KDP - Keep Discovering Your Potential!
Everyone is talking about the new KDP UPDATES AND CHANGES ! The what?
Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon's publishing platform which allows authors and publishers to publish their books to the Amazon Kindle Store.
KDP has a new clean fresh look which is easy to use and shows that Amazon is taking your career as an author seriously! If you are selling any of your books on Amazon, you need an author page. This is a great way to brand yourself as an author. You can direct your followers to your author page.
First off, the author page is much more organised and tighter. A potential buyer can see info 'about the author' and the books are displayed in a much nicer way . You can even see which books are the most popular
RIGHT! So sign in and go to your author page. Let's take a look
1. 'One or More of your Quality items need to be addressed'
This is a great housekeeping and maintenance feature! Readers can flag up like ‘errors’ or things they don’t like which could be anything from typos to spelling. As the author, you may have made a grammatical mistake which needs changing or it might be a conscious style choice so review these manually as maintenance. Click on VIEW ITEMS and address these items as either mistakes or deliberate choices. If you have too many which go unchecked, KDP may pull your book or give it a quality warning.
2. Title Archiving Now Available
A great dashboard clean up! You can now remove any old versions of your book that you don’t want to keep, projects which never got published or pre-orders which got cancelled
3. Kindle Vella Option
Sorry! Only for those in the USA. First of all.. What Is Kindle Vella? Kindle Vella is a serialized reading platform where writers can release stories in short episodes. The platform was launched by Amazon in April 2021, and it is currently available only to those in the U.S. Each episode on Kindle Vella can range from 500–6,000 words If you just want to blog for yourself and close friends, you can set your blog for private access but if you actively want to engage with your readers and general public, you can set the blog for public access.
4. New Marketing Resource Page
On this page you see
> enroll in KDP select (KDP Select is a free program, open to all authors willing to give Amazon exclusive rights to their book for 90 days. By enrolling in the program, you get access to promotional tools and the opportunity to earn higher royalties)
> Amazon ads
> A + content – relatively new feature where you can ad banners and illustrations, reviews over picture backgrounds so you can really customise your Amazon page and have a unique style
> Run a price promotion
> Author Central
From author central, choose a market place ie. Amazon.com or amazon.co.uk then click on manage author page. This takes you to your Author Central Page
Click on the Reports and Marketing page, you can now see your followers on your dashboard and customise your Amazon page with illustrations, images and reviews
!!! New to Author Central: Amazon Followers
Understand your reach by seeing the number of customers who follow you on Amazon.
!!!New to Author Central: Book recommendations
Connect with your readers by adding book recommendations to help them decide what to read next.
· 1) Amazon followers
Followers – you need 20+ before you can activate this feature but experts are not quite sure how this works. You cannot contact your followers direct but Amazon can sometimes send out a new book release or pre order release to your followers. This feature does not directly boost your sales rank
T&C’s are rather vague – up to the discretion of Amazon to send out notifications only so long as your followers have signed up fto receive marketing emails
· 2) Book recommendations
You can tell your readers more about your books
- My most talked about book is..
- The book I wish more readers knew about is…
- If you are new to my work, I suggest you read…
- If you want to get lost in a story, I recommend…
You can also recommend books by other authors. At the moment, you can only choose 3.
Check out the T&C’s such as:-
Email notifications can be sent to followers if you submit at least three new recommendations.
What does this mean? Amazon want to boost their book recommendation feature so it’s like a special offer to those authors who already have their Amazon author page set up. Amazon is saying that may send out an alert to your followers
This feature could be useful to direct people to books which are similar to yours and potentially in driving traffic to your Amazon page
· 3) Sales rank
See your titles’ Amazon Best Seller Rank.
4) Bookscan Weekly Sales Report
The Bookscan feature seems alittle lacking. It does not take into account ebooks or audio books However you can use Book Report which is the best way for indie authors and publishers to track their sales data
Book Report automatically fetches your latest sales numbers and turns them into simple, insightful reports. We don't ask for your password, and your sales data is always fully encrypted, so you can have peace of mind that your data is safe.
What’s has been removed?
The blog feature – feed to your latest blog has been removed but other Amazon platforms may still be displaying your blog
Changes tend to happen on the US site then are rolled out to other Amazon sites
In short, the whole Amazon author page has been freshened up and redesigned for a better author experience. It is clearer and more concise with added features such as being able to see your followers, being able to customise your Amazon page with illustrations, images and reviews.
Be creative - You can use emojis on your author page. and top left there is a drop down where you can have several pen names with its own set of titles
Have fun with your page and use it to promote your books!