Is Amazon KDP good for beginners?

There are plenty of helpful and not-so-helpful blogposts and videos out there on how to self-publish with Amazon KDP. I must have read and watched dozens, maybe hundreds, before I put my toes in the water of self publishing.

I thought I was pretty genned up, but there were things I learned along the way that the experts didn’t say. Or maybe they did and I just missed them.

So I’m sharing with you my first Amazon KDP journey to highlight some of the things I didn’t know I didn’t know, until I got there!

Why choose Amazon KDP?

I spent a lot of time going round in circles, reading reviews, working out what was the best platform for an absolute beginner.

Amazon KDP is worth it if you want to self-publish a book relatively easily, at a manageable cost. But if you plan to make large amounts of money, it may not be the best, unless you’re producing dozens of so called ‘low content’ books (with a unique selling point or you’ll get lost in the thousands of others).

For fiction, produced by a human, the rewards are less financial, more personal.

And if your genre is short stories then a traditional publishing route may be hard to achieve. Most traditionally published collections are by authors who are already well established. Short fiction is popular with readers, but agents and publishing houses need to know there’s more in an author’s tank before they’ll take the risk.

In the end I went for Amazon KDP because of its huge, global reach and comparative ease of use.

How user-friendly is Amazon KDP?

I found the interface easy to navigate and clear. Uploading files was straightforward but then I ran into all sorts of techy snags and hiccups that made the process slower than I expected.

Should you use Amazon KDP’s own tools?

I went about things my own sweet way, using Word to format the book then turning it into a pdf.
That took a lot of time, trial and error and I couldn’t have done it without the help of my partner who is a bit of a perfectionist and frankly loves fiddling about with things. If it were just me, I’d have thrown in the towel and paid someone to format it for me!

For the cover I had an idea of what I wanted, but no concept of how to go about it. And, with the inside all my own, original work, I didn’t want an AI generated cover.

So I commissioned a designer to produce a front cover for the eBook and a front, spine and back cover for the printed book, again supplied as a pdf.

I didn’t use Amazon’s own resources like Kindle Create for formatting the text, or their Cover Creator programme.

I did take a look at them but felt they were a bit restrictive and would make my book look a lot like everyone else’s. So I ploughed on, independently.

I have a feeling that if I had used Amazon’s bespoke tools, the process might have been a bit easier.

eBooks are easy!

After my experience I can now see why so many authors opt to produce only an eBook version.

But, despite trends towards digitalization, a survey in 2021 showed that 68% of younger readers (18 to 29-year-olds) in the U.S. prefer print books. In the UK in 2021, fiction in print outsold e-books, and this increased in 2022 with a 5% growth in print versus a 10% decline for e-books.

eBooks are here to stay and Amazon’s Kindle currently dominates the e-reader market, holding a substantial 72% share. And they are relatively easy to format and produce a cover for.

But for personal reasons I wanted a paperback version too.

And that’s when things got a bit tricky.

It took several goes to get the sizing and position just right, even using the helpful Preview tool, and the paper choices, trim size and bleed margins took a few goes to get exactly right.

Then, just when I thought everything was fine, my book was rejected because … it didn’t have a barcode.

Why you must have a barcode on Amazon KDP

I bought my own ISBN numbers, as I plan to publish several more books and might, in future, wish to publish on another platform.

All my research suggested that a barcode was only necessary if you were planning to sell in shops, which was not the case for this, my first book.

So I assumed, as my book was being sold via Amazon, all I needed was the ISBN number on the back cover (one for the eBook, one for the paperback).

WRONG!

Amazon KDP will not publish a print book without a barcode – either one you have generated and placed on the back yourself, or one they add when the book is printed.

And, of course, my beautiful back cover had words where the barcode was going to be!

Back to my very patient designer. I could have asked him to generate a barcode, but by this time I was beginning to get the idea that KDP approves what KDP makes, so I opted to let Amazon do it’s thing.

After that, and a few minor tweaks to the sub title and descriptions – because a computer reviews the book and rejects things that a human being would say, ‘Oh I see what you want there, that’s fine!’ – and it was good to go.

Published – at last!

Lessons I’ve learned publishing my first book with Amazon KDP

It’s too soon to say how well my book will do on Amazon. Right now I’m focusing on getting reviews, before promoting it more widely – but I am planning another three short story collections and will probably, definitely, maybe use Amazon KDP again.

Here are a few things I’ve learned for next time:

• Get your manuscript exactly how you want it first.
• Make sure your description, title and sub title exactly match – no typos or discrepancies!
• Set trim size, paper, margins, gutters etc before even thinking about the cover.
• Once you’re sure the inside is perfect, commission a designer for the cover (or use KDP’s Cover Creator if you don’t mind generic styles, and have the eye to fiddle about with visual things).
• Leave plenty of room on the back page for the barcode.

That bloody barcode!

Happy writing (and publishing).

Oh, and you can buy my books here.