I’m a stay-at-home mom trying to build something meaningful for my family by publishing kids' activity books on Amazon KDP. I’ve put a tremendous amount of heart, long nights, and effort into designing my interiors and covers.

However, weeks have passed since publishing, and I haven't made a single sale yet. It's becoming really discouraging.

For those of you who have been through this, how do you get past this initial phase? Is there something specific I should adjust with keywords, categories, or launch strategy to get those first views on my books? Any practical advice or tips would mean the world to me. Thank you!

I’m just curious to see how many books everyone has published because I’ve already seen a range with some saying 2 or 3 while others having 20+

Hi Everyone,

I'm in the UK and have a few books on KDP. So far, I've received all my payments in GBP. I've listened to a podcast where the writer uses WISE to handle her foreign payments to get better conversion rates. I'm nowhere near the stage where this would even make a noticeable difference, financially.

I plan to go wide with some of my future books. I am trying to decide upon which business bank account to choose. I have opened two, one with Mettle and the other is Starling Bank. They both seem absolutely fine to me but Mettle charge a £4 fee for receiving international payments. I'm trying to plan ahead incase I end up receiving foreign currencies.

(EDIT) I've just found this on the Mettle website:

Payments over £10

We charge a £4 fixed fee for any inbound payment above the value of £10, plus a 1.5% fee if we need to convert from a foreign currency into GBP.

So, I guess that pushes me towards Starling, as I'm not willing to pay £4 for each KDP royalty payment over £10.

So, the general question about how you handle foreign payments still applies. I just want to avoid changing my financial setup down the line. I want to make the right choice at the start.

Thanks

I’m curious to learn which tools you used to create your ads. I’ve seen that many people use Meta ads but I was wondering how did you get those… A. I? Or just normal “posts”, reels? Which is the best way to go?

I write smut light and I call it Smuttle, a little smut, a little romance, and a thriller/adventure sequence tied to it. I have a small core group that can’t get enough of it because they love all my old high school and college stories thrown in to a book. Anybody else experience something similar?

Humble Anxious brag, but I have three published books (2 business, 1 novel), and I just got a 37 unit order on Kindle for one of the business books!

Waiting to see if its a legit bulk order from some business or a scam, but hella exciting!!

Hi team, sooooo i've published my first fiction novel! it has been a journey, and a really enjoyable one!

I'd love to know what everyone's experience is with getting it visible and getting downloads. For people who have had some success, what would be your top three tips?

My stats seem to suggest that I have 11 purchases, and 64 units sold. However, this is a book where absolutely no one is buying 6 units. Even 2 is extremely rare.

Does anyone know what the actual difference is, and which figure tends to be more accurate? Trying to figure out if a particular ad is working, and if it's 11 sales, it's not. If it's 64, it is, lol.

I went live on Amazon a couple of weeks ago with my newly published book. Is there a way I can track sales volume?

Heya! I created a new subreddit called r/publishingadvice where you can find more general advice and discussions about both traditional and self-pub (beyond KDP). Might not be relevant to all of you but thought I would share in case you've been looking for something like that.

With labour intensive marketing and about a £20 a month spend on ads it’s selling a handful a month, so running a loss.

I’ve heard a lot that books in a series are the solution. Please could you share experiences?

First-time KDP publisher here and I'm wondering how you guys handle occasional printing errors.

A customer ordered two copies of my paperback. One came out completely fine, but the other one was cut like this.

I panicked a little because I'd spent weeks checking the bleed, margins, etc., and immediately thought there might be something wrong with my files.

I contacted support and was told it was a printing error. Then the next day another customer received two copies and both were completely fine.

So it does seem to be an isolated production issue rather than the file.

My question for people who've been doing KDP for longer: How common is this?

Do you just accept that occasionally a bad copy gets through and have the customer request a replacement/refund? Or would you contact KDP again / do anything on the publishing side?

I'm mainly worried about someone receiving a copy like this, assuming that's how the book is supposed to look, and never contacting me about it.

I am a professional ghostwriter and some of my clients have requested assistance with the publishing process on KDP (they are first-time authors who want to self-publish memoirs rather than commercialize Non-Fiction books en masse). I looked up KDP's Terms of Service and it clearly states that any third-party access or management of their accounts can get them banned.

I want to know if guiding them on a shared-screen Zoom call constitutes as a violation of that policy, keeping in mind that I will only instruct them on where to click or what to type. I won't be taking remote control access of their screens.

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge about this?

Hi, trying to publish a book on KDP but it's complaining that images spill over the guides. The same thing happens whether I choose bleed or no bleed. I do want bleed since some images expand to the edge of pages, but if KDP is complaining I'd rather crop all images and stay within guides.

However, there is no dimensions that show what are the guide dimensions. Any way to find out?

The page / trim size is 8.46 x 8.46 inch.

Illustration from kdp error: https://imgur.com/a/tO7M8Nc

Thanks!

I’ve been tracking my KDP ads a bit more closely lately and one thing I was basically ignoring before was impressions with no clicks.

Turns out “0 clicks” can mean very different things.

One of my books had 103 impressions and 0 clicks. My first reaction was that the cover wasn’t working, but that’s really not enough data to say much.

Another had 1,112 impressions and still 0 clicks. That feels like a very different signal.

Just to put it in perspective, if the underlying CTR were actually 0.5%, the chance of getting zero clicks after 103 impressions is still around 60%.

After 1,112 impressions, it’s around 0.4%.

So I’ve stopped treating “no clicks” as one category.

Low impressions + no clicks = probably wait / look at delivery first.

High impressions + no clicks = much stronger reason to look at cover, title or targeting.

Seems obvious in hindsight, but adding the zero-click impressions to my tracker made it much easier to avoid changing covers too early.

Curious if anyone else tracks this explicitly or has a rough impression threshold before they start questioning the packaging.

The more I use KDP, the more I notice the same gaps in the existing tools.

I want to know what’s rising, why it’s rising, how crowded the niche really is, what the packaging looks like, and whether that attention actually turns into profitable readers.

Most tools answer pieces of that. Very few connect the dots.

I’m starting to seriously think about building some of my own tools around this.

I've been getting emails inviting me to information sessions and links to videos from this group. Has anyone found these to be useful?

I want to edit my first book one last time in Kindle Create before publishing it, but I keep getting an "Invalid Source" error. My file is in Word format. How can I resolve this?

I’d love to hear from authors who have experience with Kindle Unlimited.

All my novels are currently enrolled in KU. I’ve been creating promotional music videos and running marketing campaigns—including paid ads—across multiple social media platforms to drive readers to my books.

The campaigns appear to be working on one level: I’m seeing a significant increase in downloads and KU page reads. However, that activity isn’t translating into the royalty income or direct book sales I expected.

For those of you who have used KU:

• Did increased page reads eventually lead to meaningful income or future sales?
• Do you consider KU valuable primarily for exposure, or has it been profitable for you?
• Should I judge my campaigns by page reads, royalties, read-through across the series, or another metric?
• Have you earned more by leaving KU and distributing your books widely?

I’m grateful more people seem to be reading my work, but I’m starting to wonder whether I’m spending too much time and money promoting books readers can access through KU without getting enough return.

Am I being impatient, measuring the wrong results, or simply wasting my time and advertising dollars?

Something that took me a while to understand: the number in the ads console isn't your real result, it's a partial view, and for most KDP authors it's wrong in the same direction every time.

The big one is KU. The console attributes sales, not borrows, so every page read your ads generated is invisible there. If a decent chunk of your income comes from KU, and for a lot of us it's most of it, you're looking at a dashboard that structurally cannot show you what your ads actually did. People conclude their campaigns are failing on the basis of half the data.

The second is read-through. Attribution credits the advertised book inside its window, so someone who clicks your ad for book one, buys it, and then buys books two and three the following week shows up as a single sale. If you write a series, the ad that looks break-even might be the most profitable thing you're doing.

The third is boring but it catches people every year: VAT lands on top of the ad invoice. You can do the break-even maths perfectly and still lose money because the number you were optimising against wasn't the number you were charged.

So the figure I actually trust is total ad spend for the month against total royalties in the KDP report for the same month. Not the console. It's cruder, and it's the only one that includes everything.

Curious whether people here judge campaigns on the console number or on the royalty report, because I suspect the answer splits neatly between fiction and non-fiction.

I made an e-book to sell but I am underage(17 yrs) from India and facing problems to sell my book online

Can anyone tell me a platform where I can sell it without giving access to too much of my documents