Is Amazon Suppressing Your Book? Here's How to Check

If your backlist title used to sell steadily and now barely registers on Amazon, you might not be imagining things. Amazon's content quality system actively demotes books that don't meet its accessibility and formatting standards, and it does so silently.

No email. No warning. Just a slow, invisible drop in search visibility.

How Amazon Suppression Works

Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform runs automated quality checks on every EPUB uploaded to its store. These checks evaluate things like:

• Accessibility metadata, does the file declare its accessibility features?
• Image alt text, are all images described for screen readers?
• Heading structure, is the document hierarchy valid (h1, h2, h3 in order)?
• Link contrast, can readers distinguish links from surrounding text?
• Navigation, does the EPUB include a proper table of contents?

When a book fails these checks, Amazon doesn't reject it outright. Instead, it applies what's often called a "quality flag." This flag reduces the book's visibility in search results, recommendation algorithms, and category rankings.

The result: your book is technically still for sale, but far fewer readers ever see it.

Signs Your Book May Be Suppressed

Here are the most common symptoms authors report:

1. Sudden ranking drop with no change in reviews, ads, or pricing
2. Sales flatline on a title that previously sold consistently
3. Book doesn't appear in its own category or keyword searches
4. "Quality issues" notification in your KDP dashboard (rare, most suppression is silent)

If you're experiencing any of these, accessibility issues in your EPUB file are one of the most likely causes.

Why Accessibility Issues Trigger Suppression

Amazon has been steadily increasing its accessibility requirements, driven by two forces:

Regulatory pressure. The European Accessibility Act (EAA), which took effect in June 2025, requires all ebooks sold in the EU to meet accessibility standards. Amazon, as a marketplace operating in the EU, must enforce compliance.

Platform reputation. Amazon wants its Kindle ecosystem to work well for all readers, including those using screen readers and other assistive technologies. Books that break these tools create a poor experience.

The result is that EPUB files with missing metadata, broken heading hierarchies, or absent alt text are increasingly likely to be flagged.

How to Check Your EPUB

The industry-standard tool for checking EPUB accessibility is DAISY Ace, developed by the DAISY Consortium. It evaluates your file against WCAG 2.1 AA standards, the same standards Amazon references in its quality guidelines.

You can run Ace yourself (it's open source), but it requires Node.js and some command-line familiarity. The easier option is to use a tool like Rahatt that wraps Ace in a simple web interface.

Here's what to look for in your scan results:

• Risk score, a 0-100 score indicating how likely your book is to be suppressed
• Missing alt text, images without descriptions (each one adds to your risk score)
• Heading violations, jumps like h2 → h4 without an h3 in between
• Missing metadata, no accessibilitySummary or accessibilityHazard declarations
• Link contrast, links that don't have a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against their background

What to Do If Your Book Fails

The good news: most EPUB accessibility issues are fixable without rewriting your book. Our step-by-step guide to fixing EPUB accessibility issues walks through each fix in detail. Common fixes include:

1. Injecting accessibility metadata into your EPUB's content.opf file
2. Correcting heading hierarchy (e.g., changing an h4 to an h3 where appropriate)
3. Adding alt text to images that lack descriptions
4. Fixing link contrast by updating CSS styles
5. Re-uploading the fixed file to KDP

After uploading a corrected EPUB, Amazon typically re-reviews the file within 48-72 hours. Authors who fix their accessibility issues usually see suppression flags cleared and rankings begin to recover.

The Bottom Line

Amazon book suppression is real, and accessibility issues are one of the most common triggers. The fix is usually straightforward: scan your EPUB, identify the violations, apply the fixes, and re-upload.

The longer a suppressed book sits unfixed, the more sales momentum it loses. If you suspect your book has been affected, checking your EPUB's accessibility should be your first step.