Ebony McKenna (Image: Goodreads/Ebony McKenna)

Technology was supposed to make life easier for authors to earn a quid, thanks to companies like Amazon and Apple, but Australian author Ebony McKenna has found it can be a pain in the rear.

McKenna has written young adult fiction and romance novels and recently refreshed the covers of her Ondine series of novels — it features a talking ferret called Shambles — to spruce the books up for new readers.

Should be easy enough if you are the author, right?

It didn’t take long for Amazon to get grumpy with McKenna and chuck her off its Kindle Direct Publishing portal because it did not believe that McKenna, the author of the book The Summer of Shambles, was actually the author of The Summer of Shambles.

The confusion comes from the fact that McKenna’s young adult series was published by Egmont Publishing in the United Kingdom. A letter that proves the rights reverted to her in 2014 was submitted on numerous occasions by McKenna, attached in PDF format.

Amazon has a system that operates on a mixture of machine learning, automation and a team of human reviewers that look at individual cases, but sometimes things in an operation so big fall through the cracks. “Thanks for bringing this to our attention,” an Amazon spokesperson told Crikey. “The author’s account and books were removed in error and have been reinstated.” 

Termination of an author’s or publisher’s Kindle Direct Publishing account neuters an author’s ability to upload new titles as well as maintain their account. It’s a big deal.

It can also impact the people an author works with if they collaborate and coordinate anthologies and collections. McKenna collates romance writers, so Amazon booting her off also impacted their income-generating ability.

McKenna’s Twitter feed over the past week reveals the extent of her angst.

“When @AmazonKDP nuke your account, you lose any access to regular help chats or the ability to find phone numbers, so you’re reduced to sending messages on Twitter begging for help to reinstate your account,” McKenna wrote on October 8.

It did not get much better over the next 24 hours.

“I have now responded to & written 22 emails in the last 3 days. Three phone calls that went nowhere as your staff are specifically prevented from escalating my issue to anyone who can actually help, and numerous ‘contact us’ online forms where I attach documents proving my rights,” McKenna wrote the next day.

Finally, she managed to get recognised by Amazon — and have The Summer of Shambles cleared for publication — after she keyed the Egmont rights letter into an email sent to the company.

A triumphant McKenna posted a tweet advising the world of the end of a saga. “8 days of hell, 40+ emails, phone calls, Amazon bots and heaps of love from the reading and writing community, I’m finally back in business,” she said.