I got an email from Amazon KDP a week ago that my account got terminated because they were unable to verify my identity.

I’ve had my books published there for many years now and never heard of this before. I checked and indeed a week prior to that, there was an email where they asked for verification.

That’s not my main inbox, so I contacted them to let them know I missed their notification and would still like to take action and restore my account.

Luckily, they were cooperative and allowed me to verify my account.

So my books, live links and reports were back there.

This is just a reminder that we don’t own other platforms.

My books aren’t really a part of my business revenue, but they are part of my brand online and I’ve put a lot of time into organizing the content and actually publishing it.

I have links to my main business book on many platforms, and during that one week when my account was terminated, those links were broken.

This is bad for your reputation and can lead to losing leads in some scenarios.

So, the lesson here is: always be prepared. The only things you (sort of) own online are your own self-hosted website, and your email list. For the rest, make sure your whole business doesn’t rely on one platform that’s totally out of your control.