Tag: Kindle Direct Publishing

Why my books are no longer available in paperback

All of my books are available as ebooks, but only a few of them were available in print. Until now. If you’ve looked to buy one of my paperbacks, you may have noticed that none my books are available in print. Why?

TL;DR: KDP Paperback sucks monkey balls, and I’m not going to sell a book if I can’t assure my readers that the product will meet an acceptable level of quality.

I originally published my paperbacks through CreateSpace, before they were acquired by Amazon. The books they printed were great, and I never had a problem with any of them. On the contrary, whenever I had a question about the publishing process, their customer service team far exceeded my expectations and helped to shepherd many of my books to final publication.

I learned a lot of things the hard way, and made a lot of mistakes along the way. But that was all on me. When I finally figured out the right way to do what I wanted, I could alway count on CreateSpace to produce a quality product.

Fast forward to 2018. Amazon shuttered CreateSpace and began the migration of all of their books to KDP Paperback. I loved CreateSpace, but I also saw the writing on the wall, and migrated my books early. I also published several new paperbacks through KDP Paperback, using their cover creator program.

The publishing process went about as smoothly as it had through CreateSpace. The customer service wasn’t nearly as good, but I had a pretty good idea what I was doing, and with a little experimentation, I was able to produce a quality product.

Or so I thought.

I always order proofs when putting together a paperback, and scrutinize that proof carefully before approving it. For Heart of the Nebula and The Sword Keeper, I had to go through a couple of proofs before I was satisfied that I’d gotten it right. The most common problem was that the front cover would bleed onto the spine. After a couple of failed adjustments on the KDP Paperback cover creator, I decided to just upload the jpg and not futz with it, letting the program adjust it instead. And for a time, that seemed to work.

For the Star Wanderers books, I did the same thing, letting the KDP Paperback cover creator do its thing without futzing with the placement of the front cover image. A couple of the proof copies had the bleeding problem, but after following a couple of online discussions, it seemed that the consensus was that the proof copies were of lesser quality than the actual customer copies.

That should have been a red flag right there, but I went ahead and approved them anyway, since the bleed was only about a millimeter or so, and I couldn’t justify the expense of another eight proof copies.

Big mistake.

A couple of months later, I ordered about $100 worth of author copies to sell at conventions. This was the result:

Every damn book had the cover bleed problem. Every. Damn. Book. And it wasn’t a small print error, either. The bleed was as much as 3 millimeters on some copies.

Keep in mind that except for Genesis Earth, all of these covers were designed through KDP Paperback cover creator. Also keep in mind that aside from a couple of the Star Wanderers books, this printing error was not present in any of the proofs that I approved.

Genesis Earth was particularly troubling, because that was a book that I migrated from CreateSpace. None of the author copies that I’d ordered from CreateSpace ever demonstrated this printing error. In fact, I’d gone through several proofs to ensure that the front cover image was completely outside of the red zone, to ensure that such a bleed problem would never be an issue.

KDP’s customer service promises that they respond to every issue within 24 hours. That is a lie. My first inquiry received no reply—not even the standard copy-paste boilerplate response that they usually send first.

I waited three days and sent a second inquiry, threatening to email Jeff Bezos and pull all of my books if I did not receive a response within 24 hours. As you can probably surmise, I did not get a response within 24 hours.

I did eventually get a response, and ultimately I did get a partial refund for my books. But by then, I’d had enough.

KDP Paperback produces an unacceptably inferior product. Furthermore, their customer service is terrible. Because I cannot asure my readers that they will receive an acceptable quality book, I have decided to pull all of my paperbacks from KDP Paperback and go through someone else.

It may take a few months to figure this out, in which time, my books unfortunately will not be available in print. However, I think that this will be the best solution in the long run. I’ve heard good things about Ingram Spark, so I’ll check them out, but it may take a while to do things properly.

And this time, I’m not going to take any half measures.

Shifting Strategies

A couple of weeks ago, Kobo came out with some new terms and conditions for their Kobo Writing Life program. Under the new terms, the list price for a book (not the sales price) cannot be higher than it is elsewhere.

This throws a kink in the works, since the only way I’ve ever gotten traction on Kobo is by taking advantage of their promotions, like the half off box set sales or the 30% off monthly sales. The problem, of course, is that Amazon has the same clause in their TOS, and if you undercut the Amazon price they will 1) match the lower price, and 2) send you a nastygram threatening to close your account if you don’t change your prices to comply.

(This is also the reason why my books are not on Google Play Books. Google will arbitrarily drop the prices of your books, sometimes setting the price to free without any prior warning, leading to a loss of income on Amazon when they price match your books.)

Until now, the way I’ve gotten around that is by pricing my books a little higher on Kobo so that I can drop the price for the promotional sales. But it does feel a little weird to have the same product at a different price on different sites. If I were a Kobo reader, that would turn me off (hence the change in their TOS).

At the same time, it’s come to my attention that unless your book has an ISBN, Kobo will not distribute your books to the many local ebookstores that they partner with. You can still publish on Kobo, but your books won’t go any further.

In the United States, ISBNs are insanely expensive. If you buy them one at a time, it costs $125 for each one. You can get them as low as $1.50 each, but you have to buy 1,000 at a time.

Until now, I haven’t really bothered with ISBNs. Most ebook publishing platforms don’t require them, and for those that do, you can publish through a distributor like Draft2Digital who will assign you an ISBN for free. The catch is that the publisher on record for the free ISBN will be D2D, but that doesn’t impact your publishing rights at all.

(Print also requires ISBN, but CreateSpace also gives you an option for a free CreateSpace-assigned ISBN, which is what I’ve been doing for print.)

In short, by publishing my books directly to Kobo without providing my own ISBNs, my reach is greatly limited. I can publish to Kobo via D2D and get the extra reach, but then I’ll lose access to the promotions tab, which is pretty much the only way to get my books in front of Kobo readers. But that doesn’t matter anyway, since I can’t price my books on Kobo higher than they are on Amazon, and if I drop the price on Kobo for a sale, Amazon will start sending nastygrams.

So here’s my new strategy:

  1. I’m going to pull all of my books out of Kobo Writing Life and go through Draft2Digital instead. There really is no advantage to staying all-in with KWL anymore, and the added benefit of the D2D ISBNs is enough to convince me to go through them.
  2. At the same time, I’m going to create some Kobo-exclusive bundles to take advantage of the KWL promotions tab. If the bundle doesn’t appear on Amazon, then it doesn’t matter how I price it on Kobo because there’s nothing for Amazon to match. At the same time, the contents of the bundle are still available as individual books, so my Amazon readers lose nothing.
  3. For my single-title books, the price on Kobo will be the same as the price on Amazon. For the Kobo-exclusive bundles, the list price will be higher, but they’ll also be on sale more often which should bring more attention to my single-title books.

The biggest downside I can see is that my Kobo royalties will be split between D2D and KWL. To offset this, I’ll have to publish a variety of Kobo-exclusive bundles. Here are some of the ones I have in mind:

  • Bringing Stella Home and Heart of the Nebula, in one double-novel.
  • Desert Stars and Stars of Blood and Glory, in one double-novel.
  • The complete Star Wanderers series, with Brothers in Exile.
  • A first-in-series bundle, with Outworlder, Brothers in Exile, and Bringing Stella Home.
  • The first Sons of the Starfarers omnibus (I-III). This means I will take it down from Amazon.

So that’s the plan. I probably won’t announce these new bundles to my email list, since most of my subscribers are Kindle readers and I don’t want to be too spammy. But I will announce them here.