KDP Just Changed—Here’s What Every Author Needs to Know

Foreign. Hello. It feels like it's been a while. All right, today is a special live because the KDP you published on last year is not the same KDP today. Accessibility checkbox, AI summaries, new keyword rules, sales that are not tracking the way they used to. There's so much to talk about. So I thought we should do a special session just to talk about what's happening at kdp. Because just when you think you've got Amazon, KDP figured out, surprise, they shipped something again. So let's talk about the new accessibility requirements that rolled out. What are we in August? It rolled out in July. These AI book summaries that have just come kind of appeared. Keyword rule changes. We won't spend a ton of time on those, but, you know, there's a few new ones. And then also what I really want to talk about is the sales reporting and that I'm going to talk about last. But there's some really interesting things that I think everybody should know and just be paying attention to, especially if you have a launch coming up in the next few months. Yeah. Before we get into that, I do have three things that I want you to note down or just know about. And hold on a second here. Something weird is happening on my screen, and Angela wasn't feeling super well today, so I told her to just leave it to me. All right, so nobody has said hello. Want to make sure you guys are hearing me. So do say hello. Let me know you're here. I know there's people here. So do say hello in the comments so that I know you're hearing me and we're good to go. Okay, so while. While I'm waiting for you guys to confirm that you can hear me, I'll just keep talking. Makes sense, right? Okay. Three things. Number one, we're doing more lives. So today is a bonus live. I'm doing it a little early because I have to leave and go to a meeting at a different office, so I'll be cutting it short. But we're also doing it out of schedule. But that's also because YouTube has invited me into a group and there's training sessions, there's incentives. And basically what they've told me is you need to go live a lot more. Your channel will benefit, and it's good for all of the things. And so I've been learning a lot. It's been really great. I have a channel manager in YouTube along with other kind of a cohort that I'm in. It's been really, really fun. And if YouTube tells you, hey, listen, it's going to help your channel grow, you're going to reach more people, I figure why not try it? So we're doing extra lives this month, but also Saturday is one of my extra lives, but I wanted to do it because Alex Hormozi has a book launch going on. Now, Alex Hormozi, this is going to be his third book in a series. So for those of you who don't know who he is, you're not following any of his stuff. He had $100 million leads. $100 million. Can't remember the other one. And then this one's going to be $100 million models. And his book launches, while his style may not that you're interested in, his book launches are pretty epic. So I'm just going to take that off the screen. There we go. That's better. His book launches are just epic. And I don't remember the numbers from the last one, but we're talking hundreds of thousands of books sold and sold direct. But at the same time, while he's generating all this massive momentum for the direct sales, he's also getting reviews and sales through traditional channels. And of course he self publishes because why would you give a publisher a piece of this when he has a whole business goal behind it? So I think it's a fascinating case study. And so if you're not already registered for Saturday's thing, I do have an affiliate link only because I'm also watching what they're doing as far as their launch goes on the affiliate site. So you can sign up, not sign up, but if you're going to come to my live on Saturday where we're going to break it down, it's probably worth also witnessing what they're doing so you know what we're talking about. Okay. And now I see people are there. So that's great. We've got English with Jason in the house. Marlena, Carol, Wolf, Renee is here. K.J. lee, great to see you. Reverend Lisa Paete, I believe all. Thank you. And thank you for saying hello and letting me know that you're here. Okay, so that was one. So that's Saturday Livestream is happening at noon Pacific standard time, I believe. And Alex is event is at 9am Next thing is south by Southwest. I have two talks in the running. They had over 3,000 people submit to speak on their stage. And so now they're running what they call a panel, a panel voting to determine which speakers they're going to put on their Stage. So I've never spoken at south by South Southwest and probably will only ever do it once, but I thought it would be kind of cool to meet totally different audience than I usually connect with and talk about books because I think it's a really good fit for this audience. So I have two talks and I'm just going to again, because Angela's not here, I got to do this. I'm going to put links in the comments and if you're watching the replay, I'll put it in the description below. If you'd be so kind as to take basically two minutes. What you have to do is sign up like it almost looks like you're submitting to speak there. You sign up name email and then you, you click to confirm your email and then after you do that, you can kind of hit a button that says skip and then just put a heart beside the two talk titles. So yeah, I'd be very grateful if you just take two minutes and, and then sign sorry and then vote for these. I just dropped them in. Hopefully that comes through. It looks like it came through in two separate things. So I might have to. Yeah, I might have to do it separate. So I will do it in two here. So that is open until, I don't know, the 24th of August I believe. So here's the first one. That's number one and I'll put number two in there in a second and. And you can only vote once you just log in. Put your heart beside the title of the talk and that's it. That's all you need to do. And that will help me immensely and hopefully I will be able to speak at south by Southwest. And if you're there, we could say hello. All right, final thing and then we're going to get into these KDP items. The third thing is Author Launch Kit. It's funny. Not funny. The pricing has not changed yet. It's been a whole thing to change the pricing on Author Launch Kit. We've been working with the developers. It's hard coded in to the system questions that I have learned to ask now that we have developed this versus the things I knew at the beginning. Regardless, the developers should have it updated by the end of this week. But I figured I would tell you, I would just say hey listen, if you have been dragging your feet on getting Author Launch Kit, you still have a chance to get the launch pricing because it than I could have ever, ever imagined. So Author Launch Kit is marketing software for nonfiction books. Go to author LaunchKit AI and it's $99 for a year, $249 for Lifetime. With Lifetime, we're in the middle of. Well, the pricing thing slowed us down, but after the pricing thing is fixed, we are then going to be building out some really cool functionality for anybody with multiple books. So if you're a multiple book author that we're going to be building some cool functionality out in that so time you'll get all the updates. We also are going to be really adjusting the whole experience when you arrive inside of Author Launch Kit so that it's a lot more customized to what you should be doing based on what you have told the system, where you're at and what you're working on right now, and a few other updates that I'm really excited about. But anyways, Author Launch Kit AI it's worth it at the new price. So it's really, really worth it if you can sneak in still while we're waiting to get the pricing fixed. Okay, that's it. That's all my housekeeping. So let's just get into the KDP Amazon situation. So every time we think Amazon has stopped messing with kdp, they roll out a fresh batch of updates. Some are small, some are sneaky, some will hit you in the rankings if you ignore them or don't know about them. So let's just cover them one by one. Some of the things that I think are worth paying attention to. So number one, KDP in July. And I did another video on this, but I just haven't released it yet after our July break. So there'll be another video with screen shares and examples, but they now have an accessibility requirement that you have to check off when you upload your book for publication or if you make any revisions. Now, it doesn't mean if your book is not accessible, it won't get published. That's not what it means at all right now. It also doesn't seem to impact your discoverability. But what I take it to mean is that KDP is putting an emphasis on ensuring that your book experience is the best it can be for all readers. So and this is, I believe, only for ebooks, but it might be for print as well. I'm going off of memory. Like I said, I shot this more detailed screenshot on it, but if your book is accessible, that is a good signal. It signals to readers, libraries and schools and it could become a selling point. So at Book Launchers, this is something we're adjusting in our process behind the scenes. And you can use Kindle Create to just check things. And ultimately what it comes down to is a lot of things like image, alt, image text and things like that. And so it's just a little bit of extra steps. So if you're going to be doing an update to your book anyways, why not make it accessible so that it's fully ready to go and you can check. Yes, accessible there. And so I'll put a link in the description afterwards about what these requirements are and what updates you may want to consider making to your book so that you can check off that it's accessible. If Angela was here, I have her doing all the link dropping, but. But I'll just do it in the description below after. For anybody that's here now or that is watching the replay, I'll put it there the next thing. And I had posted about this in our free community, our book launchers.com school S K O O L and this was to check your books on Kindle because they've recently rolled out an A recap, an Amazon book recap. And it's funny looking in some cases and sometimes it's not actually accurate. So what is it? It's an AI generated summary that's now visible for certain series on Kindle. And let me see if I can just pull up a book really quick on my Amazon app and show you. If not, that's okay. You guys will be able to see it. But if you go to the Kindle version of a book, let's see, let's just try mine here. Julie Broad. Okay. And then what you'll see is under the description, let me click on. Don't want to click on the ones that are being advertised. That's stinky. You don't want to pay. You don't want to pay for an ad, click for your own book. Okay, now right here, let's see if you guys can see this here. Okay, so right here I know there's a little bit of a reflection. Come on. There you go. So this. What is. What's it about? That is an AI generated summary. If you have a book out on Amazon in Kindle, go and check it because this is not always accurate. This AI generated summary is not always accurate. And if it's not accurate, you can't change it yourself. You have to contact KDP support. And so how I even became aware of it was somebody in one of our communities contacted me and said like, it's got stuff in here that isn't even true. And it had brackets. So it was a memoir and it had a story about his father in it. This is a story about bracket, father's name. It just looked terrible. So check it and keep an eye on it because it does seem to be changing and evolving. And if it's not good, it could be impacting your sales. Now, as I always tell people when it comes to Amazon, they test things and if they feel like it's boosted conversions even a little bit, they'll keep it. And so this is a newer thing. They never announced it. It just kind of rolled out and started to appear. And so if it's generating more conversions, that's good for all of us. But I know there's been people who have had the wrong kind of the wrong genre in their things like that. There was a. There was some bias in one. Like I remember they're reading in a forum about it saying that it was politically, um. This is a political, like, I don't know, a very strong conservative political book when that was not actually the case. I'm. I don't remember the exact example. So, you know, the, the thing to think about is, is, you know, A, Amazon's doing it to boost conversions, so it's a win for everybody. But B, just go and check and make sure that it's actually reflective of your book because that could hurt you later on. And I've heard from a few people that it's not. Like I said, that's how I actually became aware of these AI summaries of popping up in the first place. All right, keyword rule changes. I'm going to again afterwards because I didn't get this link for you ready to go. But I'm going to link to a summary and a video from Kindle Printer where they did a great job of summarizing the keyword changes of late. But just know that some of the keyword changes have, have rolled out recently. And so you always check the KDP page to get the latest keyword changes. The big thing, I mean, for us, when we looked at it, we were like, oh, we already do all of this as best practice. Things like not saying it's the best or number one or limited time deal. You also can't be redundant with any of your categories repeating words from the title into the subtitle. Some of these changes were there, some of these things were there before. Some are changes. It's really important to be vigilant with this though, because you can get flagged or penalized and sometimes you don't even know. Like, some people go, my book got my book it went through. You told me. One of the examples was you told me that I couldn't have this word in my title and my subtitle, like a repeated word. And most of the time we've had the book kick back and it wouldn't publish. But every once in a while somebody gets a book published that way. I'm like, great, I'm glad that. I'm glad it worked for you. Now how are your sales? Well, they're not doing so good. I'm like, okay, that might be because it's getting penalized now in search because of that. The other thing that can happen and we have had this happen where it gets approved the first time, but then you do an update three or four months later for whatever reason, you found some typos and you update the file and now it gets rejected and now you can't update it. You have to make bigger changes to it, which, especially when it comes to titles, is very problematic. So it's really important to follow along with the keyword rules and just know they also change over time. And they recently added a few things. Things. But if you've been following us and you've followed our best practices for keywords, there is no changes in there that were were in contrast to what we already were recommending and what we already were doing. So it's always important though to keep an eye on your keywords. Remove any words that are not a fit anymore, that aren't being searched, but also that don't align with the rules from kdp. So again, I'll put that link as soon as we close out the live today. I'll put the link in the description below along with the the accessibility. I was like, there's something else I'm going to. I promised you. So the accessibility and the Kindle printer article. Okay. The big thing that I wanted to talk about today was the sales ranking change, which is not news today. People have. Oh hi Efren, welcome. People have not. It's been out for a little while now that Amazon has changed how they rank your book. So it used to be updated hourly. So within a couple hours those sales were reflected and it was all about the most recent sales. So the most recent 24 hour sales meant the most. This was great for people who wanted to game the system, see a big hit, get their bestseller flag and that was it. They recently changed it to be updated daily and and having a two or three day leg. Now here's why I wanted to talk about this because this has been coming up so many times. And even somebody that I was on his podcast and he didn't work with us or we would have prepped him for this. He should have worked with us. But anyway, he posted about his book launch and it was a whole confession video. And he basically was saying, I put six months into this launch, I created all this content and here I am, embarrassed to tell you guys, but it's launch day and I've sold three books. And I took a look back at his content and also I know his podcast, it's a pretty decent sized podcast. And so I messaged him and I said, hey, listen, you probably have sold a lot more books than you think you have and your bestseller flags, they're coming. Just give yourself two or three days. And sure enough, he messaged me back and he's like, you're right. He's like, I sold hundreds and hundreds of books and my bestseller flags are hitting now. And so this is why I wanted to talk about it. Because in our school group and in our author. Actually, no, it was in our author business accelerator, somebody else was saying, hey, listen, I know I've had like XYZ sales, but they're not showing in my dashboard. Here's the thing, the Amazon tracking and what's in your dashboard, they didn't say, this has changed and we're not showing you any data anymore. But what is true is there's a two or three day lag at least. So what does this mean on your launch day? It's gonna look like I almost said a bad word. It's gonna look. And it's a terrible expression, but I was about to say it's gonna look like you pooped the bed. But anyways, and you're gonna feel like this guy who did this confession video and he was like, it's 5pm on launch day and I've sold nothing despite all this work. So that's how it's going to feel. Launch day is going to feel like you have bombed. The reality is not the case. Well, maybe it is. If you did nothing, you can expect nothing. But if you push hard and you know you had book sales but you're showing nothing on your launch day, give yourself at least two or three days before you look again. Because this two or three day lag and the daily updating of sales, what we're finding is that is, that's your whole launch is not being shown anymore. So we used to have a good sense of what was going to happen launch day, because we'd be like, wow, they pre sold 800 books. This is going to be a great launch. That data isn't there like it used to be and it looks like you're not selling anything. So just a heads up on this because again, I'm seeing this all over the place where people think their launch is bombed. We were thinking that too in June. We had quite a few launches. We don't do very many launches in July and August. So we only have one launch in August. It's just coming up. But they were all looking that. I'm like, guys, what's going on? Like, why are they selling seven books when we've spent the last two months marketing them? And then it shows up three days later, they get their bestseller flags, they've sold hundreds and hundreds of books and we're off to the races. So if you have a launch coming up or you're doing a big promotion, don't check the dashboard every hour expecting to see your sales updating. Give yourself two or three days after your launch and then look at the data. Now that starts to be reflective of what's actually happened. So just a heads up on that. All right, we've got Mary Kay in the house and Renee is asking a question about would you get penalized for making changes to keywords? No. No, you wouldn't. Now, the only thing that is tricky is if you do something. Gary, you forgot to be ready for this live. What? You made it though, so that's okay. And so, yeah, the only thing with keywords that would be tricky, and I don't have a recent example to give you, just, you know, I'm searching my memory banks here, is if you change keywords in your title, I mean, title changes are a nightmare. But say you had violated one of the keyword rules in the title and you are trying to change it. That's where you may run into problems. But otherwise, no. We update keywords all the time. Especially if you see your book sales aren't doing what they used to do or your Amazon ads aren't performing like they should be performing, we'll do an update now. My one tip for updating keywords is don't update them all at once. Update. You know, like, if you're looking at the seven keyword boxes inside your KDP dashboard, Update 1, give it a couple weeks, then update the next one. Or if you're going to update your book description, just do that. Don't change the other keywords yet. The reason is if you update everything but only one thing was the actual lever that Made a difference. You have no way of knowing versus if you update one thing and now things are going better, you may not want to change anything else. But if things don't improve or they get worse, now you know that that change was good or not good or neutral. So that's why I would say don't update them all at once. You know, do this step by step and monitor what happens. So cool. I am going to put those links in after, but if anybody else has questions, we do have a few minutes. I know I fire hosed you with a whole bunch of changes and updates, but mostly I really just wanted everybody to kind of understand that things have been changing. I want you to check your AI summaries, if you have them. I want you to pay attention to the KDP rules so that you know when the KDP keywords are, are good or not good for you. Also, the KDP dashboard has changed a little bit. I'm not too fussed about it. But knowing that the accessibility is something that they've now put in there, that tells me there's going to be more and more emphasis placed on this. And ultimately it's a good thing, right? If your book is more accessible to all readers, then, you know, it's kind of why I have been saying AI or digital voice, you know, is better than no narration. And so people, people have taken a lot of heat for my stance on that. But I believe, you know, if somebody can't read a book and you don't have an audiobook, they're either going to use their own tool to read the book for them, which is going to be a digital narration, or if you have one, then you can sell it and make a small amount of money from it. But at least you've provided that option for them. Now these things that are like alt text descriptions so that it's basically if the image, if you read the book and the image gives you information that you won't have if you can't see that image. Now that's where that accessibility comes in. So that's where having alt text that describes that image can make the book more accessible. So there's a few other accessibility features and items, which is why I'll put the KDP information on that for you in the link below. All right, let's see if there's any other questions that came in. I think that's it. You guys don't have a lot of questions today, which is okay. But I hope to see you Saturday at 12 o'. Clock. We are doing the live stream to kind of just recap and highlight some of the things from Alex Hermozi's book launch. Like I said, the past two book launches were absolutely a lesson in how to sell a ton of books direct. And while his style and of course his budget because he's putting who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars into this book launch, it's it is a lesson in some and ideas for what authors can do when they sell a book direct and feed it into a very clear business goal and business path. And again, this is really interesting too because this is the third book in a series and the first book came out I think four years ago. I'll be more up to date and prepped for Saturday's session. But the first book came out and then I think it was two years and then it's been another two years I believe. Again, I will make sure I know all those facts and data points for you come Saturday. But it's been a lesson in a series, building momentum as you go. And so I think this is going to be the biggest of the three launches. He has said that he has filmed 147 pieces of content to lead up to the launch. So I think it's going to be a fascinating just insight and view into what an epic book launch can be. And I promise there will be lessons and takeaways for all of us as authors, even those that are not going to spend a dollar on their launch. There'll be things that you can learn and take away from this and I think it's going to be really fun. So his Launch is at 9am and I put a link in there. I'll put another link in the description below and then I'll do my recap at noon. So I have a little bit of time between the launch and there to just collect my thoughts and create some good highlights and discussion for all of you. All right, Mary Kay says question will the accessibility guidelines provide more searchable fields where we can put keywords? No, they don't. Right now it's literally a checkbox that says it is accessible or it's not or I don't know, basically is what it is. But what it does do is if you check yes, then it does create the accessibility for search. So it will mark that it's accessible for search, but there's no other keywords that that creates at this time. Again, this is the first part of the rollout. I wouldn't be surprised if we see further adjustments and adaptations to this, but this is what we're just seeing right now. And again, I have another video coming out soon that it shows you the dashboard and kind of goes into screen share and all of that stuff. So you can of course keep your eye out for that. And if you're not subscribed, get subscribed so you know when the video comes out. All right. Efren asks as a refresher, what is the recommended pre launch sale duration? Does that include a 99 cent ebook? So, I mean, it depends. Pre launch sale duration is going to depend on your goals, what you're trying to do. So if you're somebody that is trying to hit a list, a major list, you're going to want three months, give or take, to generate bulk sales, more sales, etc. Get them funneled to the appropriate channels and, and hit that list. So you're going to want, you know, three months or more. If you are somebody who doesn't really care about a big launch, you're going to use the book. Like we have a lot of speakers and other clients who are giving the book to their clients or they're using it as part of their business and they're not as fast about that launch. Then they're going to just basically give themselves a couple weeks before launch to make sure everything's right and then they launch. And then most of our clients are usually doing a six week pre launch, which allows us to make sure all the catalogs populated properly. You know, get some podcast interviews in, get some pre sale stuff for the ebook sale. We aren't doing that until at least one day after launch. In fact, we're usually not even pushing really hard on launch day because there's been so many issues these days that we are recommending our clients, you know, celebrate their launch day, but run any promotions even two or three days after and then run that ebook sale for three to five days after. Putting ads on different days and through different channels for each day so that you're generating consistent sales. Again, one of the reasons I believe Amazon did this change from hourly updates to daily with the two or three day lag is to discourage these big hits, these big all at once hits, and further reward people for consistent conversion, which is really what they care about the most. So as you are running promotions, doing one day isn't going to benefit you in the search algorithm as much as a three or five day will do. What do you think is the main or major way for marketing your book now on kdp? I mean, that's a huge question. It's very wide open and I could go a hundred different directions for it because there is discoverability. So there's your metadata, there's Amazon ads, there's running ebook sales through external forces, there's promoting to your own list, there's, you know, free doing free, not even free giveaways, but doing promotions through other things like inside of physical books or at events and things like that. So the list is really, really, really long as to what you can do. The main way is going to depend on your audience and what kind of books you're writing, what your bigger picture goals are like. For some of our clients, I would never ever, ever do a free book giveaway. Even 99 cent ebook sales don't make a lot of sense. But for others they do. And for some I would say let's, let's focus on libraries and forget about kdp or let's focus on selling bulk and forget about kdp. And then for some Amazon ads is great. It crushes it. It generates a lot of sales and those sales feed into the ecosystem that they've built for their business and their author goals. So it's a big topic. That's the kind of thing though I would say if you are interested in more support around it, we discuss that in our author business accelerator and we can break down and learn a little bit more about your book, your audience, your goals and kind of COVID that. So you know, that's always there too. All right, I think we hit all the points today. So hopefully see you all on Saturday at 12pm Pacific Standard Time after the Alex Hermosi launch. And I will be back here again next Tuesday. Well, I won't be, but somebody on my team will be back here next Tuesday as well for the regularly scheduled live stream which will be happening at 2pm Pacific Standard Time. And we'll have all our usual prizes, fun and festivities for you then. All right, have a fantastic rest of the week everyone. Thanks for being here.