How Ice Planet Barbarians (and Fans) Fought Amazon’s Removal

6 min readJan 4, 2022

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.

The top of the book cover shows the author name: Ruby Dixon. Below it, against a starry background with stars and a galaxy in view, a pretty human woman is in an embrace with a hulky blue barbarian (who is shown from behind). The title Ice Planet Barbarians is emblazoned in all caps against the alien’s naked back. The text at the bottom reads “Science Fiction Romance.” — Imagine a Holiday Weekend Without Ice Planet Barbarians! (Source: Ice Planet Barbarians series page on the author’s website.)

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.

A human heroine stands beside a hunky blue alien male. She is holding a spear, and they are looking in opposite directions with the alien’s blue tail embracing the woman. There is a gold stamp reading “Special Edition” beside the heroine’s flowing hair. The title and author name are printed somewhat diagonally across the woman’s outfit, and “A Novel” is printed near the alien’s blue tail. — The New Berkley Paperback Edition of **Ice Planet Barbarians**. (Source: Coming Soon page on the author’s website.)

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…