Author’s note: Want to know a secret? I wrote this blog series almost exactly two years ago. The 27th August, 2024. But I was afraid.
I was afraid that it would just fall into a black hole and I’d have gone out on a limb for nothing. And I was afraid that it would be read widely and people would actually respond or might start recommending my books. I wasn’t ready for what might come if this made a difference.
So I buried it.
I don’t know why I’m bringing this out now. Or why it came back into my mind. Or even if it’s too little too late. But I am braving up anyway and bringing it out.
I will leave it up for a time, and if no one reads it, I will remove it. I leave it in my Father’s hands where he wants to take this.
WE’VE BEEN SHADOWBANNED,
AND YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN TOO
PART ONE
Do you write Christian fiction? Non-fiction? Or maybe you read it?
Then you and/or your favourite authors are probably shadowbanned or blacklisted on Amazon.
I know it because I am shadowbanned, and I have proof that you probably are too. Let me explain.
(I’ve split this up into three shorter posts for you: about a twenty-minute read all up. Start with this one below.)
I write fantasy novels with a Christian worldview and always and only in partnership with the Holy Spirit*. I write them for Christians and non-Christians, and when I re-uploaded them to Amazon after a long break from the industry, I decided to put them in the Christian fiction/fantasy category as well as the mainstream fantasy category. Something I haven’t done in the past.
I then enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, which means I get paid per page read, and those who read my book get to read it for free (for a monthly subscription fee). If you choose Kindle Unlimited for your book publishing, for the first three months the algorithm favours you because Kindle Unlimited hungrily wants more books to make its subscription fee worthwhile. To be eligible, you have to agree that you won’t put your books anywhere else for three months, and they agree to promote you.
I was getting many page reads. Several hundred a day for all of my books. The numbers varied widely, as you would expect, because the number of people reading and how many pages they read each day is a variable you can never predict. But the lowest the numbers got was around twenty or thirty page-reads a day, and it was going up to a few hundred at the highest and climbing. And people were actually buying ebooks and a few paperbacks as well.
Things were looking good and numbers were sitting in the higher figures each day now. Given that no one reads several hundred pages a day, that meant several readers or many readers each day were reading portions of the books. And that meant reader numbers were increasing. At the end of the three-month automatic algorithm boost, it could have gone either way. Either the numbers gradually dropped off because the algorithm recommended my books less, or the numbers went up or at least remained about the same as word-of-mouth worked for me.
What I was not prepared for was for every single book, every single sale, every single page read to drop from several hundred to zero in just one day and stay there ever since.
Zero.
Think about the likelihood of that.
Even if your readership dies out, numbers wane slowly, and occasionally a few people might pick it up later, try a few pages, or maybe read the whole thing. Anyone reading the books still has to finish them, so page reads still dribble in. There’ll be days of zero, but that will be followed by a few pages or sales here or there. But for every single book – of which I had four out – to suddenly hit zero from several hundred page reads means that every single reader wrapped up their reading on exactly the same day and not a single reader picked it up after that. Statistically improbable!
Amazon had shadowbanned me and claimed I made zero sales. However, it is stupendously unlikely that my readership went from the many and hundreds of pages to dead in the water overnight for every one of my books. I am convinced that sales had to still be coming in. That means that whatever sales I was still making, they were essentially stealing.
This became especially clear a year later when I started getting readers again. I know some of them were legitimate because reviews appeared. But Amazon claimed that it must have been a bot interfering with my statistics and took all the money. Why would they think that unless they had blocked me? Why would they suspect a bot?
I can tell you, if it was a bot, it wasn’t me. I’m not that clever. But even if someone else used my account to run a bot, it does tell me that Amazon knew people should not be finding my books. The other possibility, and it is likely, is that I was making legitimate sales and Amazon wanted to take my money again.
It claimed that only sales related to the bot would be removed. That just happened to be every single page read and every single sale. Quite the coincidence. It wiped my sales to zero on the records and wiped my money owed to zero. This tells me that it’s possible for them to do that and probably what they did the day all sales and page reads fell instantly and inexplicably to zero for every book and every version.
How do I know that this is happening to you or your favourite authors to some degree? Read part two to see my evidence.
*I know that’s a bold claim. It’s impossible to summarise how this came about, how it manifests, and how I know beyond any doubt that it’s true. It’s the story of a lifetime: the story with a thousand smaller stories. But perhaps a few key stories will give you a glimpse of it all. I’ve listed some of the behind-the-scenes posts on the page “The Stories Behind the Stories”. You can jump to some of those posts when you’re ready.
About the Author: Lisa Saul
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