Witch kids, amazon edition.

One day I was surprised by an email from Amazon.

During our review, we found the cover image for the following books is in violation of our Content Guidelines:

 B0CWDRZBNG Witch Kids
 B0CV8N5H1S Witch Kids

 As a result, we won't be offering your books for sale on Amazon. Our Content Guidelines apply to the book interior, cover image, and book details.

To publish the books, you'll need to update your cover image to follow the KDP Content Guidelines and submit it as a new book in your KDP account.

This book, in ebook and paperback, have been out there for over 2.5 years, after being checked (!), and suddenly the covers are violating their content guidelines. I sent them a mail, asking if their guidelines had somehow changed. They hadn't. They basically replied with the exact same mail.

I suspect that there is some a.i. hanky panky going on, which is now checking all the books, much faster than people can. Wonderful a.i., that so many people consider a smart... thing.

This is the original image I had for the cover. I see bare backs and bare shoulders. I discussed this with a writer friend, and she guessed that some a.i. thing decided that one or more of those innocent body parts resemble a breast enough for a.i. to block the book for sale.

I decided to fix the cover, specifically for Amazon, because even Apple did not complain about this cover, and Apple can be the worst. And yes, I did add that 'ai review proof' line to the cover. I uploaded the new ebook and it was readily accepted within an hour. (FYI: that is very fast.)

An audiobook was up on amazon too. That got blocked too. Paperback? Same thing. For now I am too annoyed by this farce to add those again. I set up a paperback via another channel, so it will be out there sometime soon.

The audiobook... I don't know yet. It's quite a lot of work getting that done right, and I don't want to spend lots of hours doing that, with the risk of their "quality agent" crapping that offline again. (If you think I'm annoyed, you think right.)

I'd rather spend that time editing and writing.

This is something I had to get off my chest. Now you can go back to your nude barbecue or the regularly scheduled flamethrowing.

Have a good day.