Amazon launched Kindle Direct Publishing back in 2007 to allow authors and publishers alike to publish their books to the Amazon Kindle Store. This platform offers several tools and functions to create professional books on your own, and it also has many distribution, printing, and marketing resources for printed and electronic books.
In this article, we will dive into some of the most common mistakes people make when self-publishing a book on Amazon, why they happen, and how to avoid them.
1 – Not Setting an Adequate Price Range for Your Book
A frequent error when publishing your book on Amazon is choosing the wrong price range for your book. This especially happens because it requires a whole set of skills that is different from editing a book. We should never think that the price range is arbitrary; in fact, it affects not only the market penetration capacity of our book but also the percentage of royalties that we can get from its purchase.
Choosing a price range that is too high can discourage interested buyers from meeting new authors. On the other hand, one of Amazon’s requirements regarding their prices is that, to get 70% of royalties for the sale of each copy, your book needs to cost around $2.99 and $9.99. This limit can reduce the total from which your margin will be worked out, but it will help other users to purchase your book.
2 – Not Following Amazon KDP’s Publishing Guidelines and Format
Amazon KDP has its own publishing guidelines to guarantee that the process is smooth for authors, editors, and editing services companies (for eBooks, and paperback books). One of the most common mistakes that we usually find when self-publishing on Amazon is not following these guides and not applying the adequate format to the manuscript.
Some of the main issues are having unaligned texts, sudden page breaks, inconsistent margins, and spacing issues. This happens because, when you prepare your book on Microsoft Word (the most common Amazon KDP format), the software often doesn’t apply the format variations correctly. There are two ways to avoid these issues in your book:
- The first one is to download the specific Amazon KDP templates for Word with the design guidelines already applied.
- The second one is to download the Kindle Previewer or Kindle Create softwares to previsualize your book with the correct format applied to different devices.
3 – Not Creating an Amazon KDP Table of Contents
Another common mistake is not creating a table of contents for your book. This issue can affect the book’s reading experience, especially when you’re dealing with a technical book or a really long one in which navigation of its content is fundamental.
This problem usually happens when you don’t follow Amazon’s guidelines to create a table of contents, which consists of creating a table of contents in Word or a Kindle interactive table of contents on Kindle Create. When this issue arises, internal links may not work and the user will have to navigate the book manually. For this reason, it is important to use Kindle Previewer or Kindle Creator to verify that all links from the table of contents work and that all bookmarks are linked to the right sections.
4 – Not Verifying If the Format Was Applied to the Whole Book
Even though we already mentioned it, this issue deserves its own section: for many years, editors have been making an effort to carry out a thorough editing process so that the end result is optimal. Today, authors who self-publish are lucky enough to be able to verify the end result as much as they see fit before publishing their book.
A common mistake when doing this is not previewing the book before uploading it to Amazon. Amazon KDP tools allow us to see what the book will look like once it is finished, across different formats and devices. Thanks to this, it’s possible to verify that the format guidelines have been uploaded correctly (margins, spacing, indents, page breaks, and the position and size of images), and that all hyperlinks work.
5 – Not Uploading Files in the Correct Size
A last mistake has to do with the file size. The total size of a manuscript can be up to 650 MB, either in .DOC, .DOCX, .MOBI, .EPUB, .HTML or .PDF. There’s no problem with an only-text file (the cover is uploaded separately and doesn’t add to the 650 MB). However, a book with video, audio, or images (photos, illustrations, or tables) can be too heavy, and slow down not only the uploading process—and even prevent it—but also the downloading process and, therefore, affect the reading experience.
Amazon recommends reducing the size of the eBook file by reducing the size of the image, video, and audio files it may include. Kindle books allow .JPEG and .GIF file formats. Therefore, other larger-size formats will be compressed as .JPEG during the upload. For this reason, it is better to format images ourselves before uploading the eBook, so that they keep the size and resolution we want (at least 300 dpi —dots per inch— is advisable).
Conclusion
We made it to the end! Hopefully, this article has helped you if you want to publish through Amazon KDP, a platform that gives many opportunities to authors. If you’ve found any other common mistake we haven’t included, leave us a comment and we’ll try to find the solution together.
If you’re still struggling with Amazon KDP, we can help you out! Our services include publishing your books on Amazon in Europe and the United States for you. Contact us to learn how!
Translated by @paulanaominakagawa
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