Amazon Archives

KDP Reports

May 31, 2019May 25, 2019Business of Writing

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

On Monday, I’ll be picking up on my blog series ‘making life easier as a writer.’ But today I wanted to point out something new (still in beta) on the KDP dashboard in case you’ve missed it (and I know lots of you probably noticed this earlier than I did!)

KDP is rolling out their new reports section and my first impression is that it looks really helpful.

I’m one of those authors who absolutely hates doing metrics on ads or tracking sales. I know it’s something important but delving down into spreadsheets and the business aspect has always been something of a drag.

I love that Amazon is making this easier. For one thing, I like to keep track of which series sells better. For another, I like to see which individual books seem to sell strongest in a series…and try to figure out what the magic formula was so that I can duplicate it again.Continue reading

Formatting Book Descriptions for Amazon

May 3, 2019April 28, 2019Business of Writing

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Just thought I’d share a tool that I’ve found really helpful lately. It’s also free, which is especially nice.

Dave Chesson from Kindlepreneur is the tool’s creator. It wrangles book descriptions on Amazon’s website. If you’re like me, you don’t want the print on the description too small. You want spacing between your paragraphs. And maybe you want some things in bold (a teaser, for example), or in italics. This tool helps with all that.

I’ve experimented with other book description tools before and still found I had issues. Or I’d try to put in the HTML codes myself and, well, I’m not a coder.

I’ve had no issues with this tool. I copy-paste my book description from a Word doc into Notepad or another plain text editor (or you could just type it into the generator, word by word). Then I paste that directly into the generator box.

I particularly liked creating a larger font. I keep my book descriptions pithy and they look better in a bigger font size.

I was so happy with the way the descriptions looked that I went back through and changed all of them. :) Yes, this took a little while, but I was pleased with the results.

Have you used Dave Chesson’s resource before? What tools do you find yourself using regularly?

A Book Description Generator Tool from @DaveChesson: Click To Tweet

Moving from CreateSpace to KDP Print

August 31, 2018August 30, 2018Business of Writing, Uncategorized

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Always leery of more work, I’d put off moving my print books from CreateSpace to KDP Print. With about 20 titles to transfer (the rest were trad-pubbed), I was concerned that it would be a long, problem-riddled process.

There were originally other concerns, too. I was used to buying cheap author copies on CreateSpace and for a while, there was not an avenue to buy those copies on KDP Print. That changed as of November 2017.

A full list of differences between CreateSpace and KDP Print can be found on Amazon here.

But I changed my mind about not making the move when I received an email Tuesday from Amazon, stating:

In a few weeks, we’ll start automatically moving your CreateSpace books to KDP. Your books will remain available for sale throughout the move and you’ll continue to earn royalties. Once we begin this process you’ll be unable to edit existing titles or create new titles on CreateSpace.

If you have a release planned soon or you would like to start the move yourself, we are making updates that will allow you to move your entire catalog in just a few steps. During this transition, you can contact KDP customer support by email and access phone support in English.

I decided to stop putting it off and make the move myself. If there were going to be issues, better to go on and address them now and before we all started having issues at once. And I have a fair number of titles.

Here’s what I found: Continue reading