Amazon KDP publishing services Amazon, Kindle Direct Misprinted books, refused to take responsibility or refund/reprint

For the past few months I have been prepping a new book to publish with Amazon KDP services. This would be my fourth book published with them, and I also have a movie distributed through Amazon Prime. In the months leading up to publication, I ordered 4 or 5 proofs to check various aspects including margins, layout and image behavior. A little background on me – I have worked in publishing and printing most of my adult life, and am a graphic artist.

The images and layout got worked out in the first few proofs I had printed, everything was looking and behaving as expected. I published, and ordered 30 author copies. When I received the books, I quickly found many were misprinted – the contrast of the misprinted books was not checked and almost all the pictures in the book were muddy and dark, very little detail showing. Turns out 8 of the 30 books were unusable due to this printing error: 22 were perfectly fine.

I brought this up to Amazon KDP support, and waited nearly three weeks to hear something back, they would email me once a week to say the were investigating. Three weeks into that I simply asked them to explain to me why it was taking a three week investigation to figure out if the books were bad and they needed to reprint 8 books. Within a very short time that morning I heard back that that they investigated and found no errors.

I was dumbfounded. I sent pictures of the printing differences again. They repeated “nothing was wrong; it was within acceptable variance.”

I went back and forth, shaking my head as I typed, losing my patience for their inability to look at the issue and NOT see they needed to reprint these 8 $3 books. I paid for 30, I got 22 I could use – almost 25% of my order – my money – was wasted.

I escalated – new guy claiming to be the first person’s supervisor contacted me – said the same thing. I immediately asked if this was an issue with HIS order, if would accept that and be happy with it. He said he “saw my point,” but still maintained the company line of it being “acceptable variance.” I told him I was withdrawing my books and my movie from Amazon.

Then I was contacted by his supervisor – who did nothing but repeat the same company line of there being no problem, the books would not be reprinted.

I was also blamed because the printers said my files were bad – color images were mixed with black and white, and they should all be black and white. Regardless of the fact that this issue was addressed in the proofing stage, and again – 75% of the books printed okay. And also another book I published with Amazon KDP used the exact same type of images and files – and had zero image issues with over a hundred books printed.

Attached are photos from the three books (the proofs, the good author copies, and the bad author copies), including images of the barcodes on the back pages showing that the two versions of author copies were printed on separate days, and they were printed at a different facility than the proofs.

Good god – this was a no-brainer for anyone in the print business: a new day, a new shift, perhaps a new machine – they neglected to check settings and the images suffered.

I have not received any reprinted books, nor a refund for the 8 misprints to this day.