Dear Readers, Visitors, Students!
Kindle just banned me, the author of more than 20 educational paperback books, from KDP/Kindle publishing portal.
I admit, that I have not published anything since Amazon took over in 2018 the convenient, low-cost, and later made free, Publishing Online Platform CreateSpace.com. By chance, I just found in my home files the invoice from CreateSpace (they were distributing through Amazon) dated August 2010. So, at least 10 years I have been publishing my books. (My first Russian book dates far back to 1996 St. Petersburg, Russia, as by chapters in the magazine “Nataly”, then I published 1000 copies of it – “Devushka iz shtata Kalifornia” – with my picture on the front cover – in “Golos” ruled by the writer F.A. Alyoshkin in Moscow, Russia, in 2004. Alyoshkin or his editors distorted my last name in annotation, and that’s OK, they could not remove my picture from the front cover! The picture aroused negative feelings by some moscovites – it was showing me in a bride-girlfriend’s dress that easily could be confused with a bride’s dress. You see, all small circumstances of my life are fighting against me, however I am fighting them back. And this is how my life goes. Sorry for a long inside-parentheses note!)
Kindle banned my e-format variant of my books. I do not care about e-books at all. I do care about my paperback multi-language books based on the world classics, like Tolstoy,, Dostoyevskiy, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Poe, Omar Khayyam, Chekhov, Albert Camus, brothers Grimm, and the like, that I, an educator and linguist, have created.
My books are sold all over the USA, and all over the world. My modest royalties (just a few dollars a month) have dropped in the last 6 months, magically, by 75 percent, comparing to the previous years.
I just received the reply from Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble has many of my titles on their site. They took time with the answer, and now redirected me to their other department. So I will follow with inquiring the stores who sell my books just to have a clearer picture how all this messy system works as regarded to my own creations. Then, I will be sharing my knowledge about my discoveries if I see it is valuable for other authors like me.
I wanted to write to the owner of Amazon. Actually, I did. I just took some kind of his email address from general online search and wrote him an email. That email unlikely reached him. I initially wanted to follow it with my physical letter to his headquarters. It happened in my past that I reached powerful CEOs and did campaigns fighting for my (consumer’s) rights. They actually stopped the unlawful charges after my letters. The courts changed their decisions after my contesting some traffic tickets, for example. (Faulty as charged! I used to like speeding a little bit when I was younger, when I was driving to two works and two studies – 4 different places every week.) As we all know the teaching profession does not exactly implies 40 hours a week. We, teachers, multi-language people, are looking for all hours we can get at different institutions, or the translations we can get from lawyers’ offices or other organizations or private parties.
So, my income never relied on my book-publishing royalties – it’s quite obvious. By the way, I found now articles from other authors online who were complaining about being banned by Kindle platform, and I do understand their lamenting of losing their life incomes from their publishing. Also, I found articles about different fraudulent activities of plagiarism made to income through Kindle. Well, both these causes have nothing to do with me, a self-publishing author and educator. My books are created in connection with my own studies of languages, my memories sharing, my experiences sharing. Each of my books is very different and my personal notes in each book explain how and in what way the book is different. Some books have grammar chapters or grammar comparisons across a few languages. Other books have my own translations of different texts, or passages. Some books have my personal notes with my memories back to the past in Russian culture or Soviet times. My books are very individually and custom made and I do not make much money on them.
I will finish now the thought why I decided not to reach further the Amazon owner by my passionate, craving for justice letter. Amazon’s stocks are more expensive than Google stocks. Google is way much more useful than Amazon. Well, I decided that there is no use for me to waste my time and energy, and emotions for that fight. I made a plan.
I will re-edit all my paperback most dear for me books, and republish them from another platform, and recreate links to my books. The old editions with corrupted links then will lose their value (if any) because I will extend my texts by improving them.
Look what Amazon Central Customer Service replied to me about my book just the other day. I asked him why I couldn’t connect my valuable paperback based on Leo Tolstoy’s complete novel, the trilingual book “Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Zoia Eliseyeva (Barnes and Noble has them all, so it’s easy to see my books there) – I couldn’t connect it by ISBN search to my Amazon Author’s Page – Zoia Eliseyeva. In past it was Zoia Sproesser, so Author Pages multiplied too because I changed my last name to maiden after the divorce with Sproesser in December 2014. So, the Customer Rep. very politely explained, that my above-mentioned book has Author Page in Singapore, China (I hope not in Wuhan! :D), and Arab Emirates. However, in USA, where I live, I cannot connect my main titles to my Amazon Author Page. Now I got it why, after his message!
This is because I have not been republishing my paperbacks since 2018 Amazon’s coup d’état of CreateSpace, and that’s why my Author Pages, by the CreateSpace worldwide distribution remained like that.
Dear friends! Do not be discouraged and perplexed when you see a stupid dog’s image when you click certain amazon-links of my books! (Some links still work, but my Author Page looks quite miserable at this time having only 8 old titles instead of about 18, published in 2014-2017 years.) Also, they have inconsistency with prices. You can see the price 499.00 dollars on my two-chapter 200-page-long Rus-Eng Dostoyevskiy “Crime and Punishment” – some weird mistake that possibly makes bad publicity for already suffering (my poor) paperback book. They made my links dead-end non-existent at this time, June 2020, but victory will be with us!
We all die one day because we are human beings. CEOs will die, and teachers will die. With big money maybe CEOs will buy their artificial imaging for future. Nobody of millions of people will know about it anyway, so what’s the point now to break our spears here?
The goal of this article is:
- To notify the community about what just happened to my books since my books are spread widely in USA and in the world. (Last year one my book in English about self-publishing techniques authored still by Zoia Sproesser, since I found it unworthy to reedit as Zoia Eliseyeva, was bought massively for English pounds and Euros in Europe. I guess somebody taught a self-publishing class with that. So it was one time more or less big royalty. Majorly, like I said, my monthly royalties are quite low.)
- To let my readers know that I remain myself – a very active, adjusting to the time educator: I teach languages, and I continue writing. If somebody is a writer, they write. They write their thoughts that are pouring out of every thinking educated knowledgeable writer. Let them frauds be frauds. Normal people will remain normal people and will not do plagiarism. Plagiarism is boring like hell (pardon my French)! Give me a fresh thought, a fresh joke from a real person. I do not have a bestseller about vampires, but I do have my two websites and my profile is public on all public platforms, and my UTube is filled with my creations. My voice exists and it can be quite easily found in audio/video and written creations.
- To notify other banned authors about my case, about what happened to me, a published author of over 18-20 titles since around August 2010. Let them not be discouraged by the ban, but continue their writing finding other publishing platforms. There are plenty on internet. I am tying to find a free one or low-cost one as CreateSpace was. I am creating my books myself, from Front and Back covers, to inside file in pdf or document file. If my texts are all over internet to read, and one can see my texts exposed to tease customers to buy products – so let it be. Where is justice in this world, anyway? So, why to worry. Relax, and continue your life, find new, less corrupted people or organizations to deal with. Learn a lesson. Share your experiences in your blog or on your site, or on a public platform page. I just wrote on my FB page a couple of extended kind of “diary notes”. Like I said, writers will write, and grabbers will grab. And robbers will rob, and frauds will fraud. We cannot be upset over something we cannot control.
Thank you for reading me. Zoia Eliseyeva, June 3, 2020 from California, USA. In Russian my full name is Елисеева Зоя Владимировна. I am an educator living in USA for 25 years. I have an extensive UTube channel named zoiacalifornia (only around 2 thousand subscribers: honest one-teacher education does not sell) where my 2 universities’ diplomas are posted (Russian BA, and American Master’s Degree in Education, rather Educational Counseling for Community Colleges). Let’s not confuse me with other Russian people, who may have the same last name and who live all over Russia and may be in other countries too.
Good luck to all readers of this site!
I am enclosing here a song. It is a historical poem by Valeriy Bryusov, a famous Russian poet-symbolist (beginning of 20th century) about love, that he obviously translated from Armenian language poem dated back to the famous Farsi-Armenian-Azerbaijan-Georgian poet of 18th century Sayat-Nova. Valeriy Bryusov is highly valued by Armenian culture institutions for his contribution to popularize Armenian texts for Russian readers. It is the most beautiful poem with its brilliantly fine and rich vocabulary. I am singing it in Russian language. The melody is approximately like melodies of Armenian popular songs. Thanks to all, who devote a little bit of their personal time to read, or listen to my creations!