Independent Authors Beware

As an independent author, I have relied on Amazon’s KDP publishing programs and used their Author Central page to advertise and promote my books. For this, I am grateful. Without it, no one would ever have heard of Kate McVaugh, nor have read any of my books. Now it seems, that may no longer be the case.
A few weeks ago I noticed that not all of my eight books were showing up on my Author’s Page. Things occasionally go wonky in the tech world, so I let it go.
Then a few days ago I noticed that it had gotten much worse. Maybe three books would show up across the banner on my Author’s Page. Below that, where all my books had previously been listed, only a few were visible. This was not good.
I wrote to Amazon Author Central, the department in charge, expecting to hear back that it was all down to a slight technical problem. This was their devastating reply.
***
Greetings from the Author Central team!

Please note that that is no mistake or error. It is a new design of Author Pages which our developers made called Top Picks (which changes from customer to customer-including yourself- and it will change constantly based on your shopping behaviors and each customer's shopping behaviors).

The Top Picks feature allows Amazon customers to see personalized recommendations from your catalog of books. Customers will see this on your Author Page and it will suggest books based on these traits:

• New releases and pre-order books matching their interest.
• Unread books from a series they started.
• The customer’s reading and purchase history.

The goal is to help them find more books they want to read from you. Each customer will have a different recommendation, including you, if you’re logged into your Amazon account.

Author Pages currently support the “Top Picks” feature in the US and UK marketplaces.

Since this feature is updated based on customer shopping habits and changes frequently to reflect current buying patterns, I'm not able to modify it.

While changes to the feature are not possible, I hope this information better explains the way the feature works on our website.

Thank you for using Amazon Author Central”
***
Were I some controversial, well-known author, this would not be a surprise. Amazon has been playing around with such authors for a few years now. But I am not famous. Added to that, there is not one controversial topic in any of my fiction writing. True, my blog posts might possibly be a bit more on the provocative meter, but no one really reads my essays. I’m lucky if one hundred people a week dip into my blog.
FULL POST HERE