Tag: Amazon KDP

Are You Sure the Description of Your Book at Amazon Is Your Latest One?

Guest post
by Sylvia Engdahl

Did you know that people who view your Kindle book during your promotion may not be seeing its current description? If your book has been available for some time and you have revised its description in Author Central without also revising it on its KDP page, they’re not.

Although we were told in the past that the KDP description is not used if a description has ever been entered in Author Central — and some books about Kindle promotion still say this — Amazon has changed its system. The KDP description now overrides whatever was done in Author Central if any change at all is made through KDP, including price or categories. Continue reading “Are You Sure the Description of Your Book at Amazon Is Your Latest One?”

Amazon’s New Series Pages

amazon book series
Is this really a useful tool?

Last year, Smashwords introduced a neat tool called Series Manager which allows authors to link books in the same series together for better discoverability. Well guess what? Amazon has now done the same thing. Supposedly. But not quite. Frankly – not at all.

To be perfectly honest, Smashwords outguns Amazon with this feature – by a longshot. I’ll explain why in a minute. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty first.

Unfortunately, there is a catch, the same as with Smashwords. If you have books that are in a series which are both self-published and published through a press (which uses a different KDP account), you cannot link those together yourself. You can only link the books under your control through your KDP account. To do that, go to your KDP Bookshelf (dashboard) Continue reading “Amazon’s New Series Pages”

Black Magic – Making your book perma-free on Kindle

Simon GoodsonGuest Post
by Simon Goodson

There’s something strange going on with free Kindle books. You can use KDP Select to make your book free, but only for 5 days every quarter. Yet some books are free day after day, week after week – what is known as perma-free.

Here, in theory, is how to make your book perma-free on Amazon…

a) Publish your book on kindle.
b) Publish the same e-book through another online retailer with the price set to free.
c) Tell Amazon that you’ve found the book at a lower price. Go to the books Amazon page, then to Product Details (third section down). The last line ends with a link titled “tell us about a lower price.
d) Amazon checks the information you provided, then lowers the book’s price to zero.

Easy isn’t it? Well, not quite that easy. There are a few gotchas… Continue reading “Black Magic – Making your book perma-free on Kindle”