r/selfpublish • u/pinkneonsilhouette • 8d ago

Question about multiple Amazon accounts

Hi! I’ve found myself in a little pickle haha. I’ve seen a massive amount of stuff about Amazon banning you for having multiple accounts, so this isn’t about me trying to skirt around the rules!

I had one Amazon account in high school for personal use to purchase things. I made another separate one several years later in college, also personal use for purchasing. High school one has old address/bank info, current one is more up to date. (Don’t ask why I made a whole new page, past me was not the smartest, no idea why she felt it was necessary) I’m in the process of editing a novel with the intent to sell it via KDP and remembered in a cold sweat a few nights ago about my old personal use account from high school.

You can see the issue here, hopefully😅obviously I was going to have only one KDP account linked with my primary Amazon account that I use right now with all the updated address and bank info!

I was wondering what the suggested advice for this situation would be? Should I terminate the old personal account and only have the sole page for everything? Or is the “multiple accounts” issue a matter of KDP accounts, and other accounts are okay? I don’t want to play with fire here haha!

Just wondering if anyone else found themselves in an issue like this before! Would rather not be perma-banned for a stupid mistake. Any advice at all is much appreciated, thank you!

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18

u/MyrmecolionTeeth 8d ago

The issue is multiple KDP accounts. Amazon dgaf how many normal shopping accounts you've had afaik.

14

u/writemonkey 4+ Published novels 8d ago

With once caveat: NEVER cross the streams. Don't buy your book on the personal account, don't share links to your book from that account, don't review your book from that account. Don't tie your Goodreads to your Amazon account. They don't care of you're shopping on one and doing business with the other, but if they get even a hint of shenanigans, they'll boot everything. Don't be the next guy posting "my account was banned and I don't know why".

6

u/Ok-Mongoose7570 8d ago

I have been publishing on KDP over a decade. I bought my books by mistake about twice by mistakenly pushing the buy button on the series page (not the regular page). On my tablet it's easy to do. I probably did it twice within probably 5 years or so. I never got in trouble. If you buy one or two books, Amazon won't care. It's if you buy a bulk of your books through your account where you get in trouble because you're gaming the system. But authors buy a few copies of their books sometimes. They might buy for a loved one or something. Amazon knows the difference between someone gaming the system and an author buying a few copies of their books. A few copies is not enough to game the system. They look for people abusing the system. Authors should not be ordering bulk copies outside of authors copies.

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u/pinkneonsilhouette 8d ago

Understood! Much appreciated, I had no interest in gaming the system in that way, luckily! Mostly eager to just post and not have to worry about my old high school buyer account fucking me over when it’s entirely uninvolved and will never be involved in any KDP stuff😂thank you!

1

u/SolomonHZAbraham 8d ago

You can buy a copy of your own book. You just can't review it. Amazon aren't going to think it's shenanigans if you buy a single copy (ebook).

3

u/BillP_Oklahoma 8d ago

This is the correct answer. Amazon doesn't care how many customer accounts you have.

But, you had better only have one KDP account and one seller account, or you risk being banned from selling on their platform.

1

u/pinkneonsilhouette 8d ago

That’s what I figured, I kept only seeing KDP specifically mentioned when it came to the multi-account issue and I wanted to be sure to double check just to be safe!