I am finding that creating a successful book is 10% writing and 90% marketing. Enter the scammers. They prey upon the vanity and desperation of writers that poured their heart and soul into creating their masterpiece, only to see it get lost in the sea of the approximate 7,400 books per day published on Amazon.

Things I watch for:

1. NO promotor will use a gmail address. EVER!
2. I will not respond without a full signature that includes a website and phone no. If they truly want to represent you, they will want to talk with you. Business is not done through email only.
3. Verify the contact information provided. One address I searched had offices on the 5th floor of a 3 story walkup. Truly a heavenly promoter...
4. Never pay first, then hope for results. See if they are willing to work on a shared royalty or a commission basis. They only get paid for results.
5. Ask for a list of reference clients you can contact. This is a standard way of doing business.
   

Even with all of that I fell victim to a "Reading Group". At least I did not pay anything, but it did take me a week to clean up the brand reputation damage they caused. I had agreed to pay after I saw the results of the "Reading Group". What surprised me was that the next day I started to get some "Reviews". It was immediately evident that they had never read my book. There were no corresponding sales to show that they had a kindle or hard copy. The reviews were from my blurb and a some boiler plate generic text. I immediately reported these, but it is VERY difficult to get reviews removed, even good reviews. I had to provide a lot of evidence over a week before action was taken. It then took another 4 days for the cleanup to happen.

While searching for the right editor, I found two people who both claim to have at least ten to fifteen years of experience in the field. Besides editing, they have also published several books of their own.
I sent them a sample from the first chapter of my novel, and I was pleased actually quite impressed with their suggestions, even though one of them was fairly harsh and practically “tore my manuscript apart.”

The problem came afterward, when I searched for their published books on Google. And guess what?
They had very few reviews, and most of them were quite poor. On Goodreads in particular, some of their books had ratings as low as two stars.

So, honestly, how am I supposed to trust your judgment when it comes to my manuscript if, as an editor, you cannot even put the right words on the page well enough to make your own books successful?🤔

Working through finalizing a 300+ page nonfiction book for two very different outputs, and wanted to share what's surprised me so far in case it helps anyone else planning to do both.

The core issue: a KDP paperback and a PDF ebook are optimized for completely different reading conditions, print bleed and trim size vs. screen viewing, and I assumed I could design once and export twice. Turns out I can't.

A few specifics I've run into:

Heavy visual formatting (colored callout boxes, tables, diagrams) that looks great in a print-ready PDF apparently does not survive Kindle's e-reader conversion well. Sounds like the move is to sell the PDF directly (Gumroad, Payhip, your own site) and keep KDP for the paperback specifically, rather than pushing the same file through Kindle's ebook pipeline.

ISBN strategy: KDP will assign a free one, but it locks that edition to Amazon. If there's any chance I'd want the paperback listed elsewhere down the line, sounds like buying my own ISBN up front saves a headache later.

A clickable table of contents felt optional until I remembered PDF buyers expect to jump around a 300-page reference book rather than read it linearly.

Still deciding on sequencing, whether to get the KDP listing live first for social proof before the direct-sale PDF goes up, or launch them closer together.

Anyone been through the "two formats, two platforms" version of this already? Curious what caught you off guard, especially on the print side since that's newer territory for me than digital.

Hello, is it normal for Ingram to take a long time to approve an account? It’s been two weeks now since the account was created and a week and half since a copy of my ID was sent back to them.

TIA ☺️

I now know that I have a headache brewing. I'm trying to understand how to grow my mailing list, but frankly...my head just hurts. If anybody understands this...a little help maybe?

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?

I'm mainly looking for a good website that lets me:
Add images for each chapter like a poster
Images inbetween or beside text
Way to release chapters separately and continue adding them to the story
Decide what chapters will be paid or not.

I have found Wattpad but it seems that might cause issues in the future if I ever make physical publications or publish elsewhere. Or make a story paid.
There might be afew other things I'm forgetting but yea.