The Wayward Bard leaves KU (Patreon)

This isn't a post I wanted to write. I love the idea of Kindle Unlimited, and since hearing about it, I've been certain my books belonged there forever. However, it was not to be.

The first stutter came when I received an email from Amazon 14 days after publishing, saying:

" We are reaching out to you because we detected reading or borrow activity for your books originating from accounts attempting to manipulate Kindle services."

and 

" Please know any additional violation of our Terms and Conditions – including a violation caused by any marketing services you, or others on your behalf, may have used – could result in account-level actions, up to and including termination of your KDP account.  "

This included about 15% of my earnings from April being removed. I was in shock and didn't know what to do - but quickly found out I wasn't the only one affected by this - GameLit/LitRPG writers left and right were losing earnings or being downright banned. GR Cooper, Ramon Meija (frigging Ramon even) and Michael Chatfield are just a few of the ones who've been hit. 

Needless to say, I haven't used any questionable marketing services. Hell, I haven't used any at all - I had no clue whether the book was going to sink or swim. So I basically had no clue what was happening - and Amazon refused to answer anything. But from reading up on what was happening, I see two dominant teories:

 - Amazon relies on algorithms to find scammers, cheaters and irregular behavior. These algorithms, however, do not take KU-heavy genres with voracious readers such as ours into account and there are no people involved in any sort of vetting process.

- Scammers who make money by selling page reads include legitimate writers into their reads to obfuscate their behavior.

Anyway, I took the hit and kept on. While a lot of other writers were planning to go wide, I still believed that KU was the perfect fit for a newbie writer. I tried contacting Amazon several times - so far, I still haven't been in touch with a person, just standard auto-responses.

And then, yesterday, I received the second mail. Same content, more or less. From the experiences other writer's have had, that's where they really dig in, removing anywhere from 1/3 to all earnings for an entire month or banning a writer from Amazon entirely. 

And that's it. I've had it. Just received the confirmation from Amazon that I'm out of KU, and with this experience I have no plans of coming back.