Puzzles AlmanacPUZZLESALMANAC
Print SetSign in
Guard · a Publisher service for KDP authors

You get five days
to prove the book is yours

Anyone can file a copyright complaint against your title. Amazon does not investigate who is right — it asks you for documentation, and it starts a clock. Most authors find out that morning that everything they own could have been made the night before.

Guard issues the evidence in advance: a timestamped, independently verifiable record that your exact files existed under your name on a specific date.

Guard my first bookCheck a certificate
Inbox — 06:14
From
Kindle Direct Publishing
Subject
Action required: confirm your publishing rights

A review found interior or cover content in your book that is also “available from a different publisher.” Reply with documentation confirming that you hold the rights to the content.

5 days. Without documentation the title is made unavailable for sale.
Paraphrased from a real KDP notice. Wording varies. The deadline does not.
Already received the notice? Guard cannot backdate evidence, and we will not pretend otherwise. Here is what to do in the next five days — and how to cover the rest of your catalogue while you do.
The 5-day guide →
How a clean book gets blocked
The complaint

Anyone can file one

It costs the sender nothing and needs no court. Scrapers lift interiors and covers straight from the preview, republish them, and report the original as the copy. Being first is not something Amazon can see.

The response

Amazon does not investigate

It is not a court and does not try to be. A rights dispute it cannot settle becomes a request it can make: send documentation, or the title comes down while you sort it out.

The window

Five days is not time to build a case

It is only time to send one. Whatever evidence you have on the morning that email arrives is the evidence you are going to use.

The evidence gap

Most of what an author reaches for is evidence they could have made last night.

What you probably have
A manuscript file whose modified date you can change in ten seconds
A cloud folder that sits inside your own account, under your own control
A design project with an edit history you are free to rewrite
Your own word that you wrote it — which is exactly what the other side also has
What carries weight instead
A fingerprint of the exact file, so your copy is distinguishable from a re-export
A date nobody in the argument can move — not the other side, not you, not us
Storage that cannot be quietly rewritten once the dispute has started
A record the reviewer can check themselves, without taking your word or ours
What a Guard certificate is made of
SHA-256 per file

Every file you submit gets a cryptographic fingerprint. Change one pixel of the cover and the fingerprint changes. We record the fingerprints; your files themselves are never published.

A Bitcoin timestamp

Those fingerprints are gathered into one manifest and anchored into the Bitcoin blockchain through OpenTimestamps. Your date is fixed by a block, not by a row in our database.

Storage we cannot erase

Your files are held under a seven-year object lock. The key our own servers run on is not permitted to delete them — a system that writes the evidence must not be able to destroy it.

Your proof does not depend on us staying in business.

Download the proof file from your certificate, take it to opentimestamps.org — a site we do not run — and it verifies against Bitcoin with no Puzzles Almanac server alive. The subscription witnessing services cannot say that. When they close, their certificates quietly become PDFs.

NO SERVER REQUIREDBITCOIN ANCHOREDWORKSWITHOUT US
Do not take our word for it

Every certificate can be checked without us

A certificate has a public page and a downloadable proof. The reviewer needs no account, and the last step happens on somebody else's website.

01
Open the certificate page and download its proof file.
02
Drop it into opentimestamps.org, or run the OpenTimestamps client yourself.
03
It names the Bitcoin block the manifest was committed in, and the date of that block.
Holding a certificate?

If an author has sent you a reference and a verification password, look the record up directly. Nothing about it goes through them.

Verify a certificate
What lands in your hands

Not a concept — the attachments you put in the reply.

The certificate PDF

Reference, registrant name, issue date and every file fingerprint on one document a reviewer can read in twenty seconds.

A public verify link

Share it and the reviewer checks the record themselves — no account, no login, nothing routed back through you.

The manifest and proof

The exact bytes the timestamp commits to, so anyone technical can re-derive the whole chain from your files down to the block.

A deterrent badge

For your copyright page. The cheapest complaint to survive is the one nobody bothers to file — scrapers pick easier targets.

Letter drafts

A reply to the review team, a notice to the other party, a counter-notice. Drafted entirely in your browser — we never receive the other side's name.

Please read

The letters are drafting templates we wrote, not legal advice, and we are not your lawyers. For anything contested, take them to one.

Read this before you pay anyone, including us

What Guard does not do

It does not prove you wrote it

A timestamp proves that specific files existed, under your name, on a specific date. Authorship is a separate question, and no timestamp anywhere settles it.

It is not a copyright registration

It is evidence, not a government record. Copyright begins the moment you create an original work, and if a title is worth registering with a copyright office, register it — Guard sits alongside that, never instead of it.

It cannot promise an outcome

Every case is decided by Amazon's reviewer, not by us. Anyone guaranteeing you a result is selling something they do not control.

We would rather you learn the limits here, in a calm moment, than discover them on day three of a five-day window.

Why the date matters more than the product

A certificate is worth exactly
what its date is worth

Issued today, it proves today. Issued the week after someone reported you, it proves the week after someone reported you — and the other side will point that out. There is no retroactive version of this for sale anywhere, which is the entire reason to do it while nothing is wrong.

How to get it

There is no per-certificate price

Guard is not sold by the unit. Access comes with a seat in Royalty Guild — where the authors dealing with this are already comparing notes — and your first certificate is free when you arrive.

Step one
Your first book, free

Upload the interior and the cover, get the certificate. No card, no trial period, nothing to cancel. Pick the title you would least like to lose.

Sign in to start
Step two — the catalogue
Publisher access through the community

Members of Royalty Guild on Skool get Publisher access on the site — 2 certificates a month, enough to work steadily through a backlist.

See the community →
Step three — on a schedule
Premium seats

Premium members issue 5 a month — for authors publishing often enough that every new title should be witnessed the week it goes live.

The cheapest day to do this is any day before the email

One book, five minutes, no card. If the notice never comes, you have lost an afternoon. If it does, you already hold the one thing you cannot make later.

Guard my first book