Amazon is blocking me from accessing royalties I’ve already earned

Call it what you like—I call it unconscionable

My books are selling. Amazon is collecting the money.

But thanks to its broken systems, I can’t access the royalties I’ve already earned.

This is not a story about a single glitch or a short-term delay. It’s about a structural failure inside the world’s biggest retailer, where customer service has collapsed into scripted theatre, and accountability has been replaced with bureaucratic recursion.

The loop that never ends

Here’s what happens when you try to resolve a serious issue with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP):

1. Retail support says it’s a KDP issue.
2. KDP support insists it’s a Retail issue.
3. Both sides tell you to start from scratch.
4. The same system error blocks you every time.

Meanwhile, Amazon keeps sitting on the royalties from books that have already sold and been paid for by readers.

It’s Kafka in a call centre—a theme I’ve already explored in detail in this post, where even the support inbox itself failed.

What Amazon tells you

At every turn, I’ve been given variations of the same empty phrases:

• “Your account is functioning normally.” (It isn’t.)
• “We’re not dismissing your concern.” (They are.)
• “We tried calling the number in your account.” (The same number I’d already told them was inactive.)

Even when escalation was advised, the system panicked. Copying multiple Amazon addresses into a chain triggered an auto-generated privacy warning. At one point, their support inbox itself timed out and bounced messages back to me.

This is not resolution. This is theatre—an elaborate choreography designed to look like help while ensuring nothing is fixed. It’s exactly what I called out earlier in Amazon’s failure of ownership.

What’s really happening

Let’s strip away the euphemisms:

• Books are being sold.
• Amazon is collecting the revenue.
• Authors are blocked from accessing their royalties.

Call it withholding, call it limbo, call it bureaucracy—the effect is the same. Amazon is sitting on money it owes to its own authors, while blaming its customers for the failure of its systems.

I’m careful not to use the word that implies criminal intent. But when a trillion-dollar company knowingly leaves authors unpaid while hiding behind scripts and silos, what else can you call it but unconscionable?

This began with what I described as an astounding customer service failure—and every interaction since has confirmed that diagnosis.

AI knows—but culture refuses to act

Here’s the irony: Amazon sells a product called AWS Comprehend, a sentiment analysis tool that parses text for tone, escalation risk, and resolution potential. If they’re running it on my case—and it would be negligent if they weren’t—their dashboards must be glowing crimson:

• Sentiment: hostile, escalating, indignant.
• Escalation risk: catastrophic—the customer is going public.
• Agent adherence: robotic, scripted, dismissive.
• Resolution: zero.

The AI can see the problem. But culture prohibits anyone from fixing it. That’s the tension I laid out in When AI knows you’re angry.

Why leadership matters more than slogans

Amazon loves to call itself “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” My lived reality says otherwise.

Customer-centric organisations don’t:

• Pass customers in circles between silos.
• Demand evidence already supplied multiple times.
• Send scripted replies that contradict the facts.
• Treat escalation itself as a violation.
• Leave their support inbox unable to accept messages.

What makes a company truly customer-centric isn’t data, AI dashboards, or slogans. It’s ownership. It’s accountability. It’s empowering people to resolve problems instead of deflecting them.

And right now, Amazon is failing at every one of those basics.

Final thought

My books sell. Amazon gets paid. But I don’t.

You can call it a glitch, a process failure, or bureaucracy run amok.

I call it unconscionable.