Amazon KDP Will HATE This...

About this video

Dale lists grievances he says Amazon KDP will dislike. First, sweet-spot pricing: ebooks only earn 70% royalties between $2.99 and $9.99 and 35% outside that range, which he says penalizes pricing a book at $19.99 and devalues authors, while he claims Apple, Barnes & Noble Press, and Google Play Books pay 70% regardless of price. Second, KDP Select borrows count toward bestseller rank, so a book can be a bestseller without selling a copy; he proposes separate rankings for Kindle Unlimited and sales. Third, category squatters place books in wrong categories to claim number one status, yet KDP is auditing and suspending accounts — he cites indie author Sarah Sutton’s video about being wrongly suspended over a browse path she was not using — and argues KDP should fix its own category system first. Closely related, low-content books such as journals and planners have no proper categories, even though KDP added a low-content checkbox and removed ISBN use for them. He also criticizes out-of-control suspensions and terminations with no chance to explain, copycats and pirated versions going undetected while original authors receive takedown notices, boilerplate email support with no direct phone line, a new reports dashboard he calls wonky and prone to browser timeouts, the inability to delete or archive old books and editions from the dashboard, and Author Central remaining a separate site instead of a tab merged into KDP as CreateSpace was merged in 2018.

Key takeaways

• KDP pays 70% ebook royalties only between $2.99 and $9.99 and 35% outside that range, which Dale argues penalizes higher-value pricing.
• Because KDP Select page reads influence bestseller rank, Dale says a book can rank as a bestseller without a sale and calls for separate Kindle Unlimited and sales rankings.
• Category misuse by squatters is a real problem, but Dale argues KDP’s audits are also suspending innocent authors and that Amazon controls the browse paths authors end up in.
• Low-content books still lack dedicated categories despite KDP identifying them as low content and removing their ability to use ISBNs.
• His other complaints include harsh suspensions without arbitration, piracy and copycats, boilerplate support responses, a buggy new reports tab, no delete/archive function, and Author Central not being merged into the KDP dashboard.

Episode details: published July 26, 2022 · 14:54 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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