New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/27/2012 -- What do these three have in common? They are all giants in the business of publishing and social networking areas. Yet, they may now also share another thing in common which could earn them the villainous title of being the Goliaths of our new web-based world: they might be trying to muscle in and stop a new little book called The Facebook Nostradamus from being further sold in Amazon’s online bookstore or even ban it from future publication altogether.
The Facebook Nostradamus, a novel written by author E.R. Escober based on his real life prophetic dreams last year, was uploaded to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing in March 2012. The night of April 25th, the author received an email from KDP, which read:
“During a quality assurance review of your KDP catalog we have found that the title, descriptions and/or authors of books you have published are misleading to our customers.
We’ll need you to fix and resubmit all of your catalog’s affected books within 5 business days. If your books have not been corrected by that time, we will remove them from sale in the Kindle Store.
If you have any questions regarding our quality assurance review process, please write to kdp-quality@amazon.com.”
E.R. Escober immediately emailed back asking for specifics so he can fix and resubmit the book. He waited a few hours and didn’t get any response. Panicking, he followed it up with another email. Still no response. The following morning, he found out that his book was removed from sale in the Kindle store! Shocked, he did a search within Amazon’s website and these were the messages he got: “Your search did not match any products” and “Looking for something? We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.” Further communications with KDP were met with silence. What happened to the “within 5 business days” warning notice?
Based on the email sent by KDP which was the only thing he had to go with, E.R. Escober tried to discern what exactly were considered misleading. The title “The Facebook Nostradamus?” Is Mr. Mark Zuckerberg really that malevolent about someone else using this “word?” The author did a research beforehand and found out there were existing novels and other books with the word “Facebook” in their titles. E.R. Escober’s novel was also registered and copyrighted with the US Copyright Office last August 2011 with no hassle. The author also bought the domain name and website address called TheFacebooknostradamus.Com without any trouble.
Descriptions? The Amazon description included the tagline, “Brace yourselves, fasten your Kindles, it’s gonna be a bumpy read!” which was totally appropriate considering the roller coaster storyline of the novel. Why would Amazon take offense in that? The tag, “casual vacancy?” The author included this among the keywords hoping to bring some traffic and attention to his very little known book. Is this wrong? Are JK Rowling’s people threatened by this? Do they think this little book will eat into the sales of billionaire Ms Rowling’s new adult novel?
With no further clarification from KDP, E.R. Escober was left with frustrations and questions. And with the novel being suspended from being sold online, with no further book income.
The psychic/fashionista protagonist in E.R. Escober’s novel might as well ask: “Is this the new black in censorship fashion?” Are these three giants really responsible for E.R. Escober’s little novel from not finding a home in the publishing world? With no direct answer from Kindle Direct Publishing, the author could only speculate. In the meantime the author is thinking of giving The Facebook Nostradamus a very Harry Potter-ish temporary name: The Novel That Shall Not Be Named. Will JK Rowlings approve?
Contact: Erebrown@yahoo.com