This may sound like a big ask, but it’s a lot easier than calling up every bookseller around the country and begging them to stock your book. Indie authors have an equal chance of seeing their book rise in its category - as long as you can get pre-sales, sales, and user reviews (and you’re able to get people who land on your page to press the ‘buy’ button). It looks purely at data to determine - in its cold, calculated way - which books to put in front of more readers. It’s as if The Terminator worked at Barnes & Noble: the algorithm is a heartless book-selling machine that doesn’t get star-struck by big-name authors. Well, actually, that won’t always be the case!
Why is this good news? Won’t the algorithm just promote famous authors and big new releases? They let their algorithm decide which books to feature and promote. Where Apple Books, Kobo, and other online retailers have groups of humans who choose new titles to promote (or authors whose backlist they’ll feature), Amazon doesn’t care about merchandising. The Kindle Store is algorithm-driven, which is good news for indie authorsĪmazon’s book stores do not have a merchandising team. Some indie authors will spend a good part of their week managing their titles across a half-dozen retailers, only to find that the majority of their sales still come from one source: the Kindle store. One retail news site suggests that in the US, Amazon held an 83% market share of ebooks in 2019 - with the remaining 17% spread between its competitors. To be more accurate, it’s the largest bookstore in the world, period - though Amazon doesn’t quite have the same iron grip in non-English language book markets. Amazon is the largest bookstore in the English-speaking world
Instead, we’ll look at the edge Amazon and KDP has over its competitors, such as Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple Books. Those upsides are numerous and covered in great detail in our article comparing self-publishing and traditional publishing. To fully answer this question, we should clarify that we’re not talking about the benefits of independent publishing.
#Kindle direct publishing sign in how to
James ( Fifty Shades of Grey), Hugh Howey ( Wool), and Andy Weir ( The Martian).īesides, authors of niche genres have gained access to readers when, before, they would have been ignored by the traditional publishing model and struggled to find their readership in the early days of self-publishing.įor a closer look at how to set up an account on KDP, take a look at our guide on Amazon self-publishing.
This accessibility has led to multiple waves of bestselling authors who have found success through self-publishing, including E.L. Readers could now not only buy indie ebooks through but also through the Kindle store preloaded on all Kindle devices. Launched concurrently with Amazon’s ebook reader in 2007, KDP opened up the publishing world. Publishing is as simple as uploading a book, adding a few details, and hitting “go.” (Screenshot: ) It’s the most accessible platform for self-publishing authors. In a matter of hours, anybody can create an author account, upload their book files, and sell their book through Amazon - all without any setup cost. Everything else seems to be driven from how your account is configured.Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon’s publishing platform that allows independent authors to access readers around the world, without going through a traditional press.
So there's no "publishing it on KDP US vs not," there is only publishing it. There's a link over on the right hand side which will take me to the equivalent page on the Amazon.ca site, which will then allow me to buy the book. For example, when I'm in looking at an eBook, I can't buy it. People who want to buy your book will be required to go to the location associated with their account. When I go to publish a title (and I just setup #7 today for pre-order), I just setup the information, upload the content, and set the price in all the various marketplaces. After that is Amazon Marketplaces, that's where you'll see how you are going to get paid for each of the different marketplaces.įor my account, every marketplace states either EFT or cheque. This will bring you to a screen that has your address, and if you scroll down, you will a spot called Tax Information (make sure you've got a green checkmark there, if not, you have some work to do). After you log into KDP, click on upper right-hand link for your account, mine says "Adam's Account." I think what you're looking for firstly, is what marketplaces your KDP account is configured for. When I log into, it actually redirects me to. I've published 6 books so far on KDP, and I'm based out of Calgary.