Amazon unpublished my book

A month after I published my latest book, Amazon unpublished it.

Well, they didn't actually unpublish it, but they sent me an email and said that if I didn't unpublish it within five days, they would do it for me.

It's like your boss telling you that you can either resign or he will fire you.

What fatal sin did I commit to cause Amazon to unpublish my book?

I left a dash out of my subtitle.

It's obvious that Amazon won't put up with such ridiculous behavior.

I corrected my transgression and republished the book, but Amazon counted it as a new book and deleted all of my hard-earned reviews and the link to my audiobook version.

Here are the details

Below is the book that Amazon "asked" me to unpublish. The two lines in the subtitle and how they're shown on the cover make perfect sense.

But if you look at the two phrases the way Amazon's computer sees them as one long sentence, it looks like this:

Step-By-Step Book Writing Guide How to Write a Nonfiction Book

Their computer sees it as a confusing statement that's guilty of keyword stuffing and not a clear sentence or phrase. I have to agree with them when you look at the subtitle that way.

It would have been okay if I had put a dash between the two phrases, as I did in my previous book's subtitle, shown below. Amazon didn't have a problem with this book.

You can change many things about a book after it's published, but you can't change the title or subtitle. The only way I could fix the problem was to unpublish the eBook and the print version, make changes to the cover, and republish them. And I had to buy a new ISBN for the printed book.

All of that was easy enough, but having all my reviews deleted bothered me the most. Reviews are hard to get. Now, I have to try to get people to post a review for the "new" book.

I wish Amazon had found this problem during the two days they took to review the book before they originally approved it for publication.

Some good news:

I called customer support at ACX to see what I would have to do to unpublish the audiobook and republish it to get it to link to the new eBook and print book at Amazon.

The lady I talked to was in Costa Rica. She said to give her the new ISBN, and she would link the audiobook to the new version of the books on Amazon.

She said the link would take three to five days to appear, but within 24 hours, the audiobook link was showing on my book's Amazon detail page, and I sold two audiobooks the first day the link was back on the page. All is well.

Bottom line: If you have two phrases in the subtitle of your book, you need to put an em dash or period between the two phrases. Just putting them on different lines won't work.

Update: I don't know why, but two days after all of this happened, my reviews showed back up on my Amazon detail page for the book. I'm not going to ask any questions. I'm going to consider that to be my Christmas present from Amazon.