AN: This is Part 2 of an ongoing series where I share what I’m learning about self-marketing and KDP on my personal journey. These are just honest field notes.
Estimated reading time: 9-11 minutes
Warning
What follows is a short, UX Designer-driven rant. I’m only reining this shit in so as not to completely burn bridges if, for some multiverse reason, I find myself applying for a job within Amazon, specifically their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) area. Beyond that, all that follows is, as always, my opinion and based upon specific experiences, and should be taken with a grain or two of salt … followed by a shot of tequila. FML.
Why the KDP Rant?
I’m not an overdramatic person by nature, despite what my children think. That loud, off-key singing in the car is done solely to embarrass them. 😊
I’ve spent over 25 years as a designer, 20 of which focused on usability and user experience design. My UX work for departments and organizations is geared to the best possible user experience, while avoiding errors. Errors mean a phone call, email, or a social media post, all of which might result in a customer failing at their task, an audit, being sued, or public shaming.
When I say KDP fails at basic usability principles, I mean it in the actual clinical sense: visibility of system status. This is arguably the single most foundational heuristic in interface design, and something Amazon just doesn’t do. You submit something, you should know if it worked. That’s not being bitchy, that’s Usability 101. If a state agency’s website behaved this way, I’d flag it at a Severity 3 on my worst day.
This isn’t a “boo-hoo, technology is hard” rant. It’s a “I know exactly what good design looks like, and this isn’t it” rant.
“On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival.” – Jakob Nielsen
The Bad, the Ugly, and the WTF?
For those poor, unfortunate souls first experiencing Amazon’s KDP as an indie publisher, you have my condolences. For all that Amazon has its founding roots in selling books online, they really suck at making it simple and straightforward for its content creators, e.g., indie publishers. After publishing several books and book formats on Amazon, I’ve found the pain to be real and recurring every time. As such, I’d like to highlight some of these pain points, along with the workarounds I have found for a few and not all.
Top Five KDP Pain Points
- No confirmation, audit trail, or accountability for processes
- Duplicative content and behaviors—no sync between book formats
- Lack of transparency between editable and permanent content and settings
- Mistakes in entry or selection are met with capital punishment
- Failures of the system cost you, the content creator, not Amazon
Why These Are My Top Pain Points
No confirmation, audit trail, or accountability for processes
When changing content or settings, or submitting a new advertising campaign, such as a Kindle Countdown Deal, KDP’s system doesn’t send any confirmation. Yes, there’s confirmation when your book is submitted for publication and when it’s published, but that is the extent of the changelog.
This means there’s no audit trail and no accountability on Amazon’s end when their system fails. I scheduled a countdown two weeks in advance and reviewed it the night before. The morning of, I noticed that the Kindle version of my book was still listed at its standard price on Amazon’s site. When I checked the Promote & Advertise page for that book, the countdown deal displayed for a brief instant, but at the next page refresh, it was gone.
Going through Amazon’s fun-to-find custom service funnel, I was met with incredulity, thinly veiled accusations, and then a brick wall, as the CSR and their supervisor could do nothing. Their system also had no record of my deal. The kicker—KDP’s system merely reflects what the user is currently seeing. No past records, just point in time. So, if something goes awry, there’s nobody but yourself to blame.
Duplicative content and behaviors—no sync between book formats
There are three formats available to you in Amazon’s KDP when setting up a book for publishing: Kindle, Paperback, and Hardbound. If you plan to publish your book in multiple formats, good luck. Using all three? Settle in with a nice, large cup of coffee and prepare for redundancy and ADHD hell.
Instead of one process to rule them all, you have … Three. Separate. Processes. A high percentage of those content fields are the same, which means you’ll need to copy/paste the same content and select the same categories repeatedly. Why, Amazon? Why?
Lack of transparency between editable and permanent content and settings
Spoiler alert: Some of the selections that you make for your book initially, when you set up KDP, are permanent. In other words, make a mistake, and you’d better get comfortable with ignoring it every time in the future when it stares you in the face.
The real difficulty is not that some fields are permanent once you submit them, but that KDP doesn’t inform you from the beginning. This would be an example of error prevention in the field of usability. Letting the user or customer know the system’s limitations and informing them when a selection is irreversible before committing is a common best practice.
Mistakes in entry or selection are met with capital punishment
With rules hidden and cardinal sins classified, there’s no telling if a faultless mistake will end your indie publishing before it begins. Again, this is a standard usability best practice and Usability Heuristic #9 of Jakob Nielsen.
Miss your pre-sale launch date? You’re banned from doing any pre-sale launches for a year. Something you’re informed of after the fact. Miskey a title? You’re stuck with it unless you want to take down your book entirely, lose its rank and any followers, and start all over.
Also, select the wrong category for your book, per Amazon, and you will get a nasty email and a threat to penalize your book. Almost a cease and desist order for a category picker that is not altogether useful.
My tiny example: Zombie Girl Omega is Military Sci-fi. Is there a category for that? Yes-ish. In KDP, you can pick the general tier above (Sci-fi) or the more focused tier below (Space Marine/Space Fleet), but not “Military,” the category nestled between those two. So, yes, Amazon overlords, this isn’t a science fiction story about a military squad killing zombies in space, but it is a science fiction story about a military squad killing zombies. My fallback category: dystopian. Accurate, but not specific enough.
Failures of the system cost you, the content creator, not Amazon
When a book fails to be published through KDP, or a promotion goes astray, who suffers the most? I’ll give you a hint—it’s not Amazon. Whether their indie publishers can successfully publish and market their books rests solely on the individual’s shoulders.
Yes, there are a shit ton of articles and third-party content for how to be successful with KDP. However, between researching, writing, and marketing a novel, reading several more novels to understand KDP’s shortcomings isn’t realistic. Time is money, and not everyone has a sugar daddy … mommy … er … whatever you call them, to finance their mistakes.
The more concerning part is that many of these failures are avoidable if Amazon’s KDP prioritizes usability. Making this subsite user-friendly and geared toward their customers’ expectations and goals. Amazon has the backing and the bodies to build a better system for KDP, so this isn’t a resource problem. It’s an “authors aren’t the customers” problem.
Amazon—help your customer. Not only to recognize and diagnose their misstep, but to gracefully recover without impact. Being an independent author and publisher is challenging enough without the black-and-white conditions that KDP imposes.
Workarounds Unlocked
Understanding KDP and its shortcomings is key to better preparing yourself to use its system. Sadly, some of this understanding is achieved through stumbling, fumbling, and failure, but on the bright side, secret levels get unlocked. Life is a learning experience, and so is KDP, apparently.
My workaround for the Kindle Countdown Deal failure: Manually set the Kindle version of my book to the $0.99 sale price. The downside of doing it this way is that it dropped me into the 35% royalty tier instead of the 70% tier. So, KDP’s system failure came with a financial penalty for fixing it.
Remember the note about failing to upload your manuscript within the 72-hour pre-sale window* required by KDP? Hopefully, if this ever happens to you, it’s a one-time thing. You can undo it, but be prepared for some groveling, irritation, and delays. There are two steps you must take:
- Contact KDP’s customer service and explain the situation. Promise profusely that you’ll never let it happen again, and they will probably waive the ban. Just this one time.
- If your canceled pre-sale Kindle version is tied to an existing paperback or other format, or is a part of a series, you’ll need to contact KDP customer service again. This time, request that they delete the old instance so you can create a brand new one and properly associate it with the other book format(s) and/or series.
*This isn’t step 3, but it’s a good aside to note. KDP pre-sale uses GMT time. Everything else on Amazon and KDP might follow your local time, but beware of when UTC+0 applies locally.
Lessons Learned and Moving On
Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way when publishing through KDP:
- Don’t trust the promotion system. If you’re running a price promo timed to an external push (BookSirens, Fussy Librarian, whatever), don’t expect KDP to tell you it worked. Check the live listing yourself, the week before, the day before, the day of, every time. Screenshot everything. Categories, keywords, pricing: there’s no changelog, no history. If something changes and you don’t initiate it, you have no way to prove what it used to say unless you keep your own record.
- You always have a manual override. If something goes wrong with your Kindle Countdown Deal, you can change your list price directly, and it goes live within minutes. Way faster than waiting on the two-day promotion queue. Keep this in your back pocket as your emergency Plan B.
- The dropdown lies by omission. If a category you want isn’t listed, that doesn’t mean it’s not a real BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) category. It may mean KDP doesn’t give you access to it. Assume the interface is hiding information, not that the option doesn’t exist.
What Amazon Should Do (But Won’t)
Okay. This part is almost insultingly simple for KDP:
- Follow Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, particularly
- #1 Visibility of System Status – The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time.
- #4 Consistency and Standards – Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform and industry conventions.
- #5 Error Prevention – Good error messages are important, but the best designs carefully prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
- #9 Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover From Errors – Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no error codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
- #10 Help and Documentation – It’s best if the system doesn’t need any additional explanation. However, it may be necessary to provide documentation to help users understand how to complete their tasks.
- Send a confirmation email with a timestamp when a promotion is scheduled, or when something about a book is changed by the user, and what.
- In the Promote and Advertise section, include a status indicator—pending, active, failed, canceled—visible in the dashboard. Better yet, consolidate all book advertisements into a single section rather than a separate area for each book format.
- Include an actual audit log, so when something changes, you, the user, can see what changed and when, instead of relying on screenshots.
- Allow users to select accurate category names in the dropdown that reflect real BISAC codes, not euphemisms that only reveal their limitations after you’ve already built your metadata around them.
None of these suggestions is novel (forgive my pun). Every SaaS platform I’ve worked with in the last decade has had this. Amazon has the engineering muscle to build a better mousetrap for literally every other product line. If their indie publishers are important, shouldn’t they design a usable and useful KDP for them?
Challenge = Opportunity
Okay. End rant on this topic. Apparently, I’m still working through some KDP trauma. Apologies.
Despite all the friction and limitations of the current KDP system, we keep showing up anyway. Perhaps it’s some rite of passage for the indie publishers who are stubborn and resourceful enough to push through the B.S. and get their gift out there. I’ve heard versions of these shortcomings from other authors. The frustration and tears. For some, it’s created a barrier to their books being available to others.
The thing is, none of this has to be the end of the line for authors. Instead of KDP requiring a 10-hour class to understand its outdated, siloed nuances, they can make it customer-journey-focused. Talk to your content creators and make their job simpler. Self-publishing does take effort and time, but it doesn’t need to be non-inclusive by design. Trust me.
Listening to on Spotify: Teeth by 5 Seconds of Summer
Chain Reading: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers by Nicholas Irving
Writing Nook: Zombie Girl Omega: Defection (first draft)
Latest Run: 8.3 miles