The Public Domain Mistake That Got Me Banned From Amazon
In 2023, I woke up one morning to find six of my titles wiped from Amazon. Gone. Not flagged, not paused for review — gone, four days after I'd published them.
I want to tell you exactly what happened, because I think a lot of authors and small publishers are one honest misunderstanding away from the same thing, and because I'm still living with the consequences of it today.
What I did
I was publishing public domain texts — classic works legally free of copyright. I started on KDP, and later moved to IngramSpark to reach Amazon that way instead. I assumed, reasonably I thought, that if one route caused a problem, the other would be a fresh start. It isn't. KDP and IngramSpark both feed into Amazon. There's no back door, no separate account standing, no way around it. If Amazon has a problem with you on one, it follows you to the other.
Why I thought I was safe
I hadn't just reprinted the raw text. I'd worked hard on each of those six titles — re-editing properly, redesigning from the ground up, writing an original foreword, adding illustrations that didn't exist in the source material. In my mind, that was real, substantial, original work layered onto a public domain base. I'd read the rules. I genuinely believed the value and uniqueness I'd added meant I was operating well within them.
Amazon didn't see it that way. The ban was immediate, and it wasn't a warning — by the time I noticed, four days had passed and those six titles were already gone.
What it's cost me since
Here's the part I don't think enough people talk about: I've never tried to sign up again. I believe the ban is permanent, and I simply can't afford to find out for certain — if I'm right, and it happened again, it would end my business. So to this day, I deliberately avoid publishing through IngramSpark's Amazon distribution at all. Most of my titles are published "print only," without that wider distribution, sold instead through wholesale and my own site. It's a workaround I'm grateful to have, but it's been genuinely crippling for growth — bookstores and libraries who'd otherwise find me through that channel simply can't.
What I'd tell someone in my position now
I'm not writing this to scare you out of public domain publishing — it's still legitimate and valuable, and it's still the foundation of my business today. But I learned the hard way that "I added real value, so surely this is fine" is not how these platforms actually evaluate it, and that reading the rules yourself is not the same as understanding how they get enforced in practice. I also learned that the consequences aren't always temporary. Sometimes they reshape how you're able to run your business for years afterward.
That's exactly why I wrote From Overwhelmed to Published — not because IngramSpark is complicated to be difficult, but because nobody explained the parts that actually matter to me either, and I still don't want that gap to cost anyone else what it's cost me.
