Demystifying Book Unpublishing on Amazon: A Guide for Authors | Book Launchers

This happens more than you think. An author publishes a book that they wish they hadn't rushed and they're embarrassed and they want to unpublish it. Or the world changes so much they need to do a big update. Or the author gets a book deal from a publishing house and then the publishing house goes out of business or stops paying royalties. If any of these things happen to you, how do you unpublish your book and then republish it after? If you're wondering how you unpublish a book, then this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on your readers and done right will help you grow your brand, build your business, and make you money. The best part? You yes, you keep all rights and royalties. Okay, before I get into this, let's cover the hopefully obvious. If you didn't publish the book yourself, you went through a publisher, make sure you actually have the rights to get your book back and republish it yourself. Most of the time, if a publisher has gone out of business and this happens more than you want to think, we've helped quite a few authors with this, but most of the time the rights revert back to the author. But double check your contract. There are scenarios where it's not that straightforward. For example, if it's an imprint closing with a parent company that's continuing, the publishing parent company may transfer rights to another imprint or just hold onto rights as long as the book is in print. They can choose to revert rights back to the author. But if it does come back to what's spelled out in the contract, we've had a few authors where the publishers were really good about it, and one or two where this was a big battle. In other cases we've worked on, it wasn't so much of a case of the publisher going out of business, but rather legal battles because they weren't paying royalties anymore. There's some shady publishing houses and some publishing practices that are pretty questionable out there. It's worth checking the OLLI list of reviewed services, which I'll link to in the description below. Before you sign with any publisher or pay money to a company to publish your book, especially if they're going to ret any control over your book. And really, that's my first piece of advice. Prevention is the best medicine. Read your contracts carefully. I'm a huge fan of self publishing because you retain control. And if you do that, it's also a really smart idea to make sure you have all the source files for everything, even if you don't have the right software to open it on your computer, get it, and save it for the future. But let's say the ship has sailed and you're stuck with a book you want to take back. You want to take it back down and unpublish it for whatever reason. How the heck do you unpublish that book? You can unpublish an ebook and it will disappear from Amazon and other digital locations. It's not that big of a deal. And if a publishing house has gone out of business, this is hopefully happening already. But if you unpublish a print book, the listing stays so that the secondhand book market can still trade. So if you've published your book through IngramSpark, which is where we publish a lot of our clients books, removing a listing can take up to eight weeks. To unpublish in Ingram, you have to email them the request. The email must come from the same email account that is your login for Ingram, and it must include the ISBN of the book. And we always include the title too. As a verification point. We keep a running list of the retailers that got distribution through Ingram and check them off as the listing is removed. Then about a month later we start contacting companies directly if they still have the book for sale as new. Again, you're not going to get rid of it with the secondhand market, but you can stop it in the new market. To unpublish your book on Amazon, there is an unpublish button in KDP Amazon. When you release a new version of your book, you will need a new ISBN in the vast majority of cases and you will then reload it as a second edition or a revised edition. By the way, I was trying to figure out what the difference is between revised and new edition. And there isn't really a standard rule as to what you would release as a new edition versus a revised edition. In my mind, a new edition is one that has a lot of new content. A revised edition is just less updated. Now. I don't know. There's no industry practice on this. It seems when you add the new edition, it will start as its own listing on Amazon, but you can contact Amazon to have the listings collapse together. The reason you might want to do this is to keep the reviews you have from the first edition or the previous edition. Usually the reviews from the first edition will connect to the second version so you get to keep those hard earned reviews. Of course, if you have a lot of bad reviews, you might not want to do that. You might want to start fresh. Couple of tips make it really clear when a book is new edition so readers don't crush your book with bad reviews about how this was all repeated content in the description. It can also be a good idea to clearly explain what was added so readers can decide or at least make it very clear that it is new content. We worked on the revised edition of How Much Money Do I Need to Retire? Shown here you can see the clear indication on the COVID and then another note at the top of the description to make it clear that this is a revised edition. In this situation, a lot of new material was added to the book and it was updated for the current market conditions so even previous buyers might have wanted to repurchase it. Ultimately needing to unpublish and republish a book happens a lot. It's not as simple as clicking a few buttons, but it's not that challenging if you have the rights and the right files to make it easier. And of course, a little patience to sort out all the details will help too. Have you had to unpublish a print book before? How'd it go? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbooksswag. We have new videos every Tuesday and Friday. Make sure you catch every one by subscribing to the channel and turning those notifications on. Then you can be the first to comment, which will move you one step closer to being one of my beloved YouTube besties. 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