Yesterday, I published a post titled "My Book 'AI, Ego & Regret' Paperback Is Live. Kindle Is Blocked."
A few hours later, something changed.
The Kindle edition was approved.🎉🎉🎉
So here is the update.
The Paperback Was Already Live
The good news came first.
My paperback edition of AI, Ego & Regret: 15 True Failure Modes from the AI Era was approved and published on Amazon.
238 pages, 6" x 9", $9.99.
It is a real physical book. Amazon prints it on demand, so I don't have to keep boxes of books in my home. Someone places an order, Amazon prints a copy, puts it in a box, and ships it to the reader.
As an independent author, I still find that pretty amazing.
I thought that meant the difficult part was over.
Then I checked the Kindle edition.
Kindle Was Blocked
The Kindle edition was not approved.
The status in KDP was simply Blocked.
It wasn't sent back to Draft, where I could make changes and submit it again. I couldn't edit it, resubmit it, or delete it from my bookshelf.
The dashboard said:
"Your title is unavailable for editing due to either a copyright restriction or blocked content. Check your email for more details."
So I checked my email.
There was nothing.
I contacted KDP support, and the first support representative told me that the issue was related to Account Status and Rights. He transferred the case to the appropriate team.
Later, I received an email from the Kindle Content Review team.
The explanation was very short:
"Based on our review, we won't be accepting your submission for publication because the book(s) might result in a disappointing customer experience."
That was all.
I wasn't told which part of the book caused the problem. There was no specific chapter, paragraph, formatting issue, metadata field, or Kindle requirement mentioned.
Just "might result in a disappointing customer experience."
My QA Brain Started Working
I'm a QA engineer, so when a system gives me a result without enough information, my first instinct is usually to figure out what could have triggered it.
I started listing possibilities.
Maybe it was the external links in the EPUB. I had a dev.to link, an email link, and an Amazon review link in the author section.
Maybe it was content matching. These stories had previously been published by me on dev.to, so perhaps an automated system had detected similar content somewhere online.
Maybe there was a Kindle-specific formatting issue.
Or maybe it was something completely different.
I prepared a new EPUB with all external hyperlinks removed. I didn't upload it, though. I wanted to understand the actual problem first.
If I change five things and the next submission passes, I still won't know which change fixed it.
That's not debugging.
That's guessing.
So I Asked Amazon What Went Wrong
I replied directly to the Content Review email.
I explained that the paperback edition of the exact same book had already been reviewed and published. I included the ISBN and Amazon ASIN.
Then I asked what specifically had triggered the concern.
Was it the content? The formatting? The metadata? The external links? A Kindle-specific requirement?
If there was something I needed to change, I was happy to fix it. I also mentioned that I had already prepared an updated EPUB with the external hyperlinks removed.
What I wanted was simple: some specific information about what had gone wrong, so I could fix the actual problem instead of making random changes.
In QA terms, I was basically asking for the bug report.
Then I Got Another Email
A few hours later, another email arrived from the Amazon Content Review Team.
This one started with:
"Congratulations!"
They said the book had been reviewed and had successfully passed.
There was no request to change anything.
They didn't ask me to upload the new EPUB.
They didn't ask for any additional documents.
They also didn't explain what had caused the original block.
They just approved it.
Amazon said the Kindle edition would soon be available in the Amazon Store and that it could take up to 48 hours.
It didn't take that long.
I checked Amazon, and there it was.
The Kindle edition was live.
So now both editions are published.
The paperback is live, and the Kindle edition is live.
So What Actually Happened?
Honestly, I still don't know.
Maybe the first review was an automated or overly cautious decision. Maybe something in the original submission triggered a review that was resolved during the second review. Maybe the external links had something to do with it. Maybe they had nothing to do with it.
Amazon didn't tell me.
At this point, I probably won't get an answer either, because the book has already been approved.
But I'm not particularly upset about that anymore.
The important part is that the decision was changed after I asked for clarification.
I Didn't Delete My dev.to Articles
One thing I decided not to do was delete the original articles from dev.to.
These stories were originally written and published by me there. The book is a re-edited, reorganized, and expanded collection of that work.
When the Kindle edition was blocked, I could have started deleting articles, rewriting the entire book, and uploading different versions until something passed.
I didn't want to do that based on speculation.
Instead, I kept the original articles, publication dates, author page, manuscript, and publishing records.
If Amazon had ultimately told me there was a copyright or content ownership issue, I could have shown that I was the original author.
Fortunately, I didn't need to.
What I Learned
The interesting part of this experience wasn't really about publishing. It reminded me of something I've seen many times in software testing.
When an automated system gives you a result that you don't understand, there is a big difference between troubleshooting and guessing.
You can change something, submit again, change something else, and eventually get a different result. But unless you know what caused the original failure, you haven't really solved the problem.
You just found a version that passed.
That's why I decided to ask Amazon directly what had triggered the block.
They didn't give me the root cause, but at least the case was reviewed again and the book was approved.
I'll take that result.
There Is a Slightly Funny Part
My book is called AI, Ego & Regret.
The stories are about AI systems making confident decisions, people trusting those decisions, and organizations sometimes failing to ask a very basic question: why?
Then my own book got blocked by a system that told me it might create a disappointing customer experience.
So I asked what went wrong.
A few hours later, someone reviewed it again and approved it.
I couldn't have planned that better.
So Now the Book Is Actually Out
After all the back and forth, AI, Ego & Regret: 15 True Failure Modes from the AI Era is now available in both formats.🎉🎉🎉
The paperback is $9.99 and the Kindle edition is $3.99.
Fifteen stories about AI failures.
And now, apparently, one more story about a book getting blocked by a black box system before being approved without anyone explaining exactly why.
I guess that one wasn't in the original manuscript.
Thank You, dev.to
I also want to say something that has nothing to do with Amazon.
None of this would have happened without dev.to.
I published my first AI trainwreck story here in May. At the time, I had no idea if anyone would read it, or whether anyone would care about stories from a QA engineer writing about AI failures.
People did.
Every reaction, every comment, every follow, and every conversation in the comments kept me writing. It wasn't the algorithm or the numbers. It was the people.
dev.to gave me something I didn't expect: a place where someone writing in imperfect English could still find readers who cared about the technology, the stories, and sometimes the life behind them.
That's rare, and I know it.
So thank you to everyone who read, reacted, commented, shared, or simply stayed around through the 15 stories, the 36 Stratagems series, a job loss, a mountain climb, and now a book.
And to @leob @nimay_04 @gramli @unitbuilds @technogamerz @ahmetozel — your comments from the old series made it into the book's front pages. That's the highest compliment I can give.
Special thanks to @ben @jess @francistrdev . You know why.
And thank you to the dev.to operations team.
Also, to whoever has been adding custom summaries to my articles, I don't know who you are, but I've noticed. You read the articles and summarized them carefully, every single time.
Thank you.
You didn't have to do that.
You did.
That means a lot.
P.S. English isn't my first language. I use AI tools to polish my writing, but every story, every emotion, and every intention behind the words is mine. The failure modes are real. Thanks for reading.
P.P.S. In my last post, I said a prayer for the dev community at the summit of Wudang Mountain. The paperback went live first, and the Kindle edition followed a few hours later.
Maybe the prayer worked.
Or maybe someone at Amazon finally got to the bug report. 😂
Top comments (2)
Ordered
Paperback, arriving Sunday. 🎉 Congratulations on both editions being live.
The part I want to single out is the thing you did twice without naming it as the same thing. You prepared the fixed EPUB and didn't upload it. You could have deleted the dev.to articles and didn't. Both times, the anxious move was right there, would have felt like progress, and would have destroyed the information you needed. Most people take it, because doing something beats waiting.
The honest reading is slightly bleaker than "ask, and you'll get answers", though. You never got a root cause. What changed is that a human looked, and it worked partly because you had the ASIN of an identical approved edition to point at. Somebody without that comparison is appealing into the dark.
Which, given what the book is about, is almost too neat.
Looking forward to Sunday. 👊
What a great day! Feeling happy. Time to sleep – gotta stop the late nights.😴