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The REAL Reason You’re Not Selling on Amazon KDP
Hint: It’s not Amazon’s fault and it’s not a scam.
I’m going to lay out the problem right now: you’re writing selfishly and expecting your friends and family to subsidize your creativity.
Many writers dream of one day holding a physical copy of their book for all the world to see. It’s fun, let me tell you! In March 2022, I had the pleasure of publishing my first book on Amazon under my married name. This was also the first book I published as a paperback a few weeks later (some people requested a paperback version).
Great! I naively thought that the book’s excitement would continue and people would keep buying it. However, I didn’t understand book marketing or Amazon’s algorithm. I was very much in the world of “if I make it, they will buy it.”
Fast-forward to today (yes, literally today), when I sent three books to Amazon for publishing on the KDP platform. They aren’t long books and aren’t the next Great American Novel, but they do something many books do not — they solve a specific problem.
Algorithms change, and there will always be people who game the system to get what they want. The trick is to find the intersection between crafting what you want and enjoy writing and what people are actually searching for online.
