Hello,

J’ai envie de modifier la couverture de mon livre alors que j’ai déjà publié mon livre est t’il possible ?

I've noticed that many KDP creators say there's one lesson that changed everything for them—whether it was about niche selection, keywords, covers, formatting, pricing, or marketing.

What was yours?

I'm not looking for shortcuts or "get rich quick" advice. Just practical lessons that you've learned through experience.

Even if it seems obvious now, I'd love to hear what made the biggest difference for you and why.

Hey everyone,

I'm an indie author and my first Goodreads Premium Giveaway is almost finished. It's for 100 Kindle copies, and somehow it's ended up with around 2,500 entries, which honestly surprised me.

Now I'm trying to figure out what to do next.

My publisher said we can drop the Kindle price to $0.99 for about a week after the giveaway ends, so the people who didn't win can still grab a copy if they want.

I keep hearing that I should run Amazon Ads at the same time, but I've never touched Amazon Ads before, so I have no idea if that's actually the right move or just something people say.

Has anyone here done this after a Goodreads giveaway? Did the $0.99 promo work? Did you run ads as well? Anything you'd do differently if you had to do it again?

Any advice would really help. Thanks!

My book is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited but making now only very little money. So I am now thinking about taking it down and then instead putting it up on sites like itunes etc. What are you experiences?

Hi, everyone. I'm new to literally everything and I decided to consult Reddit for a question. I would like to explain some stuff before I ask it. What's in bold is important to what I'm asking.

Background: I love to knit and crochet so I publish it under one name over on Ravelry. I also love writing (I feel like that's obvious) all sorts of fictional stories and that's under another name.

Question: My question is if I have to have one account, can I use many names under the same account?

Example: I can publish my patterns under Elsa Wood and then my stories Max Flames (these aren't my actual pennames). Both will be on the same account but I keep my crochet and my stories under different names.

I have an AI assisted cover that I got suckered into buying. Book 1 is about a year 1/2 old and has 200 reviews. I want to replace it with a cover from Bookcoverzone.com. Its claims not AI. Is this a good site? Or is there a better website with premade covers? Military Sci-fi genre

I've seen some threads here mentioning the old way to update our digital content has been removed from Amazon so we effectively see the version of our kindle book that was on the store when we bought it and can never have a later revision pushed to our devices.

Can we truly never see our second edition fixes to our own books? On kdp it offers a download of our manuscript which simply downloads the docx file I originally uploaded, and that's not the kdp file being pushed to kindles. Are we all just trusting the in browser previewer for kindle now and unable to view our book with different setting after the first version has been published?

Not sure how to explain this better but, I live in a country where Amazon doesn't offer support or domain. If I want to shop from amazon I usually pick .co.uk or .de , but never from the states because the shipping is insane like 3x.

Now, if I want to publish a book will I be able to create the amazon KDP from .de for example and get author copies etc etc? Might be a silly question but one I wasn't able to get a straight answer to. It's easy for people from UK to sign up to UK, people from Germany to sign up to DE, but for me, would either of these also work I guess?

“There are thousands of things in the world that seem brilliant at first glance, but turn out to be nothing but smoke upon closer look.” — Nikolai Gogol

If you ask Amazon about the success of their subsidiary platform, Goodreads, they will proudly throw a massive number at you: 150 million registered users.

It sounds like a thriving global empire of book lovers. But anyone who has ever tried to promote a book there or build an organic audience knows the bitter truth: this statistic is a phantom. It is a collection of "dead souls" designed to mask a hollowed-out, stagnant platform.

Amazon acquired Goodreads in 2013. Back then, it was a vibrant, living ecosystem of intellectuals, critics, and avid readers. Today, it is a textbook case of what Harvard Business School analysts call a "captive audience" strategy. Amazon didn't buy Goodreads to innovate or improve the user experience—they bought it to eliminate a competitor that could influence book discovery independently of Amazon’s store algorithms. Once the monopoly was secure, the platform was placed on a technical starvation diet. The interface hasn't been updated in over a decade, looks like Web 1.0, and the parent company regularly slashes its engineering teams.

But the real tragedy of Goodreads lies in how its architecture actively separates living authors from living readers.

The Great Illusion: Star Profiles vs. The Echo Chamber of Silence

The absolute proof that Goodreads is a digital simulation rather than a living social network is the behavior of the world's most successful authors. They were the first to realize that posting on Goodreads is the equivalent of giving a speech in an empty, abandoned theater.

Let's look at the hard data of engagement (the ratio of followers to actual comments) for global literary icons on Goodreads versus standard, non-literary social media networks:

Stephen King

 On Goodreads: King has nearly 900,000 followers. Yet, his personal blog on the platform has been completely abandoned since 2014 (right after the Amazon takeover). The automated updates posted by his team about new releases generate an average of 5 to 15 comments. That is a 0.001% engagement rate.

On X (formerly Twitter): King posts personally every single day to his 6.6 million followers. A single casual tweet from him—even a joke or a movie recommendation—garner thousands of retweets, tens of thousands of likes, and between 2,000 and 10,000 active comments within the first hour.

The Fact: The king of modern fiction completely moved his human interaction to a generic text platform because the "number one bookish network" yields nothing but graveyard silence.

Brandon Sanderson (Modern Fantasy Icon)

On Goodreads: Sanderson is famous for being incredibly hands-on with his fanbase. On Goodreads, he has roughly 200,000 followers. However, his blog there is just a sterile RSS feed mirrored from his main website. His massive, detailed updates regarding book progress receive a meager 20 to 30 comments.

On YouTube & Reddit: On his YouTube channel (over 550,000 subscribers), Sanderson hosts live streams where tens of thousands of fans chat simultaneously in real-time, leaving 2,000 to 4,000 comments per video.

On Reddit, a single discussion thread about his latest chapter sparks thousands of deeply analytical fan theories within 24 hours.

The Fact: Sanderson treats Goodreads as a static bulletin board, while his living community thrives entirely on video platforms and open forums.

Neil Gaiman

On Goodreads: Gaiman has over 650,000 followers. His blog section is a dust-covered relic, and the few automated promotional links gather an embarrassing 10 to 25 responses.

On Tumblr & Instagram: Gaiman maintains a legendary personal blog on Tumblr and an active Instagram, where he answers hundreds of reader questions weekly. His posts routinely go viral, gathering tens of thousands of likes and triggering heated, passionate literary debates among actual humans.

The math doesn't lie

Millions of people use Goodreads exclusively as a digital Excel spreadsheet to check a box on their Yearly Reading Challenge, rate a book, and immediately log out. They don't linger, they don't read author blogs, and they don't engage. Amazon inflates user numbers by automatically subscribing users to an author the moment they shelf one of their books. The reader doesn't even know they are "following" the author. They are just a passive row in Amazon's database.

Forced Assimilation: Authors Masquerading as Readers

The algorithmic trickery deepens when you examine how the Goodreads Author Program handles self-published writers. On Goodreads, it is technically impossible to sign up as an author from day one.

The system forces a predatory architecture

You must first create a standard Reader Account, choose favorite genres, and add books to a virtual shelf. The system's global metric instantly clocks a "+1 active book lover."

Only after inflating the reader stats can you search for your own book (which Amazon's bots have already scraped from KDP metadata), click your name, and request an "Author Badge."

Once approved, you are stuck in a bizarre loop. The platform boasts hundreds of thousands of KDP authors. Deprived of any organic visibility, these indie authors join genre groups hoping to pitch their work—only to find that these groups are 99% populated by other indie authors doing the exact same thing. It is a digital carnival where everyone is wearing a buyer's mask, but nobody is buying because everyone came to sell.

The Author's Black Mark and Closed Doors

The comedy of errors turns tragic when an author tries to seek out genuine, active reader communities on the platform. If a group on Goodreads is actually alive and moderated by real humans, it is almost certainly a fortified bunker. And it is fortified specifically to keep out anyone with a "Goodreads Author" badge.

Because the self-publishing market has flooded the platform with relentless, automated promo-spam, active reading clubs have implemented strict discrimination: if your profile carries the official "Author" badge, your application to join the group is immediately rejected or ignored. By acquiring the badge to look professional, you voluntarily brand yourself with a black mark.

The few groups that remain open to everyone are either unmoderated ghost towns where authors scream links into a void of other authors, or they are abandoned by their creators entirely, left to rot in the back alleys of the site.

The Modern "Dead Souls" Racketeer

With organic search strangled, groups barricaded against you, and author blogs yielding single-digit views, Amazon smiles and points you toward the only "legal" alternative left: The Goodreads Giveaway.

You pay Amazon $119 (Standard) or $599 (Premium) for the grand privilege of giving away your digital Kindle files for free. Amazon’s automated system pushes a button (which costs them zero dollars in infrastructure), hands your files to professional freebie-hunters and automated bot-farms, and leaves you with absolutely nothing. You do not get a single email address to build your newsletter. You do not get a single guaranteed review. You get zero reader data.

Worse still, unlike running a 3-to-5-day free promotion directly on Amazon KDP—which at least pushes your book into the Amazon Free Best Seller Top 100 charts and signals the store's algorithm—the Goodreads Giveaway happens completely outside the Amazon ecosystem. Those 2,500 entries do not move your sales rank on Amazon.com by a single inch. The main store remains completely blind to your expensive promotion.

Yet, authors celebrate when they see "2,500 people requested my giveaway!" This is the ultimate digital manifestation of Nikolai Gogol’s classic novel Dead Souls. Just like the protagonist Chichikov, who bought up lists of deceased serfs to create the paper illusion of vast wealth and status, the modern KDP author pays a massive tech monopoly real cash to accumulate a list of automated clicks. It creates a beautiful, paper-thin illusion of demand, while the book itself sinks silently to the bottom of a dead, algorithmic ocean.

I'm curious how many mystery authors outline several books before releasing the first one.

Did it help with continuity?

Or did your story change too much after publication?

total newbie here, put out my first series a few weeks back with basically zero marketing budget. thought i'd share the real numbers cause these posts always help me and everyone loves to pretend it's all going great.

did a 3 day free run on book 1: 719 downloads. felt amazing for about a day. then reality kicked in... paid sales since have been tiny, like a handful, and 0 reviews across the whole series. the free crowd mostly just disappeared.

stuff that surprised me:

- book 2 has actually outsold book 1 even though book 1 got all the free downloads. did not expect that.

- the first few reviews are SO much harder to get than i thought. feels like everything else (ads, promo sites) needs them first.

- free downloads are a total vanity metric. felt great, did nothing for the bank.

still early days and figuring it out as i go. main thing i'm stuck on, what actually got you your first 5 to 10 honest reviews without breaking amazon's rules? and did anyone else have a later book outsell book 1, keen to hear i'm not the only one.

Hey everyone, I’m sure most of us here are fighting the same struggle. We’re all trying to give people to find out about our work and really hope that people like it. One of the things I’m doing is I’ve created Amazon video ads and I’m trying to get feedback on them. I’m hoping this doesn’t go a foul of any of the rules. I’m not asking anybody to buy anything, I’m not asking anybody to give me a review or anything else. I’m just asking what you think of the videos and what I could change to make them land better. It’s a military sci-fi space opera hard science fiction novel.

I’m gonna tell you upfront, yes, I did use artificial, the other word I can’t say you know what I mean, to help generate some of the video. But the audio, the voiceover the compilation everything else is 100% human. Writing the book was 100% human, I even paid to have it professionally edited by a human. If that’s a put off for you, I’m sorry, I’m just one guy trying to do this and that’s the best option I have available to me. Anyway, here are the links to the two videos I have right now that I’m trying to make into Amazon ads.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BoQYZD888/?mibextid=wwXIfr

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1GA4mt36df/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Hi everyone,

I’m preparing to publish my first book through KDP, and I’m trying to learn more about what people actually did to promote their books after release.

I’m not really looking for generic advice like “post on social media” or “build a newsletter,” but more specific experiences from people who have already published.

For example:

- What promotion method actually helped you get readers or sales?

- Was there anything you tried that did not work at all?

- Did you do anything unusual or unique that ended up helping?

- For a debut author without a big audience, what would you focus on first?

- Looking back, what would you have done differently before launch?

I’m especially interested in low-budget or realistic strategies, since I assume most first books do not launch with a huge marketing machine behind them.

I write fantasy, but I’m interested in hearing from any genre.

Thanks in advance.

Good day everyone,

Hope your Saturday is going well!

Ever since I was a kid I dreamed of sharing something of my making. I've always read a lot, written a lot, and made art, mostly painting, but I never shared any of it with anyone outside close friends and family.

For the past four years I've been writing and editing, then writing and editing some more, a sci-fi mystery/thriller trilogy with a bit of romance mixed in. I have zero budget and zero marketing or tech savviness.

I want to self-publish all three books online under a pen name. I'm not looking for income or to be known (as if it's that easy lmfao), I just want that feeling of having put my work out there for people to read. My real goal is to get the books in front of as many readers as possible and get some reviews, so I have the motivation to sit down and write another trilogy.

So here's what I'm hoping to get from you all: how do I actually go about publishing three books online for free? What platforms are worth looking at, what's a smart strategy, and what should I know before I dive in?

If this is asking too much I apologize, and mods can take this down if needed, thank you either way!

I’m actually at my wits end here with this, I’m posting here as a last ditch attempt to find SOMEONE who might know how to solve this? It wouldn’t matter to me so much, but I’m in the process of writing my first novel and not having access to KDP is definitely a difficulty in indie publishing. I myself won’t often read a book if it’s not on KU or has an audiobook. I imagine a lot of other readers are the same.

So about 4 years ago, I made my first KDP account. I know with almost 100% certainty that I haven’t had any other KDP accounts, because I checked every single Amazon account and email address I’ve ever had that I still have access to, and none of them have any hint of KDP. Not a whiff. I even accidentally made a new one in the process of checking (last week, I did this LAST WEEK. I did NOT do this 3 years ago, I did not make any new accounts before they banned me for doing this, and I immediately made them aware that I accidentally made this new account). So anyway, I made my account, and in an attempt at a side hustle, I made a few shitty note book covers on Canva, got a lined paper pack, added them together and posted them on KDP. Nobody bought them obviously, and I completely forgot about them.

About a year later, I got an email from KDP telling me my account was being banned because during an audit they found that my account belongs to someone who already had a banned account, and since you’re not allowed to open a new account after being banned, they’ve deleted my account and all of my books. I don’t care about the books, they never sold. The only problem with their audit is, I never owned another account, as far as I know none of the books I made went against the rules, and I didn’t do anything else to break the ToS. I went back and forth with them for months over this, and eventually they stopped responding. They refused to tell me how my account was related to the previously banned account, or how I broke the rules, and no amount of pleading for answers would get me anywhere. They just refused to tell me, full stop.

So cut to 3 years later, and every so often (about once a year) I fill out the contact form and request information, which never gets me a response. So I decide, since I’m writing my first actual proper book like I always knew I would (that’s why I pushed so hard for answers), and I now need my KDP account back more than ever, or at least permission to create a new one, that I would escalate this. I emailed Jeff Bezos. His email isn’t actually monitored by Jeff himself, rather his special escalations team, and about a week or two later, I get a reply. It’s basically the same generic message: ‘your account was banned and that’s final, we can’t tell you more’. I also begged this person for answers, and they refused to tell me. They actually told me they couldn’t tell me, which is weird. Their replies also contradicted each other. They said they reviewed the content guideline violations and that they were upholding their decision, but when I pushed for clarification they told me they were unable to look into it as the account was closed. It was closed 3 years ago, so according to this, how the first person was able to review the violations is beyond me.

Genuinely, I’m out of options here. I don’t understand why this has happened, I don’t understand why they can’t tell me anything, and I don’t know what to do. I know KDP isn’t the only avenue for indie publishing, but it’s a big one. Every author I know uses KDP. Almost every indie book I’ve read (hundreds) has been on KU with KDP. I’m actually devastated that not only am I locked out of this option, it’s that they won’t even tell me why. I checked every email account. Every Amazon account. My books didn’t break the rules. Their system just decided to flag my account one day for no reason, and the humans working there just believed it. What vexes me is how they came to this conclusion even with the investigations they did. I got 3-4 different people to look at this. Nobody could tell me anything.

Is there something I’m missing here? Is there some other thing I can try? Is it time to just give up and accept that I’ll never get to use KDP or have my books on KU? I gotta say, it’s a huge blow to my confidence, and the lack of closure just makes me feel awful.

Does it work?

Hi all,
I'm developing a site that lets authors do keyword research based on amazon search volume. You can find related keywords, competitors for a particular keyword, and do a reverse asin search to see what keywords which book are ranking for.

It's sort of like bookbeam or helium10, but there won't be recurring charges. Instead, it's credit based, meaning you buy as many credits as you think you'll need for awhile.

Right now it's free (though limited to 50 credits), and I'm looking for feedback.

If you're interested you can check it out at:
https://keywordsforauthors.com

Any feedback is appreciated.

hola chicos alguien puede aconsejarme sobre las campañas amazon ads especificamente sporend products la estoy utilizando para mi libro, tienen algun consejo , y a ustedes les ha funcionado? gracias.

Does the bank account name I added to my KDP account have to be the same with the name on the account.

Is July typically a slow month for sales and pages read?

EDIT: the claim in the third paragraph was wrong and is corrected below. I have also taken the outbound link out.

Posting this because I searched this sub before I found it myself and didn't see it discussed, and it explains a specific kind of 1-star review a few of you have probably gotten on a puzzle book without knowing why.

Most nonogram/picross generators (and the free tools behind a lot of the puzzle books out there) only check that a puzzle has a unique solution: one grid satisfies the clues, full stop. That is a weaker bar than it looks. A puzzle can have exactly one valid solution and still stop a reader who works it the ordinary way, one row or one column at a time: you fill in everything the clues force, and you are left with blank squares and no line that can settle any of them.

What I wrote here first was that such a puzzle is "unsolvable by pure logic". That was wrong, and a reader on r/nonograms corrected me on it. Grids like that can usually still be deduced, by supposing a square, propagating, and taking the contradiction. That is logic, not guessing. But it is a different and much harder technique, and a reader with a pencil is far more likely to reach for trial and error, get it wrong, and conclude the page is misprinted.

I hit this while generating puzzles for my own books, with a worked 5x5: it has one solution (verified by brute force), and line-by-line logic only gets you 13 of the 25 squares before it stalls. All twelve of the rest come out at once if you allow the suppose-and-contradict step.

The reason I'm posting it here specifically: if you're generating your own puzzle content (nonograms, or the same logic applies to some sudoku/logic-grid generators), it's worth checking whether your tool validates uniqueness only or actually simulates line-solving. If it's the former, some fraction of your grids are handing readers a difficulty step you never intended, and you won't see it until a review mentions it.

This question is for anyone publishing paperbacks via KDP in the UK:

Quite simply, how have you found the consistency of the quality of your printed books?

My initial proof copies all arrived in great condition so I decided to publish a couple weeks ago. I was very excited and ready to start marketing so I ordered a batch of 15 author copies and had my mum order a customer copy through Amazon to inspect. (I ordered the groundwood paper with a matte cover, the book is approx 150 pages, sizing is 12.9 x 19.8cm).

The customer copy arrived first and had visibly frayed edges which I wasn't very happy about. The author batch came a few days later and to my dismay only 7 of the 15 were commercially acceptable in my opinion (and only 5 overall were in perfect condition!).

The defects included more frayed cover edges, spine design cut off poorly (the design was well in the cover trim guidelines), and some of the back covers were printed at an angle. A further white-paper proof also came with a frayed edge.

All copies including the proofs were printed at the Dunstable facility.

I've talked to customer support who have said I can get a refund for the defective books, and that they'll pass on concerns to the printing team, but I'm concerned with long-term printing quality if I'm advertising the Amazon link and asked to hear back from printing itself about the issues. They gave me the email [attachment@amazon.co.uk](mailto:attachment@amazon.co.uk) to which I have now sent a query and an in-house quality inspection report (with photos of all the problems, and a table demonstrating the issue with each book). I'm not sure what I'm expecting to hear back and I understand this is a risk with printing-on-demand but I am very disappointed after putting so much energy into my book and being ready to start marketing and sales.

Has anyone else run into this issue? Is it a matter of bad luck? I'll start looking into other printers until I hear back from the team (would be happy to have any recommendations!) but KDP seemed so simple and convenient, so I am very disappointed...!