So Castalia’s three-month return to Amazon has suddenly come to an end. Apparently writing a bestseller with 42 reviews and a perfect 5.0 rating is unacceptable to Amazon, and Castalia’s account was terminated for the fourth and final time. So we’re finally going to start the process of building our own ebook platform to compete with Amazon; in the meantime, our books, both print and ebook, will be available exclusively at NDM Express.
Hello,
Thank you for the email concerning the status of your account.
After reviewing your response, we have reevaluated the Content Guideline violations relating to the titles in your account.
We found that you have uploaded material through your account for which you do not have the necessary rights.
As a result, we are upholding our previous decision to terminate your KDP account and remove all your titles from Amazon.
If you have questions or believe you’ve received this email in error, please reply to this message.
If you would like to review our Content Guidelines, please visit: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390
Regards,
Amazon KDP
They’re trying to claim that Castalia does not have the necessary rights to publish my Japanese translation of my book, DEATH AND THE DEVIL, and that merely uploading it – not publishing it – is an excuse to terminate our account. Which is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.
In related news, THE FROZEN GENE will be released this week in ebook format. This is the companion volume to PROBABILITY ZERO that contains many of the papers that laid the foundation for it; PZ will soon be available in ebook as well as in print later today. And if you thought the evolutionary faithful had their panties in a bunch over PZ, well, you truly haven’t seen anything yet.
And so, once more, we are reminded of the fact that we cannot, we should not, and more importantly, we will not, rely upon anyone else’s platforms. If you ever wondered if your support for the Library or any of our other projects mattered, well, what we’re doing certainly seems to matter an awful lot to the other side.
We’re also going to be starting a new substack for Castalia House that will be focused on the regular print and ebook editions, so if you’re on our old mailing list, you should be receiving an invitation to that soon. We don’t want to bother our Library subscribers with that non-leather news, after all. We have also worked out an arrangement with a small publisher to make a few of our new ebooks available on Amazon for the benefit of those outside the community.