PG was intrigued by a comment/question from Randall that was part of the discussion of another post:
Is KDP getting better? Most things Amazon just keep getting better. Is that true for KDP too?
What do you think?
Is KDP getting better?
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KDP’s price-matching, while still not the most convenient thing, goes much faster now than it used to. Emailing a request through their contact form has gotten me a price-match within a couple of days—and the books go back to regular price on their own much faster than they used to once I reset my Smashwords editions to regular price.
The new keyword fields are a bit aggravating in that they seem to have character limits, but that’s not a big deal for me; at least not yet.
I’m still leery of Select after the various stories I’ve heard. I only put one book at a time in on occasion if I want to try a Countdown Deal or a few free days.
I left Nook Press in frustration over the way they complicated uploading files a while ago, and am content to distribute there through Smashwords. Kobo’s interface is one of the nicest and easiest to use, and I’ve had some interesting results with the promo opportunities they offer now (still in beta, I think?). Also love being able to set a sale ahead of time or put a book free for specific dates. But aside from those few promos, my sales there don’t come near my sales at KDP.
I and others actually like the new KDP interface. It represents a big step forward for those who actually like it. Also, the pre-order emails someone else complained about – there are those of us who actually like those, too. In fact, they’re making some authors’ lives easier, and we don’t see them at all as “annoying”.
As with anything, how you see ANY of what KDP or Amazon is doing depends completely on how it serves you and your individual needs. Since all of us are different, and have different needs, desires, and just plain wants, some will hate the very things that others will love. Subjectivity. Ain’t it wonderful? LOL
Count me as one who loves the new Dashboard (though it really isn’t all that new anymore, since it was debuted early 2014).
I love being able to generate sales and order reports per day/week/month-to-date or by particular Amazon site/title.
But as far as I’m concerned, Amazon could do away with the Units Ordered graph. All it seems to do is confuse a lot of people who think it shows actual sales (Surprise! It doesn’t).
D2D’s report interface is good, but what you see there for a month doesn’t always jive with what your copies sold/earnings are for that month when the final downloadable reports are posted. Sometimes sales from the previous month are added in.
H. I’ve heard mixed things from readers about this. KU is full of garbage scam books. The sci-fi lists are full of books with shirtless men on the cover. Reviews are still broken.
If KU represents a gain for one set of consumers, and does nothing to harm any other consumers, then it is an incremental gain to the market. (Credit Pareto)
Lots of things Amazon does appeal to a subset of all consumers rather than to the full set of consumers.
So it seems PG did a good job of asking us just enough of a vague question that everyone can say something hehehe
Is KDP getting better? seems to have multiple views:
a. Is the process of using KDP to get your ebooks processed and ready for sale getting better?
b. Is managing your ebooks in KDP getting better for mechanical stuff (names, titles, etc.)?
c. Are KDP books getting easier to adjust prices or promote?
d. Is the dashboard giving you more info on sales, etc.?
e. Is KDP linked to KU working better, despite all the issues with KU generally?
f. Is selling ebooks on Amazon improving, with or without exclusivity, etc.?
g. Is it getting better for individual authors or maturing for all authors?
h. Is it better for consumers?
Sounds like good topics for individual blogs 🙂 Joe V can write about half, probably only needs a tweet or two in length since he’s excellently succinct 🙂
PolyWogg
A. Not really, but it wasn’t broken to begin with.
B. No. Other platforms do it better.
C. Not that I’ve noticed, but I haven’t tried out Amazon’s ad service yet.
D. No, and other platforms are superior on this point.
E. Don’t know. None of my books are in KU.
F. Not in my experience.
G. Not sure about the question. I can only speak for myself, not for all writers.
H. I’ve heard mixed things from readers about this. KU is full of garbage scam books. The sci-fi lists are full of books with shirtless men on the cover. Reviews are still broken.
Depends on what the author values.
For new author hoping to make a living, I think the answer is yes. To me, the bottom line is that they’re adding features that help new authors find their audience. If you can find an audience, you can make a living writing fiction.
> KU, the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, Prime Reading. I know many authors hate these programs, but few would argue that they don’t encourage readers to try an author they’ve never heard of. Cost is often a barrier when trying a new author; Amazon is taking that out of the equation; it’s a competition of content.
> Promotion tools: Kindle Countdown Deals, free days, ads on the Amazon site and Kindle lockscreen.
> Reducing the price of kindle devices and adding features that enhance the reading experience and attract more readers (page flip, x-ray, etc).
They ask for exclusivity in exchange for many of these KDP features, but they have also invested more than any other company in e-Reading. They’ve made a significant investment and they want authors to be focused on their platform and to offer readers something they can’t get elsewhere.
Agreed.
As a new author, still figuring this all out and mostly focused on finding readers, KDP seems to keep adding helpful features. I like the option of KU and since I first published, pre-orders are now possible. They’ve also added some advertising features and now an easy way to publish your ebooks into paperbacks. Seems to be getting better to me.
It’s better than Random-Penguin and S&S. I keep going to their buildings asking them to sell my books or put them on pre-order. All they do is have security escort me out. Where’s the customer service?
‘You’ are not their customer, you are merely a sheep they will shear if they think they can get enough for your wool.
The buyers of the wool are their customers.
Depends on what sort of “service” you’re looking for…
Every one of these platforms have quirks. I can’t set a sale price ahead of time on Amazon or Nook, for instance, but I can on Kobo, iTunes and Google Play. I have to set my prices higher on Google Play than anywhere else because they automatically discount it by 20% and Amazon gets pissed if the book is less elsewhere.
I need a separate program to upload to iTunes. I need to use a different format to upload to Amazon. Kobo offers no indication that an updated book has been updated, once it’s been updated, so I’ve updated a book repeatedly out of fear it didn’t take. Nook doesn’t let you do pre-orders unless you send them an email asking pretty-please for the right to do so, and then they have a tendency to not tell you when preorders have been made.
Amazon lets you pick only a very small number of sub-categories for your books, while Google Play lets you pick an almost infinite number of combinations, for what good it does.
In terms of overall usability and friendliness and ease-of-use, Amazon’s KDP is about as good as the Nook’s platform, slightly better than Kobo’s, much better than iTunes, and eons better than Google Play.
So, the lesser of the evils and they seem to attract more buyers then?
I just imagined the “as compared to what?” part of this needed to be addressed.
Draft2Digital is a distributor, not a publisher, but IMHO their service is far superior to KDP’s. You can see all your books on the same page, you can set prices in all major and several minor currencies (including many not available on KDP), you can automate your frontmatter and backmatter (including vendor-specific buy links), you can generate sales graphs going all the way back to day one, and you can point your readers to a single page with all of your buy links.
I’ve heard good things. But for the vendor-specific buy links, I’m getting that from Vellum. It’s a pain to republish at each vendor site, but I’ll take the afternoon of publishing hassle in exchange for keeping the 5%.
Gene,
1) Google Play — the discount is 23% (and a pain-in-the-neck it is.)
2) Re: updated files. I’m discovering that it’s best to include a datestamp in one’s content and cover files. That way, if the distributor at least shows the file name, you’ll know which one they have.
1: yep, I actually just look at a chart someone figured out a while ago to price things. It works out so a $5.99 book is marked up there and discounted down to $5.99 by them. I make hardly any sales there; it’s almost not worth the trouble.
2: that makes sense. If this is about the Kobo complaint, though, I find I can’t peek inside once I’ve uploaded the new file if I’m uploading a document formatted by Vellum. In other words, i can’t look for that datestamp inside the file when on their dashboard.
I’d suggest for GP just raising your price to $7.99. You won’t run into price matching troubles, it’s quicker than figuring a discount, and you’ll make more money per sale. Personally, I think people like those .99 ending list prices best just because it’s what they’re used to seeing. I do something similar and people still buy the books, despite them being $2 higher than the other retailers’ prices. It makes it a little more worth the trouble. 🙂
KDP *SELECT*? No. It used to help, but it hasn’t for a long time. The promo opportunities don’t produce enough results to make exclusivity worthwhile.
+1
KDP getting better? No. The “new and improved” dashboard is worse than the old one, IMO, and the old one was terrible. It’s like they’re attempting to copy D2D’s awesome interface. And failing miserable.
They’ve also been rewriting the TOS without telling anyone, refusing to do anything about the KU page reads problem, and it’s now been discovered that if you’re reading a KU book offline those pages are NEVER counted as read.
Getting better? No. They know they almost own the market, and they’re already starting to screw us over.
This. It’s the reason I went all-out of KDP Select back in October when pages read flatlined. Given Amazon’s erratic behavior where authors are concerned, I have come to the conclusion that I have to concentrate on building a reputation wide, even if it means less income for now.
But with Amazon no longer paying for borrows, it’s not a huge loss.
Maybe a good time to revisit the post a while back by Hugh Howey about his musings about KDP:
http://www.hughhowey.com/stuff-i-want-to-know/
Some good discussion in the comments also.
KDP does not allow you to set the price of a book to free. All other platforms (except Nook Press) do.
KDP nerfs pre-orders by not counting the sales on the day the book releases. All other platforms do.
KDP does not allow you to see all of your books on the same page.
KDP has discrepancies between the graph on the sales dashboard and the month-to-date unit sales. The two do not perfectly correspond.
KDP does not allow you to set a sales price underneath the crossed out list price.
The only thing about KDP that’s changed in recent months has been that they got rid of the “finalized” vs “draft” checkboxes for pre-orders. That’s a small improvement (fewer potential failure points in the publishing process). However, they do send you a bunch of annoying emails in the weeks leading up to your publishing date, and there’s no real way to filter those out. Two steps forward, one step back.
In short, no, KDP is not getting better. It’s not getting significantly worse, but there’s a lot of ways they can improve, and they’re not doing it.
But why should they, when Amazon has 70% of the ebook market?
Thanks Joe Vasicek for taking the time.
Appreciate your input.
Love this list.
On your first point, I can see why Amazon doesn’t want to be the home of authors who only want to give away their books. To avoid it though, they don’t have to go to the extreme and awkward policy that they use. (Publish free elsewhere; when we discover it, we will make your book free on Amazon.) Instead they should have a rule that you can maintain one free book for every five you publish. Or one free book for every series you publish of 3 books or more. Etc. Design a policy that serves and promotes to optimize sales of an author’s work, controlled by the author (within certain new policy guidelines).
The problem is, of course, that the opportunity to make a book “free” has been doled out in 5-day quarterly increments, and used as the bait to attract authors into listing books in the Select Program. To do anything more rational with FREE, Amazon has to re-address that.
But why should they, when Amazon has 70% of the ebook market?
That 70% comes from consumers. They seem happy.
I never have believed in the idea that authors are Amazon’s customers. If we look at the details of the relationship, it appears Amazon is the authors’ customer.
I doubt widget and spoon makers think they are Amazon’s customers. They are suppliers, just like authors.
Right. We are suppliers, not customers. Amazon isn’t trying to make us happy, they’re trying to grab our margins. That’s reason #2 why exclusivity is such a horrible deal.
Reason #1 is that it hurts readers.
Our margins have no independent existence. They don’t exist before we have an agreement with Amazon. There is nothing to grab. we could just as easily say authors are grabbing Amazon’s margin.
Amazon has consistently paid 70% of list price for books priced between $2.99 and $9.99.
Exactly what have they grabbed? From where?
And consumers? Amazon offers all of it’s goods to all consumers. Any consumer can get an account.
This is the same argument we’ve been endlessly hashing out since 2012.
KU has been anything but consistent in terms of payment to authors, and Amazon deliberately tips the scale towards KU authors (as is their right). It’s a very effective way to undercut authors, just like the tradpub cartel was a very effective gatekeeper in the old days.
Jeff Bezos once said: “your margin is my opportunity.” That applies to all of Amazon’s suppliers, including authors. We are not special snowflakes; we are not the exception.
A truly independent author is one who does not depend on a single publisher or bookseller as their sole source of income, no matter how lucrative it may be.
Jeff Bezos once said: “your margin is my opportunity.” That applies to all of Amazon’s suppliers, including authors.
That comment applied to retail competitors, not suppliers. Bezos observed that if a seller has a 20% margin at prevailing prices, Bezos is happy to lower retail price, and take a 10% margin on the same item. This lets him sell it to consumers for less. Since Bezos doesn’t produce anything, he has to get it, then sell it at a lower margin. (This is very different from pushing suppliers for a lower price.)
A producer can do the same thing by selling his product to suppliers for less than competing producers. He undercuts his competitors’ margin.
However, independent authors have zero credibility when complaining about margin. This is exactly what independent authors did to traditional publishers. The traditional margin was the independents’ opportunity. Independents took the opportunity and mercilessly cut their own margin at the expense of publishers. They did an exceptionally good job.
It works because one party accepts a smaller margin then the competition.
If we wanted to apply this to Amazon treatment of independent authors, we would have to look at Amazon imprints. Amazon would be cutting margin if it accepted 15% rather than 30% of retail. But, we can see they have done the opposite. For their own imprints, they take 65% rather than 30% for KDP sales.
I agree there has been development of payment systems on KU. It’s new, and it would be unreasonable to think they got pricing right the very first time. They adjusted payment as the service developed. I expect more changes.
However, there is no KU margin that independents can claim as their own. If there is, what is it? How do we calculate it?
To be fair, you may be right about the quote not applying to Amazon’s suppliers directly. Then again, had Amazon ever not taken an opportunity to bite into their supplier’s margins? Remember, when KDP first came out, it was 35% across the board. Only when Apple offered 70% royalties did Amazon change their royalty structure.
Only when Apple offered 70% royalties did Amazon change their royalty structure.
Amazon’s margin was Apple’s opportunity.
If Amazon isn’t making you happy — why are you bothering with them? There are others out there you can deal with. Is there another seller that will give you better ‘margins’? If so, why aren’t all the writers flocking over to them?
It’s just like dealing with trad-publishers, you don’t like the deal they offer you — you walk.
I’m still not understanding why you and others seem to want to have your cake and eat it too. If you don’t want to go exclusive then don’t, you can still sell on Amazon. Want what you see as the special perks the exclusive guys and gals are getting? Then you have to play the game by the rules set for it.
Actually, I’m selling about 2-3 books outside of KDP for every Amazon sale right now. Not sure if that’s what you mean by “have your cake and eat it too,” but I’ll take it.
“That’s reason #2 why exclusivity is such a horrible deal.”
Then if you’re ‘not’ exclusively on Amazon, what are you complaining about?
Some writers either see an advantage to playing the game the Amazon way — or at least think they do — just like some writers are still begging trad-pub to let them sign their rights away with a ‘bad for them’ contract.
“Reason #1 is that it hurts readers.”
Another thing I don’t understand. You say yourself that you are not exclusive so I’m assuming no readers are ‘hurt’. As it’s the writers’ choice whether or not to be ‘exclusive’ — are you saying then the writers are hurting their readers?
If you end up with a trad-pub contract, they will decide where you will or won’t be sold, the price the reader will pay and the cover that will be used to entice them to look or frighten them away.
You’re rambling, Allen.
Yes, I’m saying that writers hurt readers when they decide to go exclusive. They limit the readers’ purchasing options. Believe it or not, there are many readers who prefer not to shop on Amazon, either because of the $2 surcharge for non US readers, or concerns about privacy and personal data, objections to Amazon’s business practices, or any other of a number of valid reasons.
Exclusivity also hurts writers who choose not to go exclusive. It creates a system where they are at a disadvantage. There’s a reason my books are selling better outside of Amazon right now.
Yes, I’m saying that writers hurt readers when they decide to go exclusive. They limit the readers’ purchasing options.
Amazon makes its goods easily available to all consumers. Authors who sell through Amazon have their goods made available to all consumers. The market is not restricted when consumers have the option of easily taking advantage of all those offerings.
Does Walgreens harm consumers because it doesn’t sell table saws? There are surely some consumers who would want the convenience of buy a table saw at their local Walgreens.
And when Walgreens closes at 10PM? I would like to buy something at 11PM. Are consumers harmed by Walgreens hours?
Some authors use KU to compete with other authors. Those other authors don’t like the competition.
That’s a false argument and you know it. Whether or not Walgreens sells table saws has no bearing on whether that table saw is exclusive to Home Depot.
Whether or not Walgreens sells table saws has no bearing on whether that table saw is exclusive to Home Depot.
If a condition is a harm to consumers, the reason for that condition doesn’t matter.
If absence of a good in a given outlet is a harm to consumers, it doesn’t matter why it is absent.
FYI, the discrepancy between the graph and the table of monthly sales numbers bugged me too, until I finally figured out what was going on. The graph shows immediate purchases. You click buy a book, that sale goes on the graph. But, it often can take hours for the actual money to process (or longer if dealing with foreign countries). And, of course, the reader may return the book for a refund. So, the numbers on the table don’t adjust until the money has come in. Now, I’m not suggesting this is a good thing — having the graph and table not be the same — but this appears to be the reason.
The graph is for orders, not sales. That’s why it’s titled “Units Ordered”. 😉
All orders do not necessarily become sales (credit card declined for some reason, and the purchaser doesn’t have another one or doesn’t immediately change to a different card and complete the sale).
If the graph and Month-to-Date sales (or the reports you can generate from the Dashboard) don’t jive, that’s why: Some orders didn’t become actual sales.
Of course, you can also have sales without any corresponding orders appearing. [shrug]
NookPress does allow you to set your price to free. They made that upgrade late last year.
Woohoo!
> KDP does not allow you to set the price of a book to free. All other platforms (except Nook Press) do.
hosting the book costs them money, why should they do it for free just because you want them to?
> KDP nerfs pre-orders by not counting the sales on the day the book releases. All other platforms do.
to me this says that the other platforms give new releases a fake sales volume on the first day. I would expect just about any book’s pre-orders to overwhelm the daily sales of just about any other book, so you are no longer comparing apples to apples.
now, if they wanted to have a separate category for reporting new release pre-orders that would be fair to other books, but pretty meaningless for most people.
how does lumping months of pre-orders into one day help the readers at all?
If it’s a good book, the readers who finally get their hands on it are going to make recommendations and there will be a lump of purchases as a result.
That’s a non argument. Free books cost the other sites hosting fees as well. They’ve found a way to make it work. Why not KDP?
As for preorders, that’s one more way to increase visibility that Amazon has closed off.
KDP or KU?
KDP: Staying about the same, maybe a little worse.
KU: Definitely worse. Page reads not reporting, clickfarms hurting innocent accounts, KENPC rates are terrible, and the exclusivity’s not worth it any more.
“KU: Definitely worse.”
Its usability on the reader side could use some improvements, too. I don’t have KU anymore (nothing against it — I just wasn’t finding enough of the kind of stuff I like to make it worth my while), but when I did my pain point was the return process.
How it should work, IMO:
1) Let’s say you want to borrow a new book, but you have too many out already.
2) On the same screen that tells you this, it presents a list of the books you have out, and lets you return one or all of them right there, then proceed with the borrow uninterrupted.
You shouldn’t have to exit the borrow process, go to a completely different part of the site, return some books, and then go find the book you want all over again.
Possibly this has changed since I left KU?
It seemed like a major inconsistency with the traditional Bezos policy of allowing nothing, and I mean nothing, to interfere with the smooth flow of the transaction.
Nope. No change since you left. It’s still just as tedious.
Is KDP getting better?
Yes. Consumers have more books available at low prices.
For me the mechanics are about the same.
What’s not the same is the KU portion of it. I went back “all in” after giving going wide a sincere try. Other retailers are basically phoning it in, so I make more in KU even though I don’t like being so entirely dependent on it.
Also, the weirdness going on makes me very nervous to be in KU.
For that part, I’d say not better at all. More money, but much worse for stress and overall experience.
I’m waiting to see how the KDP print version option rolls out. I’ve got it as an option in Beta now, but it doesn’t have all its functions available yet according to the supplied info. If I can skip doing a separate createspace upload and do my ebook and print version in one location, that would be an improvement for me.
Let’s watch for good comparative articles (KDP vs CreateSpace for POD) and submit them to PG.
For this author, I’m not certain. Since late December I’m seeing a lot more reads than buys. I’d prefer buys, but I understand that people may have gotten a gift-subscription to KDP, or have decided that they need to pay off end-of-year expenses, so renting is better than buying. Is it easier to use/upload/et al? Eh, not so certain. I liked it better before I had to do VAT calculations and price adjustments, but that’s not KDP, that’s international sales.
As a consumer I’m happy, more or less. I’ve been reading so little fiction that I’m not a good survey choice.
I never thought it was good to begin with, generally speaking. It works for some, I guess.
I’m sorry. I thought you meant KU. Gah. Yeah, KDP is fine, getting better.
To answer the question, the question must be complete.
For whom?
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the new dashboard. Or the fact that I can’t click on the cover or title of the book to edit it anymore.
I agree. It’s mostly A. a bunch of little inconveniences and B. missed or not yet pursued opportunities.
As to A.: Example: keywords are more time consuming to handle. Used to be able to cut and paste-in a stream of words that you saved elsewhere and kept track of (for A/B testing, etc.). Now it’s one key word at a time, typed into a box. KDP has had (may still have) a feedback button. I’ve given feedback on several points.
As to B: Things like why not give us data on how many times each book is sampled vs how many times it sells? A book that is often sampled but seldom sold has one kind of problem. A book that’s seldom sampled has another. I’ve shared this with Amazon long ago and got some spark of attention… but no action. I bet others have good ideas. What if we collected them en masse and gave some group feedback.
On the whole, I’m not dissatisfied. When you consider KDP’s dominance, they aren’t half bad to deal with.
To both A and B you have to look at the other side of the coin. Making it easier or more informative will most likely help those scammers far more than it will you or I.
And as someone else in the comments on the other article pointed out, we first see people crying out that Amazon doesn’t close down scammers fast enough — and then they scream all the louder when Amazon then locks down an account for possible fraud.
Amazon is stuck in the middle of two forces, anything they give to one side the other will get as well, so we might want to think very carefully on what we wish Amazon would give the scammers.