Why Amazon KDP Is Essential for Every Author Despite Challenges: 5 Key Reasons

It's been a rocky publishing road for Amazon authors. Just today I saw a note in a forum I'm a part of that. This Amazon publisher got notified that their account had been made inactive. When this person received the email, it said, here's your instructions. And there was nowhere to submit the verified documents. That is so normal and so frustrating. It is such a tough time to be someone who relies on Amazon for their book sales. Sales and yet I still recommend authors publish to Amazon. Why is that and what do you need to know? Well, if you're wondering, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad. I'm founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing company. At Book Launchers we have several paths to get you to a book, including a group called our Author Business Accelerator. We also have working one on one with a writing coach or working with the writer. Then we have a team of publishing experts, editors and marketing experts who swoop in around you and help bring your book to your readers with the goal of growing a brand or your business or both. I've always advocated strongly that authors publish beyond Amazon. My belief is that while Amazon is an incredible platform to reach readers, not all readers are there. And the company holds a lot of power over us as authors. And to be exclusively reliant on them gives them all the power in your business. And that to me is a little nerve wracking. So let's break this down on why it's challenging working with Amazon, what the choice is and why I still recommend Amazon. So number one, one thing to really understand is Amazon isn't here to help authors. Their mandate is not like Draft 2, digital or other platforms where they're really here to support indie authors in their success. Amazon is guided by four customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence and long term thinking. Amazon strives to from their website be Earth's most customer centric company, Earth's best employer and Earth's safest place to work. At any point in there, does Amazon care about its vendors, AKA the authors and publishers putting books on their platform? No. No they do not. And ultimately that is okay when you understand this is what they do. They care about selling to the customer, selling what the customer wants at a price. They want it in an operationally efficient manner. That is Amazon. At no point should you expect anything but Amazon to be taken care of. Amazon. But what does this mean? Well, it means they are giving you something that's really powerful to help you sell books and you can Rest assured, if it's good for the customer, it's good for them. That is okay, because more sales is where you and Amazon are in alignment. But keep in mind their goal isn't to sell your book. Their goal is to sell the thing their customer is looking for. So that's where you must understand what the Amazon shopper is looking for and and how Amazon determines what to show to who. So this is where we rely heavily on tools like Publisher Rocket. By the way, did you know they now have a free Amazon ad course showing you how to use Rocket to run profitable ads on Amazon? It gives you a crash course in keywords and ad setup and more. I've got that course down for you below@book launchers.com Rocket so go check it out. But the point here is your metadata. Keep keywords, category, title, subtitle and book description. The first couple lines of your book description in particular are the things the Amazon algorithm relies on to show a buyer what they think the buyer wants. And believe me, they are good at figuring out what someone wants. So make sure if your book is a fit, Amazon knows it. All right, point number two, Amazon protects their reputation with consumers. We'll get to that in a minute when it comes to book reviews, but where we're seeing it lately is in publishing rights requests. Amazon asks authors to prove they have the right to their own work and this can be tricky for self published authors and it can be upsetting, especially if Amazon suspends your account until you can provide the proof they ask for. This issue is a great reason to file for copyright as soon as your book is complete rather than waiting until after launch. This allows you to have the documentation to submit promptly if you get caught up in this one when you upload your book to Amazon. And yes, you can file for copyright before your book is published. There is an option to fill in that it is not published yet. When I said this before, a lot of people said they thought they had to publish first and you don't. You can file before your work is published and I highly recommend you do just in case Amazon asks for proof, because this is excellent proof. I'm going to sneeze. This happened to me last year before we published Self Promotion, Promote and Succeed and we sent in the copyright letter I had received when we submitted and all was well. As always, having the right documentation and giving them a prompt reply when they flag something is vital. A delayed response can trigger an account suspension, so make sure you're monitoring the email that you have submitted. Your book Upload through and now it's a good idea to submit for copyright as soon as you're done. Your book Number three, feeding off that one a warning can lead to a suspension and quickly followed by a termination. And and this seems to be happening more now than ever, ever before. Amazon maintains the right to suspend or terminate your KDP account at any time and withhold any outstanding royalties you might be owed at the time. Sometimes these account issues stem from very legitimate causes, like if you try to publish a book that isn't yours, or you violate KDP's terms and conditions by maintaining multiple active KDP accounts or starting a new account after your old one was terminated. All of those reasons are things you should not do. And it's total, totally legitimate that Amazon would suspend or terminate your account. But more and more it seems they are terminating accounts without a justifiable reason. My guess, and it is just a guess, is that this is because they have a lot of bots doing a lot of the screening and they have tightened criteria because of the increase in AI books and low content books. So what do you do? Well, this is the number one reason I advocate for creating your own email list. A lot of our authors push back and say, well, I don't plan to write another book or I don't have services to sell. Why do I need an email list? Well, there's a lot of reasons why every author should create an email list, but here's one big one. What if Amazon terminates your account? How will you tell people to try to get the word out, to buy your books from other places or to contact Amazon to get your book back? And if you have people's email addresses, you can build a relationship with them and, and that builds your platform and your value over time because then you can let them know where there's a 99 cent ebook sale or when you launch the audio version or you can just consistently ask for reviews. I can go on and on. So build your platform and again, yes you can have social media, but you don't own social media either. So an email you control and own and you can't, they're not going to turn it off on you because you own and control it. So I recommend building your platform and specific specifically an email address list inside of your book. Have strong calls to action to connect with you via email newsletter. So you are gaining readers who build a relationship with you outside of the book. Remind them a few times of the value you offer elsewhere when you're writing your book. And if you need Motivation to do so. Remember, Amazon will never tell you who's reading your book. So this is your chance to connect. And then if something does happen to your book, you have an army of people that that can support you with whatever it is you need to do. Next, number four, customer reviews get removed or blocked all the time on Amazon and this becomes a huge point of contention for people. And I get it. I had 12 reviews for self, Promote and succeed just disappear overnight. And a few of my YouTube besties mentioned they couldn't even post a review. These are legitimate reviews and legitimate people who can't post and it's frustrating. Oh, who's a YouTube bestie, you might be asking. Well, when you comment on the day a video is released, which is every Tuesday and Friday except in July when we take a break, not only do you get entered to win some fabulous swag, but you also get one step closer to YouTube bestieland. And we celebrate our besties here all the time. People like Kevin Hall, Bonnie Lester, Professor Burlingame, Tyler Mondragon, Stella Golf, Beeline Bill, and so many more. Thank you for always being here to comment and support the channel. Anyway, your customer reviews are social proof for you and your work. Even if book sales aren't your number one focus, customer reviews will impact speaking, engagement, bookings, media interviews, client attraction, and so much more. So reviews are vital. And Amazon is the go to of most people. When looking at what people are saying about your book, your message and your work, you want, let me say this again, you want Amazon to protect the reviews and not let a bunch of bots or competitors or random people trash your book. That said, the strictness with which they police reviews can be hard. And while we'll never know how they really connect accounts to friends or family or how those bots work, well, there's things that you can do to try to protect yourself. Amazon owns Goodreads, for example. You may have connected Goodreads to your social media, which gives Amazon access to your friend list. Also, IP addresses are an obvious way Amazon can connect people. If you've bought things for that person on Amazon, that could also be a connection. Ultimately, the way I look at it, as frustrating as it is to see good reviews go away, you want honest customer reviews to guide your purchase decisions, don't you? Not a popular person who can get a bunch of people to say nice things about their product that somebody's never used, even if it's crap. So it's in all of our best interests that they protect their reviews, even if it's frustrating. It's also frustrating when they won't remove a crappy review when it's clear, clear somebody hasn't read the book. They only remove them if it's hateful or discriminatory. So sometimes you're going to have a one star review because somebody's pages fell out of the book or they hated the color blue and your cover was blue. It's not fair, but it's what we all deal with as authors. So know that going in number five, Amazon doesn't have a lot of humans that work the front lines. This means that if you have an issue as an author, you're going to have to fight with the bots to get get to the people. This is super frustrating when you have a launch date and things are stuck in processing and there's no clear reason. We had that happen with a book that had journaling in the subtitle, which on the surface is a violation of their policies because it states on their policy page, don't add anything from the following list of prohibited items in the title field. Repeating generic words like notebook, journal, gifts, books, etc. So on the surface, this book was violating that. However, when you see the book is literally about art journaling, you see it's not a generic word. It's got a really important purpose to identifying the ideal reader. It took us multiple times pushing back on the rejection before a human reviewed it and accepted it. So this is the thing you have to be ready for. Give yourself more time than you think, because you're not dealing with humans at first. You have bots who follow rules to the literal line and there's some situations where a human needs to be involved to override those rules. Again, go back to the original statement that Amazon is in this for operational efficiency, not for you. They streamline their processes to the point of pain for any author that needs human help. But they have created the largest online marketplace for books and we can thank them for making it easy and possible to reach authors. As indie authors, I continue to use Amazon, but they aren't my primary focus. My first focus is on growing my platform and connecting with readers directly. Which reminds me, if you want to get my latest book Self Promote and Succeed for free in audiobook version and join my bi weekly launch letter, well, head to selfpromoteandsucceed.com audio. Enjoy my gift. How do I connect with readers directly? Well, through Book Funnel. Here's a video I did on that. And here's the one YouTube thinks you should see. Next. Click on over. I'm waiting for you.