Who exactly did you say you were?

[MartinC]

Just had an email from Kindle Direct Publishing:

Thanks for using Amazon KDP! We look forward to bringing your titles to the Kindle store. Copyright is important to us – we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has their books claimed and sold by anyone else. For your title(s), we just need a few additional items:

Cold Hillside by Cooper, Martin (AUTHOR)

To confirm your rights to distribute these titles, please reply stating one of the following and provide one of the forms of documentation listed below:

1. State that you are the author of this title -- and, if the name on your account does not match the name of the author of the title, please provide an explanation.

2. State that you hold the eBook publishing rights to this title – and provide any documents you have from the author (or other copyright owners) of the titles which confirm your eBook rights. Alternatively, if you are affiliated with or are the physical book publisher please provide a statement or resource verifying this.

Please respond within 14 days with the requested information. If you don’t respond within 14 days, your title will be blocked on your bookshelf and will not be available for sale in the Kindle Store.

Have I done something bad - or could this be Amazon starting to tighten up on pirates? My account name is slightly different from my author name (it has a middle initial).

[TrineDaely]

Or a phishing email. I'd go to the KDP/Amazon site itself and inquire if this is a legitimate request from them.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by TrineDaely

Or a phishing email. I'd go to the KDP/Amazon site itself and inquire if this is a legitimate request from them.

"If you don’t respond within 14 days, your title will be blocked on your bookshelf..." is the part that stands out. Why would they give a pirate 14 days to do anything and only then take action? Wouldn't they block first, then unblock if they get the response they want? I've seen a lot of phish hooks for banks, payment services, online games, etc., and the threat of future enforcement action is one of their common threads. "Give us all your personal information or we'll block your bank account in 3 days" is a big one. (if someone had stolen your identity, would you want your bank to wait 3 days to do anything about it?)

If it's legit, Amazon is trying awfully hard to look like a phisher. Go look into it from the Amazon end (do not click any links found in that email) and see notifications, if any, you find there.

[Tome Keeper]

I agree it sounds like phishing, I'd just get on the phone to Amazon CS and get an instant response.

[MartinC]

Originally Posted by TrineDaely

Or a phishing email. I'd go to the KDP/Amazon site itself and inquire if this is a legitimate request from them.

Done that, and it does seem to be legit. Their response:

Thank you for writing to us about the request you received from our Title-submission team to confirm the rights as an author for your Kindle title "Cold Hillside."

I checked our records and have confirmed that there appears to have been a few corrections you made to your Kindle title. Hence, when certain metadata changes are made from your KDP shelf, to confirm that the title is not being published as a duplicate version our review team requests you to send the rights information as an author.

I take this to be a very good sign.

[mr ploppy]

1. State that you are the author of this title -- and, if the name on your account does not match the name of the author of the title, please provide an explanation.

Wouldn't anyone issuing a pirate copy just say they are the author using a pen name? Or would they need some other form of proof of ownership? (Not that I can think of anything). Expecting potential pirates to tell the truth seems a bit overly optimistic to me.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Expecting potential pirates to tell the truth seems a bit overly optimistic to me.

I suspect it's less about discouraging piracy and more about covering their butt.

[Todd Young]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

I suspect it's less about discouraging piracy and more about covering their butt.

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

[Notre Dame]

All my reissues were held up at Amazon for several weeks while authorship/ownership (reversion of rights) /copyright holder/ebook rights holder were verified by Amazon via my new ebook publisher, not made any easier by the fact my author name had changed from Scott Wilson to Chris Scott Wilson (so all my books came under the same author name) ! However irritating it was at the time, at least they were checking. For my next reissue, Scarborough Fair I expect further delays as the publisher who originally produced the paperback/audiobook went bankrupt, so there are no actual documents confirming reversion of rights. However, I have been advised that if a company goes bankrupt, any contract between you and them is void, as a company that no longer exists cannot hold any contract with you.
http://www.chrisscottwilson.co.uk

[Steven Lake]

We (my publisher) actually ran into this recently while trying to post some of our newest books in kindle format. They make us verify that we have the rights to post every single one of the books we put up there. It's stupid, but hey, we're a small house press and Amazon hates our guts. They only like the indies (who they seem to think they can bilk for big money), and kinda tolerate the big houses. So yeah, I don't find this at all surprising.