KDP Books Unavailable To International Readers Amazon

A situation blew up at Amazon over the weekend which is ghosting most KDP ebooks (and many Amazon imprint titles) for international readers who use the US Kindle Store — which has also exposed a glaring security problem. Amazon appears to be unaware of either issue.

This issue — which is either a bug or a very badly bungled roll-out — is causing great confusion as its effects are only visible to those outside the USA, which might explain why Amazon has been so slow to address it, or even understand the problem, it seems.

The first reports of this issue were from a few weeks ago when Australian readers who use the US Kindle Store were unable to see a handful of new releases. It seems to have spread significantly since then. This weekend I noticed the issue myself for the first time. Buy buttons had disappeared from a couple of my ebooks and they were no longer appearing in Search results or on my Author Page. It was as if they had been ghosted. Read More…

The Birth of the Kindle Amazon Writing

The 10th birthday of the Kindle was on Sunday, which has been met with all sorts of retrospectives. Getting less coverage is that it’s also the tenth anniversary of Amazon’s self-publishing platform. In this excerpt from the forthcoming third edition of Let’s Get Digital, I argue that the real revolution is something else again which is also ten years’ old this month: the Kindle Store itself, which didn’t just open up publishing by allowing anyone to sell their books, it also democratized which books get recommended. I’ll be posting in more detail about the launch, and the two books on marketing which will follow. Digital 3 won’t be available as a free update like last time, as that caused way too Read More…

15 Ways To Improve KDP – Progress Report Publishing

The London Book Fair is underway again which makes it a perfect time to review the list of suggestions I presented to KDP last year. As regular readers will know, I crowd-sourced a list of feature requests, bug fixes, and common problems via my blog and the most popular self-publisher hangout, Kboards. The KDP reps at the Fair spent a great deal of time going through your list of suggestions. They asked for clarification at various points and I was able to follow up with them by email afterwards. At the same time, a parallel effort led by Marie Force, Laura Florand, and Diana Peterfreund presented a similar list of suggestions at NINC in October last year. There were probably Read More…

15 Ways Amazon Can Improve Kindle Direct Publishing Amazon Marketing Publishing

At the London Book Fair in April, I had the opportunity to meet representatives from Amazon and present a list of feature requests and complaints (from the comments of this post with an assist from KBoards). I spent quite a bit of time going through the list and felt that everything got a fair hearing. Amazon said that a lot of this stuff is in the pipeline in one form or another (although judgement will have to be reserved until we see how it’s implemented) and the rest of the issues and feature requests would be passed along to the relevant department. This isn’t the full list I presented, but it’s the issues I’d like to focus on today: 1. More Read More…

Making Money From Writing, Part 3: Sales Channels

For the last two days we looked at the various markets where you can sell your short stories and novels. Yesterday we covered the reasons why you should be cautious before you self-publish your work. Today we are going to look at the various sales channels where you can sell you self-published stories: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, Apple, Diesel, and Xinxii. You should be publishing on all of them. It requires very little work once you have done your formatting, and if you don’t you are cutting your sales for no good reason.
https://davidgaughran.com/tag/kindle-direct-publishing/
davidgaughran.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-09
67882
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JC4KSN6A4XC4BBUYDQUTVJ6OIFXO2UYO
<urn:uuid:48439136-c726-4336-81af-8587b6c352c6>
2019-02-19T14:29:55Z
159.65.164.51
text/html
sha1:QPKP4RYH4IL6DK76VG5POG7NWKXGPFOI
<urn:uuid:0dd53ced-d66f-486d-a944-6d10898f8d91>
https://davidgaughran.com/tag/kindle-direct-publishing/
response
<urn:uuid:b2ae356d-2199-42d4-b51a-edd0883b8669>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-09
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-145-232-247.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/