Yesterday, I published a post titled "My Book 'AI, Ego & Regret' Paperback Is Live. Kindle Is Blocked."
My Book "AI, Ego & Regret" P...
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I guess this is a good reminder that we shouldn't give up too easily. Congratulations! 🎉
Thank you! I guess my QA instincts kicked in. When a system says "no" without telling you why, it's hard not to ask for the bug report. 😂hahaha
You were probably flagged because your book title contains the world "AI". My best guess is that an automation in the approval process stopped it, or a time-out from no one actually looking at it. Id be curious to get in contact with a human. If not, there is always the better business bureau and of course reddit lol. I cant imagine you would want to take action though if they are actually publishing your book now. Haha. 😂
Haha, Amazon has an AI‑powered chatbot on their backend. After a few rounds of conversation with it, you can get transferred to a human agent. It works pretty well. But they just keep refusing to give the actual root cause; the whole process is so opaque. I tried publishing the hardcover edition today, and it went live in about an hour.😂
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. 👊
Thank you so much. Someone placed an order for my book right after it went live, and it’s even the paperback edition. To be honest, I’m still lying in bed. It’s around 6:50 a.m. Beijing time. I keep wondering if I’m dreaming. Is this real? Did I actually publish a book? Did someone really buy a copy? Am I really an author now? I could have slept in more on this Saturday morning, but all my sleepiness is gone. I don’t even know what to say right now.😭
The book arrived Monday, and I've been in it since. Properly hooked.👊
Awesome, glad it pulled you in! Thanks so much for your support 👊. For your information, the published book version of my older series went through heavy refinement on both technical details and storylines. I’d guess only around 60 % of the original Dev.to serial content remains unchanged. To be honest, the early online version reads more like a technical power‑fantasy piece — the protagonist keeps turning the tables and outsmarting opponents for maximum satisfaction, hahaha. Looking back now, I even feel a little cringey; parts come off pretty naive, purely built for that satisfying payoff 😂. If you get a chance, please leave your honest review on Amazon. I’ve documented every milestone: first submission, first order, first physical copy. Those moments are some of the most memorable of my whole life.🎉
Don't be too hard on the early version. A few stories in, and it isn't reading as a power fantasy to me. Chen Yuan fixes it in fourteen minutes and then goes home to a drive nobody knows about. That's not a man winning. That's a man proving something to himself in private.
And if you can see the naivety now, that's just what the last few months did to your writing. Everyone should be a bit embarrassed by work from before they got better.
Review's coming once I finish. 👊
Also, I love that you logged every milestone. First submission, first order, first copy in your hands.
Thank you for this thoughtful take. You nailed Chen Yuan’s core motive‑‑his victories are quiet and for nobody but himself. It’s true, looking back at older drafts can feel cringey, but that’s how progress works. Looking forward to your review whenever you get around to it 👊
What a great day! Feeling happy. Time to sleep – gotta stop the late nights.😴
Congratulations on your book! “Might result in a disappointing customer experience” followed by an approval a few hours later, that’s quite the plot twist for a book about AI failures. ☺️
Thank you! I couldn’t dream up a better real‑life plot twist for this book about AI failures 😂 The irony is hard to miss.🤣
the QA instinct to enumerate hypotheses when the system gives you a result without enough context is exactly right — the frustrating part is that opaque rejection labels like "disappointing customer experience" are designed to be actionable for the average user but entirely useless for someone who actually wants to debug the decision.
what I find interesting about your approach is that you essentially ran a structured root cause analysis against a system that wasn't built to be debugged. did Amazon AI give you anything specific when you asked it directly, or was the resolution more "submitted again and it passed on the second look"?
Exactly! Amazon gave me zero concrete details. No actual root cause, just a human second pass that cleared the book. Super classic black‑box QA debugging situation — you build up hypotheses, but you can’t see how the system really makes its call 😂
yeah the "human second pass cleared it" part is the tell — automation sets the bar, humans override on appeal, but there’s no feedback loop back into the model. the criteria that flagged it never get corrected. what’s wild is the human reviewer had no more context than the system gave you. just a different threshold.
did they give any explanation for the appeal outcome, or was it just “case closed, book reinstated”?
They gave zero real explanation. Only a generic notice saying my book is reinstated. No root cause, no adjusted rules. That missing feedback loop is exactly the frustrating part🙃
The appeal path is valuable evidence here. Automated decisions need a human-readable reason and a way to supply missing context; otherwise the system turns ordinary publishing work into guessing at an invisible classifier.
Yes, that’s exactly what makes this so frustrating. If they notify me of a failure, they should at least point out exactly which part is problematic so I can revise it promptly. This kind of opaque review outcome only raises communication costs and drags down efficiency.🫠
The hardcover is live too. All three editions of the book are finally done!🎉🎉🎉
"might result in a disappointing customer experience" - LOL, and then a few hours later it was approved - congrats!
Haha. I write about AI failures every day, and then this actually happened to me. Reality is always more dramatic than stories.🤣
Yeah this is too ironic indeed, "life imitating art" something like that ;-)
No, I need to tone it down a bit. I’m genuinely afraid that one day an AI‑controlled robot will come to talk to me about all the bad things I’ve written about it, hahaha.🤣
Yeah revenge of the bots, haha :D
Great article, thank you for sharing!
Thank you so much for reading! It was a really frustrating experience dealing with Amazon’s opaque AI‑driven review process, but I hope this story can help other authors who might run into similar publishing hurdles 😆
That’s great news. Way to push through!
Thank you! Persistence paid off 🙌