Everything is gone

This week, our Amazon account is gone, and we lost access to all our books. What happened and why? Details inside plus an update on Storm Spells.

Hey there,

This not the email I wanted to send you.

But you need to know what’s going on because it affects our books, and you could run into this issue too. So get comfy and wrap up in a nice warm blanket with a cup of tea or coffee or hot cocoa for comfort!

Hi, I’m Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker series and usually I’m pretty sunny but today, I’m pretty salty with good reason.

But I’m not mad about Storm Spells not being done yet since the story is going in some interesting directions, so I still don’t want it to end. But today I’m not here to talk about that. Next week, I hope we can chat about that.

But today, I have bad news.

What happened?

My scribe, Melinda Kucsera, needed her account ID for her publisher account so she clicked to access that. It popped up a sign in window, and Melinda entered her login credentials.

But it showed a message that said this email was already in use. That struck her as weird.

Of course it’s in use. She was logged into the account.

Technology is great until it isn’t, and it’s not a good idea to mess with it when technology isn’t playing well with others. That’s usually a good time to get help from a human.

So Melinda requested a call from support.

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) support called her and she told them about the error message. The rep told her to sign all the way out of her Amazon account.

Melinda did so, and he told her to sign in again. So she clicked to sign in and entered her credentials.

She got the same error and could not sign in. The rep told her to click forgot password and follow the prompts.

Melinda did that, and that is where something went very wrong.

Instead of recovering her password for her account, the system created a new Amazon account that did NOT have any of her books or content or anything. It was all gone.

Melinda told the rep this, and he told her to sign out and sign back in. But it signed her into the new blank account.

• All 3200+ audiobook she bought were gone.

• All the kindle ebooks she bought over the years were gone.

• All the music and movies she bought over the years were gone.

• All 26+ books Melinda has published were gone.

• The order Melinda placed for her mom the other day? It was gone too.

The rep told her to call Amazon customer support and she did. My scribe is persistent.

A rude woman answered and told my scribe that the only account she’s ever had was closed and inactive.

Then the rep said: “Here are the numbers for kindle ebooks, audible, prime video & music—call them and see if they can do anything for you.”

That was the whole call.

Well, this lady didn’t know my scribe.

Melinda wouldn’t let this go. She called back the publishing arm of Amazon (KDP) and they told her this happens all the time.

If you sign in with a different password, Amazones system WILL CREATE A NEW ACCOUNT and lock you out of the account you originally had.

So how are you supposed to change your password?

No one had an answer for this.

Melinda asked 6 different reps.

My scribe called Audible next. Our books are the most important thing obviously, but she joined Audible way before Amazon bought it, and audiobooks are life. She must get her beloved audiobooks back!

Not just because she bought a dozen in a recent sale that she was looking forward to listening to this week, but that was a motivating factor for sure.

The rep was very nice and put in a ticket to get her audiobooks restored to her account. But they were not sure she could get all of them back because some audiobooks she bought years ago were no longer licensed for sale on Audible.

The Audible rep was a real hero, and he spent ten minutes finding a rep that could help us get the ebooks Melinda bought back.

But this where things took another turn.

This is actually the reason we decided to include all this drama in the newsletter. Normally, we’d just deal with all this behind the scenes and I’d just entertain you with my attempts to prolong the current book.

But what the very patient rep uncovered convinced us that we should tell you in case this happens to you.

The kindle rep found that the original account was still active BUT Amazon’s system disconnected the email address and cellphone number from it and linked them to the new account it created when it glitched during the password recovery process.

The rep wanted to try and restore access to Melinda’s original account since he could not move the ebooks Melinda bought to the new account. So he put in a request to remove the two factor authentication from the old account.

So that’s where things are. We have no access to our books for sale on Amazon, and no access to any content purchased on Amazon.

We don’t know if Melinda will get access again, so we’ll just keep you updated.

But this reminded us why we do Kickstarters and why we have our own store—so you can buy our books AND keep them forever.

You aren’t just renting them when you pledge to our Kickstarters or buy them from our shop. You get the ebook file to keep, and you can put it on any device you want to read on.

Our next Kickstarter is for 4 brand new books (Catch the Scribe, Book Battles, Rogue Characters, and Storm Spells). Follow it here.

The one after that is for 3 new books (Chaos Reigns, Chaos in Chains, and Curse Breaker Jousts). Follow that one here.

This just reminded us how important it is to offer that because no one can take the book away from you.

I hope you don’t end up in this hellacious situation. In case you do find yourself here, we’ll share updates about what we did and what we could recover if we can recover anything. It’s been 4 days and we still can’t get into the account.

Melinda is pretty devastated since she listens to audiobooks through audible pretty much every day. She doesn’t know what to do instead since she can’t access them. She also can’t access our published books on Amazon and that is also devastating in a different way.

And I don’t know what to tell her.

Be careful when logging into Amazon. I hope you have a good week.

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