How Ice Planet Barbarians (and Fans) Fought Amazon’s Removal
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Fans of Ruby Dixon couldn’t buy her Kindle eBooks for part of the weekend. When Ice Planet Barbarians fans learned Amazon pulled the books, they took up arms.
The heroines of author Ruby Dixon’s popular Ice Planet Barbarians series endure everything from evil “little green men” to crashing on a hostile, icy planet to dangerous beasts. They survive by joining forces with tall, sexy, blue alien heroes (with horns and tails). But even their barbarian mates couldn’t save them from a glitch in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program. KDP took all of Ruby Dixon’s books down. During a holiday weekend no less.
Until the fans threatened to mutiny.
You could still buy the new paperback edition of Ice Planet Barbarians recently put out by Berkley. And the audiobooks.
Yet if you needed to get the next eBook in the series because you had just finished the previous book, you were out of luck. Many fans were furious because they joined Kindle Unlimited just to read the Ruby Dixon books.
All we could figure out was that KDP said something was “misleading” about a new book she had uploaded. Huh? You mean there aren’t sexy blue aliens waiting for me on an ice planet? Darn!
I think KDP meant something was wrong in the author’s metadata. But this is not the way to get authors to fix an error. This is a way to destroy the careers of innocent authors.
You can read more about Ice Planet Barbarians and Ruby Dixon in the sidebars below. But first, let’s dig into issues indie authors are having with KDP.
Indie Authors and Amazon: A Stormy Relationships
In 2018, The Digital Reader reported about KDP removing books by indie authors. The problem hasn’t gone away.
For indie authors, these takedowns are a huge issue. A constant fear. In most cases, this doesn’t happen because the authors included objectionable content. The reasons are often far more arbitrary. It’s hard to obey the rules if KDP doesn’t tell you what you did wrong (if anything). If…