Episode: 248: Amazon Rules You Might Not Know

This week on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing an unscripted episode where Fable talks about lessons she’s learned the hard way by using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

Over the last year, we’ve done a wide range of topics — from writing about disabilities to writing with empathy —that took a lot of energy and preparation. We’ve also been doing this podcast for almost 5 years and as we near our 250th episode we felt it would be good to do a series of episodes getting back to our roots of how this first began — through unplanned conversations about life, books, and the writing craft. So, for the next few episodes we’re continuing to see where our conversations take us, without planning in advance what we’ll talk about.

In this conversation, Fable unpacks some advice she’s gleaned through her personal experience and through some helpful resources like Kindlepreneur.com about some mistakes that can be made when using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) that could lead to errors or even your account being removed. Things like:

  • Making sure your cover reflects the same title, subtitle, and author name that you’ve listed on your Amazon page. This goes against Amazon’s rules and has the potential to lead to your account being deactivated.

  • The Amazon metadata rules note that you are not supposed to put copyrighted and trademarked words in as keywords, not even the phrase kindle unlimited or comp titles. This error has the potential to lead to your account being deactivated.

  • Double check that your paperback subtitle matches your eBook, because after it is submitted the paperback subtitle can’t be edited.

  • Ensure there isn’t a space after the title or subtitle, or any extra spaces. This could lead to an error where the ISBN details don’t match the title and the Amazon system throws a non-descript error message keeping the book from being published.

Throughout this conversation, Fable advised proactively seeking out resources such as Kindleprenuer and checking in with the self-publishing community at large to learn what issues others are seeing and experiencing and to better understand the things to look out for that could impact your ability to sell books on Amazon.

We hope you enjoy this episode and the more improvisational format of this series and that some of this connects with your own journey!

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

During this conversation, Fable shares information about the resource Kindlepreneur, which is run by Dave Chesson and information can be found on the Kindlepreneur.com website and @Kindlepreneur YouTube channel.   

The specific Kindleprenuer YouTube video she references is “KDP Termination Problem (AI Content?)”
and the Kindleprenuer article “Amazon KDP Account Suspension: Causes, Prevention, and Solutions” digs a little further into this issue with additional advice and tips. He also suggests reading through Amazon’s Metadata Guidelines for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to familiarize yourself with the detailed guidelines.

Music from:https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Bethany Stedman