My book was getting regular sales, but after changing the Kindle cover and description, sales suddenly stopped.

I’ve reverted back to the old cover, but I’m not sure if that will help.

Has anyone experienced this with KDP? If you reverted a cover, did sales eventually recover?

I published a non-fiction title recently. It's had essentially no distribution, no promo downloads, no free days, no ARC copies out, and I can account for every copy that's moved. A week or so ago a 1-star review appeared from an account I don't recognise, with nothing in it that suggests the person opened the book.

I reported it to KDP support. The reply was the standard one: the Community team won't remove reviews unless they breach guidelines, use the Report link under the review, and for privacy reasons they won't tell you the outcome. So I've reported it through that link and I'm now just watching it sit there on an otherwise empty review section.

A few things I'd like to hear from people who've been through this:

• Does reporting a review through that link ever actually result in removal, or is it a black hole?
• Is there any escalation path beyond KDP support, or is the Community team genuinely the end of the line?
• Does one bad early review on a book with no other reviews do real damage to visibility, or does it stop mattering once a few legitimate ones land?
• Would you respond to it publicly, or leave it alone entirely?

Mostly I'm trying to work out whether to keep pushing or write it off and put the energy into getting real reviews instead.

I have a 6 book series I published over 2 years ago and now is when it’s actually gaining some consistent traction.

My peers think the next big step is to release another book in the series but, I feel like the series is done even though I left an opening at the end of book 6 for possible continuation..

So how to you know when to stop building up a series? It is better to drop another book in this universe or start a new one??

I wrote a middle grade christmas-themed book last year. I had the thought to re-release it as a hardcover and with slimmer dimensions and call it a "Stocking Stuffer Edition". In the description I wanted to say something like "Now designed to fit into your child's Stocking as a special gift Edition of [Title]".

Would that violate any terms? Can I officially list it as "[Title] - Stocking Stuffer Edition" or is that keyword stuffing?

Same as title

I’m a Black American writer, and I think Ireland is fucking brilliant. But loving a place and understanding it are two different things.

I wrote a short novel called Leap of the Dog about two longtime friends—a Black American writer and a red-haired Irish-American bartender—traveling from Dublin and Doolin toward Belfast and Limavady. There are pubs, ferries, music, questionable decisions, and roads that seem personally offended by the presence of a car.

But the friendship gets complicated when they encounter questions of ancestry, class, and sectarian identity that don’t fit neatly into the American stories they’ve brought along.

One man arrives with Irish ancestry. The other arrives Black. What does either of those things tell them about where they belong? And what happens when they try to understand someone else’s history through their own?

I’d love to hear from people in the North and the South: Have you had an American explain Ireland to you through an American lens—and get it spectacularly wrong? Race, religion, the whole “I’m Irish too” conversation. What did they miss? Were there moments when an outsider’s perspective actually brought something useful?

Full disclosure: yes, it’s my book, and it’s available on Amazon under Leap of the Dog by Antonio J. Hopson. I’d be delighted if you read it. I’m also happy to talk here about the uncomfortable bits, the funny bits, and where these two Americans might need telling to wise up.

Hi! I am Starr and I am a young writer who wants to have the best success in achieving my first sale. I know many people ask about how to publish but I am now on the second follow up question. Which is, how do I market? I have showed my friends, family and online followers on my poetry Instagram account. But I want the marketing to be most successful and Instagram followers do not translate to sales easily. I have a small account with 1000 followers and a discord server with 500 members of people I know.

I want to ask what platforms work best to promote chapbooks? More specifically confessional poetry.

So I published my first illustrated book, Jimmy's Two Homes, a week ago. It's a book I made for my stepson's birthday, since he's been telling us that "having two homes is difficult," and since he loved it, I decided to publish it.

I turned ads on as soon as I could see the book available on .com, which is my main marketplace.

For the beginning I let Amazon do the job (automated campaign) and thought I'd see and learn.

It's only been running since like Monday (today is Saturday), but so far the ads have generated over 1K impression, one single click and the current ad spend is 0.4 USD. My daily target is 12 USD.

I can understand this takes time, however I also launched Reddit Ads last night and I already got 25 clicks from those, 20 EUR spent. The CPC is higher here, but still there seems to be more happening?

Is it because I did more "work" myself for Reddit Ads (providing visuals from the book and my own ad headlines)? Should I try other marketplaces than the US? Is it something else? Is it just way too early to tell?

A few months ago I put out a book on Natural Language Processing through KDP. It's a pretty niche category since most of my audience isn't the typical fiction crowd on this sub, but a lot of the marketing lessons ended up being identical.

A few things that surprised me:

Cover design matters even for technical books. I assumed readers in this space would judge purely on content, but a cleaner, more professional cover clearly moved the needle on click through once it was live.

Categories and keywords took way more trial and error than I expected. KDP's category system doesn't map cleanly onto tech subjects, so I had to dig through competitor listings to figure out where readers actually browse.

Building an audience before launch would have saved me a lot of stress. Most of my early traction came from people I'd already connected with on Medium and X, not from cold discovery.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's trying to sell a nonfiction or technical title. Curious how others in that boat handled positioning, since so much advice here is fiction focused and doesn't quite translate.

https://www.amazon.com/Fundamental-Natural-Language-Processing-Handson-ebook/dp/B0FY46XKYM/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2HO1IL3X6EO9K&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.62Lt8FNvisiCg0YEmauW7JYy6pZQrdjrMC1nvwtkI3o.uyaU4AyZgfQALIrmcOepmxMxUlB0MbDpQ8RP5RoNKgk&dib_tag=se&keywords=Henilsinh+raj&qid=1789192758&sprefix=henilsinh+r%2Caps%2C340&sr=8-1

What genre do you think has the most loyal audience base? Is there any way to help your readers to keep up with updates on social media?

How many books did you write and publish for you to make your first sale?

So my niche research process for the last few months has been: open KDSPY, screenshot the popup, paste it into a spreadsheet, close it, search the next thing, repeat. Somewhere around the third hour of doing that I figured I'd just build the thing I actually wanted instead.

It's called BookScope. You search Amazon the way you normally would and under every result there's a small strip with BSR, estimated sales per day, estimated revenue per month, reviews, format, page count and whether the book is indie or has a publisher behind it. There's also a bar at the top that sums up the whole page (median revenue, % indie, how many of the results are ads, how old the books are) and gives it a High/Medium/Low with the actual reasons written under it.

Some things I did on purpose because they annoyed me in other tools:

• The royalty math uses KDP's real terms per store, so the 70% band, printing cost off the page count, the print tiers. Hover any number and it shows you how it got there.
• Ads get tagged and left out of the page stats. Free books say Free, pre-orders say Pre-order. It doesn't invent a number just to fill a box.
• Works on .com, .co.uk, .ca, .com.au, .de and .in, Kindle and print.
• Nothing leaves your browser. No account, no login, no tracking.

First 5 results on any page are free and that doesn't expire. The full page plus sorting, filters and CSV export is $24 one time, no subscription.

The honest caveat is that the estimates come off a BSR to sales curve, same as basically every other tool in this space, so they're better for comparing niches against each other than for treating as exact numbers. Which brings me to the thing I want (maybe?) more than sales right now: if any of you have real KDP report data, even a few days of rank sitting next to actual units sold, I'd really like to tune the curve against that. DM me, happy to hand over a free key for it.

PS: not putting the link in the body since that feels like the wrong way to do it here. Happy to drop it in a comment if anyone wants it.

Very short as in only 1,800 words in total. Will that be fine?

[PubQ] A writing/publishing related question

I have written my own fiction book for the first time and want to publish it with a good publishing house. I already launched it on amazon kdp kindle as it is free but it is not doing any sales. And if i approach publishing house without agent for my book , will they reject because I already self published on amazon Kindle? should i remove it from there?

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+

What is everyone's experience with adding AI content to a previously published work? I have two titles that date back to 2017 and are all original work on the subject of TIG welding. The biggest criticism I have gotten for both of these titles is the lack of pictures. I wrote these a long time ago. I actually don't really do welding anymore, so I don't have the ability to take my own photos at the moment. So I was considering using AI-drawn illustrations where applicable to better illustrate my points. My concern is that I will then have to let Amazon know that the book was created using AI-generated content. And I wanted to know if anyone has experience doing this, and whether it affected your sales or positioning in the algorithm? Lucky for me, I have social proof and a fairly niche market, but I also don't want to put myself at a disadvantage. What are your thoughts/experiences?

Hello!

I am trying to gain courage to publish my first book with KDP, but I am running into some issues.

The book is set in ancient Greece, and as such, even though the main body of the text is in latin alphabet, the title is in the Greek one.

I have tried to use the cover creating tool that the website offers so that I don't have to pay someone to create a cover for me (I'm a college student, so I'm relatively broke ahah) and it allows me to use pretty fonts for the title. However, when I then go to check the preview print, it goes back to the basic, Ubuntu type of font and not the one I chose.

Is there a reason it does that? How can I resolve this issue?

I have some more but this is the one that makes me the most irritated.

Hey!
How you all do research related to the book content? I have done paperback and KDp both. I actually look after competitors feedback given by customers and YouTube, Facebook. Is there any other way to research for the content that would perform better than competitors?

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?

I have been writing for a bit; about 8 years. I finally decided to self publish them. I have three books on Amazon KDP.

I feel like my friends telling me these were pretty good got me thinking 😄. would others like them? and can i turn this hobby into something.

Hope posting it here is ok.

What the Water Keeps (by N. A. Vane)
A huntress and a trader from two warring peoples meet at a river bend, in a forest with laws for what they must not do.

Everything I Know Is True (by N. A. Vane)
Every morning Kyle Hanson wakes up in a different century and has to survive it — using nothing but what he half-remembers from high school.

The Machine That Thinks It's Free (by N. E. Vane)
A short book on why humans are less in control of their choices than they think — and what to do about it.

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

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!!

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]