Thank you for contacting me. I publish under the pseudonym Hapax Legomenon and own the web domain for the book series at www.ripemangotaketwo.com which I bought to promote the ebook series.

I am very familiar with both the contents of the ebook and KDP’s content guidelines. I believe that this ebook falls within KDP’s content guidelines. Because this message does not provide any detail, I would ask that you provide more detail so I may address why I feel this determination is in error.

I look forward to your reply. Thanks.

I would like to appeal this decision because I think it is wrong.

Because I have only received generic replies, I’m afraid I have no idea how I am supposed to resolve this. Without more detail, I can only speculate about what the problem is.

I have invested a significant amount of time and money in this project. This is a very very complex ebook, both from a technical and creative standpoint.

If you need additional information about rights and permissions, the ebook contains a chapter called “Credits and Acknowledgements” which covers every illustration and quotation for the ebook. Also the last chapter called “About this Edition” provides more detail about the copyright of this ebook. These two sections should address many of your concerns about copyright.

I look forward to your reply.

Hapax Legomenon

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing about a flag I received from Amazon’s Content Review Team and what to do about it.

Because my issue requires a fairly complex explanation, I have decided to send my support request as an attached PDF ( KDP-question-re-content-review-existential-smut1.pdf )

Also, for your convenience, I have attached a screenshot of all image thumbnails as a reference.

Finally, because the ebook is blocked from the Amazon store, I don’t know if you have the ability to access the file. I assume you have access to the final updated ebook file, but if for some reason it was deleted, you can find it at this URL (It is 8 MB).

Thank you for your help.

Hapax Legomenon

Your reply to my new KDP support ticket is unsettling. I have asked normal, reasonable questions, but instead I have received identical generic replies each time. I do not even know if I am requesting help from the right department.

Your responses raise additional questions about your company’s vetting process and indeed about Amazon’s policies towards authors. My 2 questions today might seem to be indelicate — and perhaps even a little sarcastic — but now I confess I have no idea what is actionable at this point.

1. Because each response is identical word-for-word to the previous one, this leads me to wonder whether a real human being has even examined my support requests. Can you confirm that a human being (and not an AI-chatbot or algorithmic-guided program) was responsible for flagging the content or responding to my support requests?
2. Has a real human person even examined the PDF I sent ( KDP-question-re-content-review-existential-smut1.pdf ) when I asked the KDP team for assistance?

In literature and book publishing, reasonable people can disagree about interpretation and meaning. But it seems to me that as a matter of corporate policy your company has not tried to listen to my feedback regarding this decision. It also has not provided any information which might lead me to correct the problem. I don’t know how to interpret this; does this mean that the corporation views the submitted ebook as impossible to fix?

For example, when I have updated the content over the week after publication, each time the content was approved. But this last time it was blocked. This leads me to believe that the decision about whether to approve the content is not as easy to determine as your canned responses imply.

I understand that a big corporation does not need to explain all its internal policies to outsiders. This is an unfortunate reality which I may have to live with. But mostly I find your company’s action (and your failure to provide any kind of clarification) to be both inexplicable and infuriating.

Hapax Legomenon

Based on its vague, generic language and the failure to provide any details about why Existential Smut 1 ebook was blocked, it seems unlikely to me that the entity (chatbot?) known as “Kindle Content Review Team” possesses sufficient intelligence to evaluate the work’s artistry or its compliance with Amazon’s publicly stated content guidelines.

Previous replies suggested that I could resubmit the ebook as long as the resubmission complied with Amazon’s content guidelines. But because the Content Review team never gave any clue about what triggered the flag, I would have to play “guessing games” about what might be wrong with this ebook, and that is something I refuse to do as a matter of principle.

I started writing stories for this project in 1990 — about 3 or 4 years before Jeff Bezos started his little Amazon.com company. Two of the stories were written in a war-torn European country in the 1990s and had to be left behind when the fighting started. Fortunately through the persistence and patience of an intermediary, those stories were retrieved and sent back to my home in the U.S and appear in this ebook. In 2003, I started publishing these stories online; during the 2000s the story site received millions of web visitors and dozens of positive reviews from readers. Starting in January 2025 I will post a series of columns related to this project 4x a year for the next 10 years.

That probably means that in 2035 I will still be writing pieces for the Existential Smut project. In 2035 for all we know the company known as Amazon will no longer exist. Who knows? Maybe by that time I will no longer exist either. But if I am around this planet on that year, I will probably still be telling people about how carelessly the Amazon’s content review team handled ebooks like this one.

Hapax Legomenon