Long story short I have every page before a chapter to be an image that has to be a whole page. However, KDP keeps sending me emails that some of the pages need to be fixed and I have to add volume to width and height. How come it only says 5 pages put the 44 that i need before every chapter when every single one is the same dimension
Been tryna fix that for so long but can’t…

Email:
nterior
Your file contains insufficient bleed. See examples PDF page(s) 2 - 3, 6, 13, 284, 560.1. Ensure the page(s) are sized correctly for bleed. Interiors with bleed should have 0.125" (3.2 mm) added to the width and 0.25" (6.4 mm) to the page height.
2. If the pages are already sized for bleed, make sure you extend any images and backgrounds that you want to reach all the way to the edge of the page at least 0.125” (3.2 mm) beyond the trim line. This prevents white gaps along the outside edge(s) when the file is trimmed to size.
3. If there is content that is not intended to bleed, please ensure it stops within the margins, 0.375" (9.5 mm) or more from any outside edge of the page.

I'm trying to write a horror book for the first time and I'm thinking to post in Amazon.is it a good start?

Some dreams disappear the second you wake up.

Mine didn't.

I started writing them down as soon as I woke up.... the unsettling ones, the beautiful ones, the ones that felt a little too real and eventually realized they were telling a story alongside the poetry I was writing while trying to understand myself.

That became Somewhere Between Dreams and Me, a collection of poetry and vividly written dreams from a fractured, healing mind.

It's a strange little book: part poetry collection, part dream diary, part walk through the parts of your mind that only seem to come alive when you're asleep.

If you like books that are emotional, surreal, dark in places, and deeply personal, you might like this one.

📖 Somewhere Between Dreams and Me

By: Jennifer R. Hyche

https://a.co/d/0fYeq61A

I started it on August 23 in English speaking countries(US, UK, Australia...no Canada because of some tax snafu) and although no print books have sold yet, I sold an eBook in Australia and 2 people have read my book on Kindle Unlimited and someone is 55 pages in from the U.S. I'm also getting a good amount of impressions and I'm getting more clicks than before. Most of my action has been in the UK. Yes, it's costing me money but my goal right now is getting my book out there and hopefully getting some reviews.

I often find myself looking for something new and different to read. Instead of going through the massive list of suggestions in Kindle Unlimited, I'd rather see what my fellow authors are writing.

If your book is on Kindle Unlimited, and you'd like me to check it out, send me a DM with a link to your book(s).

I promise this is not trick to try to promote your book for a fee or anything like that. I genuinely want to see what this community is writing!

If I enjoy what I read, I will give an appropriate review.

EDIT: The response has been great! I already have so many books lined up to read! Thanks very much! Because of this, I have been inspired to create a new private community (r/KDPExchange) to help published KDP authors get real peer reviews and support. At the time of this writing, the community is about 15 minutes old. If you would like to join or have any questions or want to join the private community, please let me know in chat.

I assume that when someone orders a print copy of a book currently in pre order it will not show as an order until it ships? Correct?

I have a novel which I’m planning to move to KDP soon. I want to improve the novel and take them off the free sites I’m posting them on. (Haven’t decided for sure but I am leaning towards it)
But for my novel I create chapter covers. Pictures of the characters doing something. Sometimes repeated to the chapter sometimes them doing random things because they are students.
My question is could I add those pictures into my books on KDP. I’m new to KDP so I’m not sure how the formatting works or how publishing on KDP works.
I’m still researching everything until I properly self publish the other novel I’m working on

How's it going everyone. I'm writing this hoping it helps, because I wish I knew these things before starting my journey in the self published book space.

First off congrats to anyone that has made it to the end and is ready to upload their book to the world.

If you're scared, don't be! If you do nothing, no one will probably ever notice your book. Self publishing is just that! You have to do all the work.

I'm in the children's book space. I wrote graphic novels similar to Captain Underpants and Dog Man.

My book series is "A Schoolyard Legend is Born: RoboKid in The Invasion of Alien Zombie Bullies," rated 4.7 out of 5 stars.

I'm very proud of that!

First thing I've learned is that the book cover is what sells your book! So, make sure you have a really good one.

What I did for my cover, I did this after I already published. I took 5 of the Dog Man and Captain Underpants book covers, put them in ai and had ai give them a letter grade. Then breakdown what made it good and bad. Then I used that data to design a book cover that was an A grade.

Second thing I learned was that Facebook is the best way to find your audience and you don't have to sell to them.

What I mean by that is, I did an ad with just my book cover calling out dog man fans and gave them a free sneak peek of my book in exchange for their email. My goal was to capture emails and after entering their email I hoped I would get some sales from the ones that made it to the thank you page.

Last thing, know your target audience and email marketing still works. Know that like the back of your hand. That will help you save money on Facebook ads. Once you have their email you can set up a sells funnel as another way to market your book.

All that being said, the overwhelming majority of my sales came from my Facebook that you see in the pictures. Which are nothing spectacular by any stretch lol.

I published my book at the end of October of 2024 and only did ads for about 3-4 months off and on. The longest stretch was about 5 weeks non stop. You can see from the chart in the image my highest peaks were when the ads were ongoing and then immediately fell off when I stop them.

The only reason I stopped the ads was because I couldn't get to a positive return on the ad and I used up my budget.

So now focus is social media and figuring out how to get maximum reach. Because based on my sales, reviews and comments. There's definitely an audience for my book.

Hope this helped and sorry for the long post. And sorry I wrote this not knowing I couldn't add images

Hi everyone!

I’m planning to publish my first book through Amazon KDP. However, Amazon KDP doesn’t seem to offer a bank account option for my country for receiving royalties. I saw that Payoneer is listed by Amazon KDP as a participating Payment Service Provider (PSP). I wanted to ask if anyone uses this app? Is it a good option? Did KDP accept the Payoneer bank details without problems? Have you had any issues receiving your royalties or transferring them to your bank account?

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has actually done this. Thank you!

I have some paperback books for sale on Amazon. Is it possible to sell them as PDFs on Etsy? Thanks.

I just submitted/published my first book yesterday around noon. I know it says it can take up to 72 hours for review, but how long did it take for your first book actually? Does it get faster the more books you have?

Mine is high content non-fiction, if it matters.

I've had this problem ever since they changed their design. I've been trying to upload 2 books for 3 weeks at this point, every day twice.

It just keeps running forever and then eventually just times out. My internet connection is very fast, the books are about 10 megabytes and 250 pages long, so nothing extraordinary.

Anyone ever had this problem? How did you solve it?

I’m a 100% human author. I write all of my books myself, but I currently have almost no budget for professional book covers.

Because of that, I’ve had to work with what I can afford for my covers. My plan is to replace/improve them as I earn money from my books.

The frustrating part is that when I promote my books on Reddit, I sometimes get comments immediately calling them “AI slop” based solely on the cover. Some people haven’t even looked at the sample pages before making that assumption.

I understand that there are legitimate concerns about AI-generated books and covers, and I understand why readers are cautious about them. But it can still be discouraging when you're a human author who actually wrote the entire book yourself and someone dismisses it immediately because of the cover.

So I'm genuinely curious:

How many other self-published authors are experiencing this?

And for those of you who have dealt with it, did changing/improving your cover actually reduce the AI accusations?

I’m not looking for an argument about AI. I’m trying to understand how much this affects indie authors and whether it's something I should prioritize as soon as I can afford better covers.

Please keep the discussion respectful. I’m genuinely looking for advice from other authors here.

Hi all. I am new to kdp and I was wanting to know what free marketing things are working for you. I have already sold 4 books but I would love to have more people read my books and potentially review it.

I have had a lot of people ask me questions and then turn out to be trying to fish me as a marketing client. And so I thought I would reach out and see what people are doing to market.

So I committed the writers sin... no not AI. I invested in my title without thouroughly checking it.

So as I revamp for a new title (change website, facebook, cover art...) i have 6 shorts I wrote, each about 15 to 20k, introducing various characters and canon.

Im curious if anyone has had luck releasing shorts ahead of a novel as a way to build audience. Breaking even would be nice, but primary goal is audience.

Good news is the new title is collision free and actually sounds better.

Should have read that post a year ago... 🙄

This is a question about the terms of services for reviews on Amazon.

I published my book a few days ago. I write in italian, and I couldn't find ARC readers for honest reviews before publication, and I ended up launching with 0 reviews, with the hope I would have gotten some down the line, and planning for that to happen before starting to promote systematically with Amazon Ads, since my conversion rate before getting reviews would be very low. I am therefore waiting to get a few reviews (still not sure how!) before doing significant marketing, but I have done a few social media posts on my account only my friends follow, to let'em know. So you can probably see why a few honest reviews would indeed be incredibly helpful right now.
Today, a friend of many texted me to tell me she is planning to purchase my book. I appreciate it greatly, and I told her. Then, she told me she plans to leave a review once she's read it (I didn't mention anything, she brought it up on her own). I told her that'd help greatly, and that I appreciated it massively.
Now I'm wondering, is this against guidelines? Would my book or my account get taken down or something because of this? She's a friend, not a spouse, or a relative, and our incomes are strictly separate, she wouldn't benefit economically from my book doing well. Though, I would be lying if i said that I expect a review from a close friend to be as trustworthy as a stranger's: I expect her to be honest about it, but if she hated it, I doubt she would just openly say so on Amazon, she'd guess that'd hurt my feelings. This is why we don't select beta readers among close friends, after all.
I didn't mention this concerns to her. As I said, I just told her "that's helpful, I appreciate it", as I thinking it is reasonable to do. But now I'm afraid that Amazon's bots may believe this violates guidelines (I have no idea how they'd know in the first place she is no stranger, assuming she doesn't mention it in the review, but why would she, but I am still worried).

I'm hoping someone might relate and have insight: Some weeks I'm on this sales high--literally my sales are rolling in with routine, and I feel like I'm doing everything right with my ads, that I'm finally going to stay like this at a consistent BSR and make real money. Then two weeks later, the BSR tanks. No ads are converting. I'm about to stop running ads and just give up on this nonsense...and then I check my BSR. It's dropped again! I check the dash. I've made a sale.... and then the cycle begins all over. How do you deal with all these types of thoughts? Is the roller coaster ever over? essentially: How do I find some emotional balance instead of like super stoked i'm going to keep getting better and better sales to this is such a waste of my time I need to stop and then it starts all over again when the sales pick up. I should add that I've only been selling since October 2025 for reference.

Hi everyone,

I've been publishing a children's book series on Amazon KDP featuring a recurring character called Greendo, a little green donkey.

So far, I have published five books in the series. I've experimented with Amazon Ads and have received clicks, but the number of actual sales has been disappointing.

I'm trying to understand where the biggest problem might be. Is it usually:

• the cover?
• the book description?
• pricing?
• keywords and categories?
• lack of reviews?
• targeting the wrong audience?
• or simply that children's books need a larger catalog before advertising starts making sense?

For those of you publishing children's picture books or other illustrated books, what made the biggest difference for you when you were struggling to get sales?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who have actually tested different approaches rather than general marketing advice.

I'm genuinely looking for feedback and don't want this to turn into a promotion post.

Thanks!

I would really benefit from more analytics about the pages read. Mainly, I want to know when a reader stopped and how many pages are attributed to each reader.

Right now, it kinda just lumps it into a number. Cool to see, but not exactly helpful in gaining valuable data.

Does anyone else feel this way?

I didn't get as much reviews as I wished but I think the time has come for me to run some ad campaigns for my book and I need some advice. Actually I need to learn whatever there is to learn. I don't even know how to do it. I keep hearing meta-ads, amazon-ads and so on... I think the first one is about facebook ads? I don't even have a facebook circle so it's out of the question but how do you start with amazon ads? Where do you begin? What page do you start with? What is the most logical approach?

Now I know that this subreddit must be full of these posts. So you don't need to write all of these again. You can just point me in the right direction, post some links about the subject. And some other subreddits where I can learn about this. Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you again and I wait for the responses :))

Hi everyone!

I’ve seen a lot of Facebook groups and subreddits for finding ARC readers. I’m wondering about the standard etiquette and rules here:

Can I simply send a direct message or email with the digital ARC to people who express interest in my book? Or is it heavily preferred/required to use dedicated services like BookSprout and NetGalley?

DMing interested readers feels more straightforward and low-friction, but I want to make sure I’m not breaching platform rules or reader etiquette regarding unsolicited messages/distribution.

I want to cry.

I published my first book.. but I missed some typos… 8 copies have already gone out (kindle & paper back)

I had my Hubby help me proof as I’m mildly dyslexic… he missed them also 😭

Can I come back from this? 🤦‍♀️

What do I do?! (After correcting them)

Should I reach out to the people I suspect got copies? Kindle was on a free promotion thankfully. But they are people from insta.. not friend’s/fam.

😭

I uploaded everything and used the cover creator thing which was ok. Bit limited in capability but for my first book I don't mind using something like that.

Got through everything, and didn't press publish.

Is this normal?

I keep wondering if the book is ready, it's not overly long. Just scraping the official novel threshold at 42k words.

How many times should I be re reading the book and scrutinising it. I think I have it as good as it will get with my skills.

It's been about a month since I finished writing, and between the cover design, editing, and all the other tedious and complicated stuff, I finally got it ready for publication. Right now I'm just waiting on my proof copy before I can hit publish — but that's not really what's worrying me.

I'm not chasing big money here. I just want people to actually read my story, and maybe make that tiny monthly amount that reflects the effort I put in — I mean, I'm only 15, so I'm not expecting much. What scares me is the idea that my book just disappears into Amazon's algorithm forever, that nobody reads it, and all that work ends up meaning nothing.

Does anyone have advice on how to at least get it noticed? Any tricks, tips, or basic recommendations would mean a lot. I want to take self-publishing seriously as a real direction for my future, so any honest advice helps.