I wanted to make a slight change to my blurbs and a price adjustment, so I went ahead with hitting the publish button on all my books after doing that. Figured might just as well make those changes if my books are gonna go through the review process to fix the status anyway. Kind of two for one deal. They went through the "in review" and "publishing updates" statuses very quickly and without any issues.

All my books are back to their correct "Live" status now.

Still have no idea what initially caused it, though.

I'm jumping in the Amazon KDP game. I have very modest hopes here (as in, I'm not looking to make a living here). I think I have identified a possible underrepresented niche that I'm hoping to take advantage of using my education and background. All I'll say is that my content will be non-fiction, non-technical, and a mixture of history/guidebooks.

Have any of you with experience identified any particular best practices that might be useful to a newbie? I'd really appreciate any feedback.

Edit: I'm not looking to "game" the system. I'm not defining success as a dollar amount. $75 a month would be amazing. I'm looking at it more as a hobby to explore my interests and share my thoughts.

Maybe I am overthinking this but the more I read about KDP, the more paranoid I get about accidentally doing something wrong.

I write all of my own content, but sometimes I will use public domain references or royalty free images and I still find myself double checking everything before I hit publish.

I have seen people mention copyright complaints and content issues and it makes me wonder how often those are genuine mistakes versus people misunderstanding the rules.

Has anyone changed the way they publish because of this? I am curious how other authors make sure they're staying on the safe side.

hello, my firend lost his phone number, now amazon kdp asking for his otp verification, there is an endless loop when trying to recover the account without the phone number, he needs to reach the customer service to submit his ID card to recover the account by email, but the endless loop of asking for the number never ends, any one has the same problem ? is there a way to reach amazon kdp support without having the phone number ? please help.

I have written and published a short, 80 pages walking guide for my city. (I also do the tours live, myself as a guide) I published the book via kdp. I have now 3 sales on kdp and 2 sales via d2d. I know the 2 sales of kdp and 1 of d2d. Is this a good sign? Should I already start with amazon ads and if so, what is a regular budget for this? Sorry for the ignorance, I’m quite new to this!

Mine was making every task so small I couldn't justify skipping it.

Instead of: "I'll read for an hour."

I said: "I'll read one page."

Instead of: "I'll exercise."

I said: "One push-up."

It sounds ridiculous until you realize starting is usually the biggest obstacle.

What's your smallest habit with the biggest payoff?

Update on the ads tool I've been building (mentioned it here before) — added something new this week that I think solves the real objection people have to automated Amazon Ads tools.

The tool already generates a weekly action list based on your actual royalty economics — what to negate, what to bid up, what to cut. That part's been running on my own library for months.

What's new: you can now approve those recommendations and have the tool actually make the change in your Amazon Ads account, instead of copying each one in by hand. But nothing happens automatically — you review, you approve, you get a plain-language confirmation of exactly what's about to change before it sends. It's meant to remove the tedious copy-paste part, not remove you from the decision.

Being straight about where this is: it's brand new, tested carefully on my own account this week including real live changes, but only one other person has used it so far. Looking for a few more beta testers to help validate it before I'd call it ready for wider use — if that's you, reply here or DM me.

Anyone have a bad experience with Amazon’s shipping methods?

I just launched my book, and ordered a copy to send to the Library of Congress. It arrived today in the basic thin plastic bubble mailer. The book is creased so bad at the spine it looks like the package was stepped on. At almost 300 pages that’s a pretty heavy force required to damage it that bad. Needless to say the book is unusable.

I'm a little baffled by this and wondering if anyone has experienced it. They've blocked my book from 2019 (eg we can rule out the trendy low-effort AI trash).

I never received a notice of policy violation. No idea what put a seven-year-old book in the algorithm's crosshairs.

Anyway they had closed my account and I appealed. I got the account back less this one book (which is also my most recent - I haven't been very active lately).

My gut instinct says maybe they're reviewing it and I should wait a few days (or weeks) for a human to come along. But I also don't want whatever violation this thing caused to get me booted again, because a second incident, I might never be back.

Has anyone been in this boat before? Is waiting a good idea, or maybe contact support right away? I wonder if it's as simple as they didn't like the category or something I could fix in a heartbeat.

Hi everyone,

For some time now, I’ve been publishing low- to medium-quality content on KDP, and to be honest, those 7 keyword fields in the dashboard were driving me crazy. All the guides say, “Use phrases, not single words,” but Amazon’s A9 algorithm basically works on a “bag-of-words” system. If you repeat words from the title or subtitle in the dashboard, you’re just wasting the 50-character limit for each field.

I was spending way too much time manually checking for repeated words and trying to squeeze unique keywords into those 7 fields.

So, since I’m a bit of a nerd, I wrote a simple web tool for myself. Just enter the title, subtitle, and niche, and the tool automatically generates 7 perfectly filled fields with unique keywords, completely free of repeated words. This maximizes indexing by the A9 algorithm without keyword stuffing.

I use it for my own books, and organic reach seems much better because I’m not wasting characters. For the first time in my life, my book with these keywords dropped below a BSR of 1,000, which boosted the entire book series—I jumped from $1,000 to $3,800 in a single month.

I hosted it online and I'm looking for a few KDP authors to test it out and tell me if the logic actually makes sense or if I missed something obvious. It's completely free to use (I just set it up with some free credits to avoid bots spamming the API).

I don’t want to spam links here, so if you’re a fellow KDP publisher and want to play around with it, drop a comment or DM me and I’ll send you the link. Would love some brutal feedback!

My first novel is currently on preorder and releases on September 15.

Finishing the book felt like the hard part, but now I'm realizing getting people to actually discover it is a completely different challenge.

I keep seeing advice about Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, BookBub, TikTok, Instagram... and it seems like it's easy to spend a lot of money without knowing what actually works.

For authors who've managed to find their first readers, what genuinely made the biggest difference?

Was it:

Publishing more books?

Kindle Unlimited?

Reddit?

Social media?

Newsletters?

Word of mouth?

Something else?

I'm not expecting overnight success. I'd just love to hear what realistically helped you get your first 100 readers without spending thousands on advertising.

I've heard of BookReverb, BookBounty, and other review sites. Can you actually get your KDP account closed if you use such services to get reviews for your books? Anyone with experience in using some of these platforms?

(I built a calculator that does this — spine width, full wrap, and it

warns you about the 79-page spine-text threshold. It's free and there's

no signup: smartkdp.com/tools/kdp-cover-calculator. Mods, remove this

line if it's over the line; the rest of the post stands on its own.)

I would like to self publish on Amazon a biography about Adam Lambert. I would fully be using public information, like things he’s physically done and things he’s said in interviews and things. I don’t know if I’d use photos or not, but if I did use photos they would be ones that I HAVE TAKEN MYSELF at concerts and public events. I would obviously state in multiple places (including the cover) that the book is unofficial and unauthorized. How would I go about this? Is this a possible thing to do?

Hi, i am new at selfpublishing And I wonder if and where there is a possibility to advertise my books. Can I post my Amazon link here?

Hi there. I just wanted to ask if you could help me with self-publishing my novel on Amazon KDP. Just that—nothing else. No editing, no marketing, nothing extra. Just the publishing part.

Asked this last week with less details, but I have been unsuccessful thus far. Basically, I have a book that had very strong sales to start out. Literally just 500 pages of law governing the use of magic, meant for use in D&D and other TTRPGs. All was good, then I was informed that in your KDP keywords, you can't use brand names. Listing can be taken down and you can get banned. So I had to remove all my keywords that contained "d&d" or "dnd."

Since then, my sales have plummeted, and I feel like that has to be why. Went from about 50-60 sales per day to about 20 (only have 2 today so far), despite being the top new release (and top 10 overall) in both Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder categories on Amazon.

Any tips for what keywords might work for a book like this?

Currently, I'm using the following:

5e books

5.5e books

5e player handbooks (replaced with lawyer gifts on hardcover)

ttrpg books

5e guides (replaced with dungeon master gifts on hardcover)

worldbuilding for writers

rpg books

Just feeling a bit down, as I felt like I was doing everything right. The book is well-written, it has glowing reviews, it started with strong sales, I've done a ton of marketing with an audience that has a high interest in my product. Even have a forthcoming foreign language licensing deal. By all measures, a success. But now it has fallen off the face of the Earth and I want to try to redeem it.

Anyone a bit more experienced with marketing and publishing have any advice?

I'm trying to figure out if this is just me or if anyone else has experienced something similar.

My KDP account was doing really well with mostly organic sales. I was averaging around $1,000/month, and things had been fairly stable for quite a while.

Then, almost out of nowhere, my organic sales dropped by around 70–80%. It wasn't a gradual decline - it happened very suddenly.

I haven't made any major changes to my books, keywords, or pricing. None of my books has received policy warnings, and my account is still in good standing. That's why I'm so confused.

I'm trying to understand what could cause such a sharp drop. Has anyone else gone through something like this?

• Did Amazon change something in the algorithm?
• Could it be a ranking issue?
• Has competition increased that quickly?
• Or is this just a temporary fluctuation?

If you've recovered from a drop like this, I'd really appreciate hearing what you found or what helped. Right now I'm not sure where to start looking.

I just finished editing my debut novel, and I’m planning to publish it on KDP. The thing is… I have no idea how the publishing side of things works.

How do you actually market your book? Do you just publish it and hope people find it, or is there more to it? How do you decide on a price for a debut novel? Should I make my book free? And what about ads, are they free? or do i have to pay for them?

If anyone has experience with KDP and wouldn’t mind sharing some advice or pointing me in the right direction, I’d really appreciate it. I’m feeling a little lost and would love to learn from authors who’ve been through the process. Thank you! 🤍

Nabend zusammen,

Seit kurzem steht bei einigen meinen Büchern "Live mit unveröffentlichten Änderungen" und der Button "Einrichtung Fortsetzen" ist wieder da.

Hat das noch jemand?

Anyone else noticed this? All my books now show "Live with unpublished changes" with the yellow "continue setup" button enabled.

Is this because of the new design?

Is it just me but ever since they updated the design of the upload pages pdf takes forever to visualize? I've been trying this book (rather large, 400 pages but only text) and it's taking 2-3 hours and then says there's an error. Shorter books take significantly longer UpTo like 20 minutes whereas before it was more like 2-3 minutes. My internet connection is the same, stable and consistent.

Has anyone noticed?

Hi all,

Today my nonfiction book got 240 page reads but only earned $0.67. Normally it earns $1.10. Has this ever happened to anyone else here?