For years Amazon has offered two separate distribution platforms for books.

1. Kindle Books: writers, authors and publishers could publish their eBooks (Kindle book) via the KDP platform and sell their eBooks via Amazon’s Kindle store.
2. Softcover books: writers, authors and publishers could publish (print) their books (hardcover was an option for authors but Amazon didn’t offer distribution) via the Createspace platform (and before that Booksurge before they merged with Createspace) then distribute, sell and fulfill their books from the largest online bookstore in the world: Amazon.

The past couple years Amazon has been beta testing a program called KDP Print (as early as July 28, 2016). It’s a platform that combines both the KDP eBook platform and print books (POD) in one convenient place.

Publish Your Paperback on KDP (Beta)
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202059560

Obviously, there’s been lots of “hooting and hollering” from many authors, indie-publishers as well as long-time industry professionals within the publishing space.

If you have plans to get your book in as many distribution channels as possible, you need to publish (print) from the sources that give you direct access to the major distribution channels. What are the major ones? Amazon and Ingram (and to a lesser extent but just as important Baker & Taylor).

This begins with purchasing your own ISBNs. Do not buy your ISBNs from third-party sellers, but directly from Bowker (MyIdentifiers): https://www.myidentifiers.com/get-your-isbn-now.

If you have plans to publish more than 1 book and in multiple formats, it’s best to buy ISBNs in bulk, at least a bundle of 10 or 100. By doing that you’ll end up spending less per ISBN.

During the purchase of your ISBNs, DO NOT purchase barcodes or copyright.

Why?

When given the option to buy, they become “upsells”. Why buy something when you can get it for free?

Additional reasons for not buying a barcode:

1. Barcodes can be created for free from online applications (eg. https://www.bookow.com).
2. Bookcover designers can create barcodes at no additional cost to you.
3. Many POD (Print on Demand) platforms will now automatically add barcodes to bookcovers during the printing process. Some give you choice to have List Price of your book encoded into the barcode.

You are better off registering your copyright directly from: https://www.copyright.gov.

You’ve managed to publish your book in paperback and Kindle formats and both listings show up on Amazon as individual pages, but you’re wondering why they haven’t linked up together (since a couple days have passed since you published).

This is a very common.

Normally, what’s supposed to happen, is that the books will link together if they have the exact title and subtitle information. Sometimes even though information may be identical for both formats, they still don’t link together.

Rather than wait for this to happen, you can actually request that your books be linked by contacting Author Central. This doesn’t just apply to paperback or Kindle books, but to all formats that have their own Amazon listings.

Another issue that can arise from your books not being linked is you may notice that your Kindle book reviews have not yet “crossed over” to the paperback listing and visa vera. Part of the “fix” for this is that you must “claim” your books from within Author Central and then request that your book listings be linked. By doing this, it’ll help with getting your reviews to display correctly on each of their respective book listings.

The following is what you can do to “fix” these issues. This request takes only a few minutes to do and it’ll take anywhere from 0 to 3 days (usually 24 hours) for your books to get updated. Once your books get linked, then whatever reviews are on either listings will then “crossover” and display on each other’s respective book listings.

If you’ve been following me on Social Media then you probably know what exciting project I’ve been working on …! It’s exciting news & I’m pumped for sharing this with you now 🙂

I’m hosting an Epic Virtual Event called: The Publishing Success Summit, on December 4th through December 18th, 2016. Don’t wan’t to miss the event launch? Then make sure to add your name and email address to the Pre-Notification list here:

http://PublishingSuccessSummit.com

It’ll be an online event where I’ll be bringing you 65 86 Book Industry Experts made up of published authors, platform mentors, ghost writers, designers, editors, literary agents & publishers!

My goal is to help educate people on how to publish successfully so that they can share their message and make an impact on people’s lives.

What I’ve discovered is that many writers and want-to-be authors (even already published authors) do not understand the publishing process and as a result they don’t have much success publishing books.