a published book that builds their authority in their business.
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If you want to be next, come find us on Instagram at selfpublishing.com and send us a DM with the word ready.
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Our team will reach out, we'll learn about your book, we'll map out exactly the path forward and what it looks like for you.
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We'll create a custom plan, DM us ready, find us on Instagram, and let's get back into the episode.
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There's three big ways that Amazon goes out and markets your book on your behalf.
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There's keywords, categories, and reviews.
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All right.
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So obviously, the you know, the keywords and stuff, you need to make sure that they're optimized for what people are actually searching.
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So I'll give you an example for me.
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It might be how to write a book, how to publish a book, how to get published.
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Those are keywords that people are actually searching that's actually relevant to my book.
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I want to show up for that.
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Then I want to make sure that I'm showing up in the relevant categories.
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And then this is a big one that not a lot of people talk about.
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You need as many reviews as possible.
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So we've got a video on the channel about how to get to 100 plus reviews fast, strategies that actually work.
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If you don't have reviews, you can optimize all this stuff.
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You probably still won't rank.
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Also, do you think Amazon's gonna ban a book with very few reviews?
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Probably not.
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So get more reviews.
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Amazon will market the book on your behalf and you'll sell a lot more copies.
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That's a perfect lead in to check number five, which is do you have reviews on your book?
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If you've got less than 10 reviews on your book, you're exponentially more likely to get banned.
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This is really just telling Amazon, is this legit?
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Like anybody can game a few reviews, but if you've got north of 10, and especially if you've got north of 100, you're extremely unlikely to get banned, right?
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Unless there's just some mass amount of bot or AI activity on that book, they're probably not gonna ban you.
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This is the biggest lever for winning on Amazon, and it's also the fastest way to get frozen if you handle it wrong.
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This trips people up.
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People are like, well, hold up.
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I've tried everything, I've done all the things, and I can't get more reviews.
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Well, you need to build a launch team.
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We've got a kind of a whole process.
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There's a launch triangle, that's what we teach to market a book successfully.
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So you need to create a launch team, you need to get reviews, and then you need to do promotions.
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The secret is in the launch team.
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If you do nothing else to launch your book, just build a launch team.
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We've got a video on that on this channel.
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Watch that video.
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Also, there's the video on how to get to 100 plus reviews.
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Get reviews, and your book is very unlikely to get banned.
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A few caveats on reviews, and there's actually within this, you can get banned if you do this the wrong way.
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Never offer money, gift cards, discounts, never incentivize reviews in any way.
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If you do that, I have seen people get their either one of two things.
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All of their reviews get yanked.
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They wake up, and maybe they had hundreds or thousands of reviews on their book or on their product on Amazon, boom, wiped out because Amazon realized, oh, these are all coming from the same link.
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Oh, they got a hundred reviews in 20 hours, and it's coming from this page where they're giving away stuff if they leave a review.
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Yeah, no, banned, right?
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Well, or Amazon reviews completely removed.
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So either they're gonna remove all your reviews, or at worst, they'll ban the book altogether.
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So don't do that.
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Also, don't stack multiple reviews from the same IP address.
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So maybe you've got a launch party.
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This is a common mistake.
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I'm doing a book launch party, I've got a hundred people in a room, and I tell everyone, hey, go leave a review right now.
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That's a smart strategy, except it's dumb because you don't know the rules, which is Amazon tracks IPs.
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And so what we found is typically if you get up to three, it's either three or five reviews from the same IP address, whenever that third or that fifth review happens, they yank all of the ones from that IP address.
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So if you've got friends, family, if you're at the house, well, then you need to tell people, hey, leave a review when you're at work because you're on a different IP address, you're not on the same internet or you're not in the same location.
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So this is important.
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Make sure that you're playing by the rules and not just stacking a bunch of reviews all in the same IP address.
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If you watched our reviews video, you already know how to do this.
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Let's move into check number six.
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But before I do, if you found this video helpful, just go ahead and comment below.
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We read and respond to every single comment.
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Subscribe to the channel.
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Our videos are popping off.
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Thank you guys so much.
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It seems like you've been enjoying the videos, so I appreciate it.
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Comment below, subscribe.
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We release videos every single week, multiple times a week, that help you be more successful with your books.
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They're also on Spotify.
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So if you listen or watch on Spotify, you can check them out there.
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Check number six.
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This is your publishing cadence.
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Now, the big thing to avoid here is don't publish a bunch of books inside of a 30-day window.
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You can technically do that and not get banned, but if you do that, the system is gonna flag it.
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Because here's the thing that nobody's talking about is a lot of this stuff is completely automated.
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So they've fired a bunch of people, they've automated this with AI.
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So if you just, you know, blur the lines a little bit or you could just be getting caught in the crosshairs, they're just gonna, it's an automated system.
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So I want you to ask the question if I'm Amazon, what are the triggers or tells that would most likely predict scams or spam?
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Well, it's publishing a bunch of books in a short window of time.
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So their system's automatically gonna flag that as a pattern and it might go up for manual review, or they might just ban your account or ban your books.
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So not only is this a way to not get banned, it's also just smart marketing is space your titles out.
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So maybe you launch one and then a month or two months later you launch another one.
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A steady cadence that looks like a real author, maybe even a prolific author, not just a dump of titles that reads more like a spam account.
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Okay, so if you space it out, it's also like I said, smarter marketing because you can launch this, focus on that, then launch the next book, focus on that, and you can keep marketing and keep publishing.
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What if you do all this and get banned anyway?
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Well, I'll talk about how to get unbanned here in just a second.
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But the thing you want to remember here is that boring wins.
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Look at authors who have stayed off of Amazon's radar for a decade.
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Do the boring, normal stuff, don't play in the gray.
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Their metadata is boringly clean, their content is 100% theirs, and that's exactly why they never got flagged.
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They're also specific.
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It's clear, not clever.
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They have keywords that speak specifically to what their book's about.
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That's why their book shows up.
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It gets purchased and it gets read.
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So if you followed all these steps and your book still gets banned, there's a four-part uphill formula that gives you the best shot at getting your book reinstated.
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We created a full video on this channel.
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It's all about what happens if you get banned, why you get banned, and what to do if it happens.
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So go ahead and watch that next.
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And then if you're serious about going faster further with your book, we'd love to help you.
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We've published thousands of books.
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We publish multiple books a day at selfpublishing.com.
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There's a link in the description.
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You can click that link to book a publishing consultation with someone on my team.
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These are experts who have helped hundreds and in most cases, thousands of people, just like you, take the next step with your book.
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You book a call, it'll be about 45 minutes.
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I'll make a bold promise, it'll be the best 45 minutes you've ever spent on your book.
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If you think this video has been helpful, this call is going to be even more helpful because there's nothing like getting one-on-one accountability and feedback specific to you, your book, and where you're at.
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So click the link in the description.
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Comment.
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I booked a call.
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If you've booked a call with the team, we'd love to give you a shout out.
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And on that call, they'll talk about your goals for your book, your challenges, your next steps will help you publish successfully and not get banned.
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Hope you enjoyed the video.
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Comment below, book a call with the team if you want our help.
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And I will see you in the next one.