When Publishing Free Falls Freeze Us, How To Respond
How one author's experience with an account closure at Amazon can teach us about dealing with setbacks in our author career...
UPDATE (April 6): Since running this article and podcast episode, the KDP account closures and recoveries have continued to happen at an alarming rate. This isn’t to say to anyone that you should be worried… rather the opposite. News like what Yasmine went through can help us know how to proceed in the future.
Zoe York (via Threads) has been chronicling the contacts she’s received, and her own attempts to reach out to Amazon via the “monitored” email account they have. Please cautiously approach this information, because neither Zoe nor anyone else in the industry is attempting to spread fear among authors, and if you’re not able to read about these things without fear spikes, maybe today is not the day to look into them.
But it may make personal contacts even more important, because the way Amazon is handling their KDP responses continues to be less and less human-centered. So you need to know the places in the industry where you can get help with these things. The author organizations, the thought leaders, the groups, and of course, the CD Reiss document that Zoe has pinned to the top of her Threads account.
The time to worry is not before it happens, because the odds of it happening to any individual person are not good. But if you can keep regulated about it, and know the information, you can be useful to any friends who have this experience and work to get it reversed as quickly as possible.
I do encourage you to read the rest of this article, because I think it’s important to have avatars for how to handle things, and I think Yasmine did a great job of pivoting through this crisis. Hopefully, if this ever does happen to you, she can be an avatar for you of how to pivot and adjust.
And now… back to the original article from March 2026:
When Yasmine Galenorn agreed to come on my series about Legacy Author Advice, she had just been through one of the worst experiences in her author career.
Her Amazon account had been terminated, without warning.
Talk about a freeze. When I got her text message, I couldn’t help thinking about how I would respond if it happened to me. My brain couldn’t even process how I would feel—it was like having nothing under my feet, like a free fall. Kevin J. Anderson calls these moments the “black ice” of author life, and if you’ve grown up around winter weather, you know that feeling of sliding without seeing it coming.
As an author coach, I’ve walked through these free falls with authors before, but I think calling attention to process when I see it is part of my job. The way Yasmine handled this shock illustrates the reason why it’s such a benefit to have Legacy Authors (people who have been in publishing for decades) to look up to. They have learned lessons from so many learning curves.
She’d been through worse, and acquired the skills from those early slides. It reminded me that watching Legacy Authors handle setbacks can be powerfully instructive.
Thank you to Yasmine for processing it with both me and with my audience. I know it will help many writers go through similar experiences in the future.
What Happened to Yasmine’s Account?
She woke up one morning to an email that her Amazon account had been terminated. Yasmine has been publishing for decades, and as she told us on the Quitcast interview, she’s had more than 20 years in traditional publishing, and then more than 10 now as indie-only (this year is her decade anniversary).
Hear me: this is not a “it can happen to anyone so you should be scared of this” post. Just the opposite. It’s to say, be cautious, sure, but know when these things happen, there’s always someone who has been through it who can help. Or there are people out there who want to assist, or there’s some way to counterbalance the effects.
When Yasmine got that email, she was frustrated and scared. However, what stuck out to me was how quickly she turned her frustration into action. Yes, she wondered “what happened,” but knowing larger corporations, that may or may not be something we ever get access to. The important thing was, she knew this had happened to others before, and there are ways to get it reversed.
We have agency here.
The Community Teaches Us
One of the first things Yasmine did was reach out to her community. Both through texting friends, and finding coaches or mentors who could help. (I wasn’t the only person she contacted, by the way. She went all hands on deck.)
Through this wide-cast net, she found Zoe York’s thread that listed the CD Reiss document about what to do if your account gets closed. That thread is here. I later learned that CD Reiss had originally collected advice from multiple people to help here, so the community keeps coming through.
Through this, we learned that Bryan Cohen of the Sell More Books Show podcast often encourages listeners to reach out to him when they need help with this situation.
Through this, we learned that most of the big indie publishing groups on Facebook have direct contacts with Amazon reps that can speed the process along. (Author Nation was the one referenced, but I think the Wide for the Win group also has contacts at Amazon.) This is another reason to belong to nonprofit groups like the Author’s Guild, a regional author’s organization, or NINC (Novelists, INC).
What information can’t provide, of course, is support. And I can’t highlight enough how much the support of authors around Yasmine was helpful for her. She had support from her PAs, and from her spouse, but she has also cultivated a group of authors who she’s been genuine friends with for many years. Claire Taylor has been talking about this a lot lately, about the need for community.
We need it so much more than we think.
And then, of course, Yasmine reached out to us as coaches at the BFA. Both to see what we could offer in terms of information, but also to see if we had any guidance, since we’ve coached multiple people through this process before, and have coached her for many years.
There’s a benefit to belonging, beyond emotional and regulatory upsides. When you give your community a chance to come through for you, they can.
Says the Connectedness.
Previous Experience Teaches Us
After having spent 20 years flush with contracts in traditional publishing, Yasmine suddenly found herself without contracts for the first time in 2016. It was a similar free fall, and she relied on her network of other authors. They all suggested indie, and she hit her first full-time-indie-income year at the end of 2016 and never looked back.
In that situation, she learned to take agency quickly and started preparing for what she could do that would give her more control over her finances as an author. So on the Amazon-account-closure day, she had this resilience to rely on as lived experience.
In fact, when you listen to her interview, you hear almost the exact same echoes of the two different situations she walked us through.
Yes, there was frustration. (Don’t not-feel your feelings.) But she quickly got to agency. What can I do here? Anger (and sadness and fear) should always lead us to action. I’m mad, what boundary do I set? Or what thing to I reclaim? Or what “no” needs to happen? Or who needs to stop having access to me?
Fully feeling those feelings can lead us to action (because emotions have beneficial action points naturally attached to them). They can reveal agency.
Personality Teaches Us
This need for agency tracks with her tendency to listen to her intuition as a storyteller. Being intuitive is a personality trait (or a combination of personality traits), meaning that you either have it or you don’t in a particular situation, and it doesn’t come from “learned experience” in the way that knowledge does. That makes it more tricky to trust, because if you have the memory of experience, it’s easier to trust. But listening to intuition can be harder.
And when you watch Yasmine’s YouTube videos describing her intuitive process, you hear a well-developed ability to trust this nebulous thing that can’t prove itself. Intuition is so often quiet statements, or bodily knowing, rather than a collection of specific reasons, so trusting it can be tricky.
Worth doing, though.
Her need for agency also tracks with her Enneagram 8 patterns. She needed to find her locus of control quickly, so she didn’t spend as much time worrying (even though she’s high Strategic in the Strengths metric). The most important thing, as she’d learned from experience, was when the free fall happens, adjust as quickly as you can so you can get back in the driver’s seat.
Those of us who have less need for agency can spend a lot of time looking for someone else to get into the driver’s seat for us, or being frustrated we’re not in the driver’s seat, but we can learn from Yasmine’s deep-seated 8 Energy. It does feel scary to admit the places we’re out of control, but once we’ve identified them, it becomes easier to see the things we can change.
And then there’s one final twist to this whole thing… the way Futuristic was acting.
Negative Circumstances Can Still Be Capitalized Upon
Hear me. This is not an argument for “oh, there’s a silver lining in all this.” I’m not going to toxic-positivity the mindset of, “be grateful for everything that happens.”
I’m also not going to gloss over the fact that there was a pretty significant upside to all this free fall. Once the cliff fell away beneath her, she landed on some pretty solid ground.
She lost close to a thousand preorders, and all her books disappeared from Amazon, but she did not lose her royalties (I’m not sure if this happens to everyone who gets their account shut down and restored, but at least she reports not losing the royalties she’d already sold and was owed). As she recounts in the interview, she had to post quickly to let readers know she knew about the shutdown, because they were looking for her now-absent books.
And yet. Losing those preorders freed her from the plans she’d made, and let her re-consider what she would do now, if everything had to be different. Her acceptance allowed her to quickly get to a place where she could recognize how to make lemonade out of this floor full of sour lemons. That means, she had to find the sweet addition to the situation.
(Or maybe you make Lemon Chicken out of lemons… either way, you have to bring something else to the table besides the lemons, to sustain the sourness of the situation.)
What she brought to the table was a desire to change plans she’d made. There was a series of spinoff novels she’d wanted to do earlier, but she had preorders up and collecting sales. And as we all know, cancelling preorders with Amazon means you lose your privileges to put up preorders, so she’d originally decided not to change plans.
The account closure and re-enstatment brought her a gift. “I’d been wanting to start [these books] earlier than I had planned for…” says Galenorn in our interview. And now she could proceed with the plans to start those books earlier.
So even in bad circumstances, there’s always a possibility that something good can happen. She wouldn’t have chosen it, but she made the most out of the circumstances.
What Do We Learn
It’s important to take the legacy wisdom from these situations, and let ourselves learn from the actions of others. It’s not about learning how to interact with Amazon, or how to prevent account closures. That’s being too vigilant about the situation. The key here is, she didn’t do anything that made the account closure happen. It was a glitch out of her control.
What we learn from Yasmine is how to roll with punches.
Have a general emergency plan so you don’t have to worry about being “prepared” for every eventuality. You know you always have agency, even if things can’t proceed exactly as you had planned. But you can always make it better and take your control where you have it.
Save money. Reduce spending. Keep as much of your income as you can. If you need a place to start, go to Profit First.
Have a community that you support and that can support you. You have to be a villager in order to have a village there for you. And then you have to call on your friends when the free fall happens.
Get to acceptance quick. We did a video with our Strengths coach Jess awhile back where she talked about airport moments. Those times when you miss a flight and you see all your connections getting messed up from here, and lose this “perfect” plan you thought you had. If you have an airport moment, you get angry about the change, and your lack of agency, but you quickly get on the phone with the airline to try to make the best out of this situation.
Find the place where you do have agency and actively get yourself into a place where you can withstand the storm.
This isn’t about direct sales. This isn’t an encouragement to say “forget Amazon and just go direct with everything.” Even Yasmine isn’t quitting Amazon. They re-instated her account quickly, and she’s still publishing books there. She’s changing strategy a bit on new releases (and potentially preorders), but she’s not attempting to abandon Amazon and be all-direct. You could do that if you’d like, but that’s not the moral of the story.
The moral of the story is: when you free fall, the faster you can get to acceptance, the faster you can change the game.
I know we’re mixing all kinds of metaphors here, but there is no way to be specifically prepared for situations like this. Morgan Housel has a great book (I mean… great for the type of book it is, and caveat, caveat) called Same As Ever about what we can predict and what we can’t predict. And then there’s Annie Duke’s fantastic Thinking in Bets book. In case you need some learning around how to accept and get to agency. You don’t prepare for specific problems. You prepare for general problems. Have more security. Have more community. Have more desire for resilience. And then whatever specific problem happens, you know where you have agency.
Yasmine had a line in the interview that really struck me. She said, “when I don’t like the game, I change the rules.” And that’s really a powerful mindset to adopt.
I don’t like the way this company is treating me. Ok, I’m going to stop making compliance with their narrative of utmost importance to me. What might that mean right now? It might mean I’m going to lose money short-term, but I’m willing to do what I have to do to play a game I’m comfortable with.
That’s her particular way of changing the rules.
Yours might be different.
Yours might be: I don’t like the way I feel when I’m watching my sales all the time. I need to stop watching my sales, and I know it, but I’m scared to stop. Ok, I’m going to stop making my inner fear drive the bus and I’ll test not checking my sales for a day, just to show myself I can do it.
Yours might be: I don’t like the way I feel when I read about everyone’s royalties going down all the time. I feel out of control and like there’s nothing to be done. Ok, I’m going to stop going on Threads/FB/IG/TT/SS/YT and stop letting my inner fear drive the bus. I’ll test bricking my phone, just to show myself that my plans to write my own books at my own speed is the right strategy.
Yours might be: I don’t like the way I feel when I worry about getting a one-star review. I feel like I’m disappointing people and my career might be over. Ok, I’ve heard Mandy Roth’s quote that Becca always quotes, “If I’d known how many one stars it took to get to seven figures, I would have wanted them to come so much faster than I did.” That’s Legacy Author Advice. Learned experience. I’m going to trust what everyone says, that it’s safe to disappoint readers, and I’m going to allow people to dislike my book and not take it personally. (And maybe also do a bit of work around my desire to people-please.)
All these are examples of learning curve moments that legacy authors in this new series have learned from hitting their own free-fall and having to face the hard part of their career head-on. “I don’t need to be vigilant” is one. “I don’t need to know what’s happening with everyone / it’s safe to miss out” is another. “I have to write what I’m going to write and stop listening to people who tell me I have to write to market” is another. (I did a newsletter on that this week.) Or “I’m going to let readers dislike my book and not worry it means the end of my career.”
All these are learned experience. We’re afraid of them, because we haven’t learned it yet. But this is one of the reasons we listen to legacy authors.
So if you’re struggling with those, make sure you’re following me here or following the Quitcast or listening to the legacy authors you already know. That lived experience is so helpful.
And if you’ve had your Amazon account closed, do what Yasmine did. Take a beat to have the emotions, then jump to strategy. Ask for help. Pivot quickly. We can get through this together. <3