Don't Do These Things When Self-Publishing Books On Amazon KDP

in this video let's talk about some of the things that are a complete waste of your time when publishing books on Amazon KDP and some of these things may even get your KDP account terminated hello my name is Caroline if you have stumbled across my channel welcome thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join me here I share videos every week all about self-publishing books and you're watching one of them right now so subscribe if you like the vibe most of the time my videos are all about the things that you should do when you self-publish a book and the things that are going to be helpful in your self-publishing journey but we don't often talk about the things that you shouldn't do the things that can have negative effects on your Amazon KDP account and the things that are just a total waste of your time there's a few things that I see all the time when I'm browsing on the Amazon bookstore and I feel bad that there are self-publishers out there doing certain things that they think are a good idea or that they think is going to make them more money by selling them lots of books for them but they are actually having negative effects on their books and some of these things are also big no NOS for Amazon's publishing guidelines and can even get your KDP account terminated which means that you can never sell books on Amazon ever again so you really want to make sure that you're not doing any of these things the first thing that you shouldn't be doing because for one it is a total waste of your time plus it is wrong and that is don't copy other book designs this might seem like a no-brainer but the amount of books that I see on Amazon that are almost identical to or are clearly copying other books is huge I often talk about that you should spend a good amount of time on Amazon doing research looking at other books getting ideas but the important thing is that you really need to ader to is to use other people's books as inspiration not to blatantly copy them there is no point in taking a really popular book that's already established it's already selling well copying it and actually expecting yours to sell why would an Amazon Customer pick a book to buy that looks exactly like the best seller of that kind of book but the copycat book has no sales it has no reviews and it is obviously just a copy copycat book they aren't going to do that they're just going to go buy the original better selling book and I can understand why people do go down this road because when you do see a successful selling book you want to replicate that but sometimes people take it too far by just copying that book in the hopes that customers would end up buying theirs instead of the original let's take a look at an example this flower coloring book is one of the bestselling coloring books on Amazon it was published a few years ago but it has consistently been a top seller in coloring books and just by searching for the keywords Bloom coloring book you can see all the other coloring books that have been published using the same name now there isn't anything wrong with using the same title of books you cannot copyright or trademark titles of books but it is always better to try to come up with something different and original and unique so that you do have that point of difference when customers are looking for a flower coloring book there's this one next to it and although the cover design the colors and the way they've designed the cover is different they've copied the name of the book and also they've copied the font and the style of the title in the actual design so they've tried to replicate the font to make it look similar to the better selling book and this doesn't just apply to covers it also applies to the interior of books so don't copy the Interiors either now this is a prime example of someone who has obviously copied the original Bloom coloring book they've taken the name of the book and used the same name published it a couple of years later they've used the same cover design so although they have chosen different colors to use they have basically copied this idea of having some black and white coloring images mixed in with some colored floral images so they've copied the design of the book they've also copied how they lay out the back page of the book and the coloring images used are also extremely similar to the coloring images used within the original one and even this particular coloring image here looks very similar to this one here almost exactly the same and even down to the title and subtitle that has been used when publishing the book we've got the title which has to be what's on the cover of the book but their subtitle beautiful flower garden patterns beautiful coolest flower garden and Botanical florals which is what this one has here as well and Botanical floral prints and so it's just not very creative and not very unique and while it obviously has had some sales cuz we do have some reviews and ratings here it is probably never going to match the success of the original book purely because the this was original and it has established that customer base and those rating and reviews it has a lot more ratings and reviews a lot more sales and so customers are most likely always going to choose this one over any other book that has copied it and doesn't have as established a sales history as this original one here is another quick example these two books are some popular handwriting tracing books for kids one published 2022 one published 2023 and they've really established themselves in this Niche they have a fantastic bestseller rank so they're selling really good amount of books every day and every month and then we have this one here which was just uploaded to Amazon a couple of weeks ago but the cover is so closely similar to these already popular hand writing practice books they have used slightly different coloring of course but they have basically copied the layout of the cover they have copied the wording so the print handwriting workbook down the bottom we've got improved penmanship same as on the bottom bottom of this one improve your penmanship with 101 interesting science facts improve your penmanship and writing skills with 123 mind-blowing science facts they've even got the author name in the exact same place as this book they've even used the same style of font where we've got this style for the and then a Sans serif font for the rest of the title and that's the same as what this one's done they've used sort of like a more creative font for the word the and a bold solid font Sans serif for the rest of the title and it just looks like too much of a copy and in this case unfortunately if we scroll through the interior of the book and then we scroll through the interior of the original ones we have the same layout here showing how to write the letters and then when we get to the pages where we can trace the letters they've copied the exact same layout as the original book once we get through all the letters there should be some sentences to write as we can see down here some words and sentences which is exactly the same as how this book has been designed we've got words we've got sentences and so unfortunately this book that was uploaded a couple weeks ago has basically copied the entire book the way it's laid out the content of the interior of the book and for the most part also the cover of the book The reason that doing this is a complete waste of your time and not a good idea is it has the potential to give the customer a bad experience and Amazon wants its customers to have good experiences and if their customers are not having a good experience your book is not going to get anywhere at all it will stop being shown in search results because if you make your book look too much too much like someone else's it can be perceived that you're trying to trick the customer into thinking your book is a book created by somebody else a more popular author or a more popular publisher and if a customer buys your book thinking it's the original book by a different person and then get it in the mail and find out is just a copy they are not going to be happy they're going to leave negative reviews which means Amazon is going to stop promoting or pushing your book in the search results the next thing that you definitely should not be doing because it's a waste of time is using trademarks the reason that it's a waste of time is because this will at some point definitely get your KDP account terminated and so you've spent weeks maybe months creating and Publishing books only to have your account terminated you can't sell on Amazon anymore after that and this one is a frustrating one because yes you go on Amazon and have a look through the bookstore and you do see books published and for sale using trademarks that shouldn't be used and you wonder how did it even get approved by Amazon in the first place yes these sort of things should be picked up in the review process and they shouldn't even make it to sale on Amazon but these things happen and using the excuse that other people are doing it isn't a good enough reason to do it yourself it's just not worth the risk as well as trademarks you shouldn't use anyone else's name or images anything like celebrities name or images or anyone famous this works the same as trademarks you cannot use anyone else's name image identity to create a book around you might think that using the term unofficial in your title something like The Unofficial Taylor Swift coloring book thinking that this releases you of any responsibility but this does not work either and so talking about Taylor Swift I have some examples here to take a look at to give you an idea of what not to do with Taylor Swift's tour there seems to be a lot of books cropping up around her image and identity books like this a Taylor notebook and although this one's being a little sneaky they haven't used her full name Taylor Swift probably knowing that it's not the right thing to do and that it could get their book removed or their account terminated they've only used her first name and they've used this nickname Swifty so you can clearly see it's a Taylor Swift notebook they've used a couple identifiers the image is an AI generated image I would suspect of Taylor Swift but you just can't profit off somebody else's trademark or somebody else's identity this is another one swifties a coloring book for kids again avoiding using her full name probably because they know it's not right to use her to profit from um so they've just called theirs swifties and again only using her first name in the description but it's a coloring book all of images that look pretty much like Taylor Swift again probably created by Ai and here's another one Taylor Swift coloring and activity book the 100% unofficial musthave so that's that word thinking that using the word unofficial releases you of some kind of responsibility cuz you're not saying it's the official coloring book or activity book and they have used her full name on the cover and it's been approved so who knows maybe this person does have permission to create this book and Amazon has been pretty good in the last year or so and has really cleaned up these books that work infringing on trademarks and there aren't really many available for sale anymore when I was browsing through looking for books to show you as examples in this video of people infringing on trademarks it actually took me quite a while to find a few which just goes to show that if you do use people's trademarks their copyright their identity images names and things like that you are going to get your books removed and most likely going to get your account terminated so it's just a total waste of time creating these kinds of books just to have them removed rejected or accounts terminated just one more example before we move on to the next thing and this is another thing I see quite a lot is using sports stars in books so this is a football Stars coloring book although they're not using any particular names on the cover or in the title of their book this is a book that has images of famous football players so when we scroll through the inside of the book they've got the names of all the famous football players that feature in this book and then coloring images of each of those those people so while this person might have purchased the rights to use these people in their books they've got all different kinds baseball and soccer as well if they haven't paid to use the licenses of these people then they have gotten around it by not using anyone's name on the cover or anyone's name in the title of the book but at some point if they are not allowed to be using these people's names and images then that will cause them problems later on not every book on Amazon that features a celebrity or trademar is doing the wrong thing you can buy the rights to use trademarks on products so if you see a book on Amazon like some of these ones it might not necessarily mean that they're doing the wrong thing they may have purchased the license to use that product on their book and that is something that you can do too if you do want to invest in something like that in using a famous trademark and another one is this Minecraft coloring book unofficial again using that unofficial word thinking that that means it's okay to use a trademark or infring ing on someone else's copyright now I don't particularly think that this person has purchased the rights or the license to use this and the reason that I don't think that is because they have their name their publishing name as Mr crafty but when we scroll down here to the about the author Mr crafty has an image of a female which to me doesn't make sense so I feel like this is someone who's just created this book using a trademark that they shouldn't be using maybe they think it's okay maybe they're unaware that it's not okay using the word unofficial to negate any negative effects of using a trademark now the next thing that is a complete waste of your time is Mass publishing generic books a few years ago when low content book publishing sort of started to become a thing the method that most people used was just publish as many books as you can because quantity over quality and the more books that you had the more chances you had of one or two or a few of them actually selling so people did things like create hundreds even thousands of books all with the same interior and just switching out the covers and having different covers on them and Publishing thousands of essentially the same book this is quite common with notebooks and journals because the interior is just the same just a book of lined pages and it's really quick and easy to just mass-produce covers and upload those books pretty quickly we've got this example which has created just a bunch of notebooks or journals and put them monogram on them so put an initial on them they have these black ones with every letter of the alphabet on them we then have some of these sort of Checker type covers with the monogram in the bottom again one for every letter this black cover here with a monogram in the corner one for every letter we have these unicorn ones that have every letter on them we've also got some of these ones here which aren't Monograms they're password log books where they've just sort of changed the color of the skin or the color of the background or the eyes Etc they have a lot of them published as well and we have have these ones here a birthday notepad with every letter of the alphabet again and then we also have these to-do lists there's one for every single month and so specifically with these monogram type of books it's a very quick way to upload a lot of books in a short amount of time with very minimal changes to the cover and there's actually quite a lot of these available for sale on Amazon we have these ones here that's going to have one for every letter of the alphabet this self-publisher here is also going to have one for every letter of the alphabet looking at these examples none of these books are actually selling because there isn't anything really about these books that makes them stand out from all the rest and so it just becomes a big waste of time creating a big bunch of variations of essentially exactly the same book the next thing that is a waste of your time is not telling Amazon the truth about your books what do I mean by this when you upload your book into your KDP account you get asked a bunch of questions about your book one of those questions is does your book contain AI generated content you actually need to answer these questions truthfully because it will almost always come back to bite you later on specifically with the question about your book containing AI content at this point all we know that Amazon is okay with books containing AI content what we don't know yet is how this is going to impact our books our account and ultimately our royalties in the future if at all Amazon might be asking this question just to keep a check on how many AI generated books are being published they might be collect this information to form new royalty levels or royalty tiers for books containing AI content we don't know yet but if you do create a book that contains AI content and you tell them it doesn't this could cause problems for you in the future if they found out that you didn't answer this question correctly it may result in your book being removed from the bookstore or who knows it may result in your account being terminated so it's always best to just tell them if you did use AI to help create your book because otherwise it will just end up being a waste of your time creating books that you end up not being able to sell or make any money from another one is don't say your book is not low content when it is low content last year Amazon finally set up a clear definition of what they deem to be a low content book and what isn't they then do ask the question when you are uploading your book if it is a low content book low content books have lost a couple of features that we used to have access to things like being able to have an ISBN for your book and the Amazon Customer ability to see the inside the interior of our book using the look inside feature those things are now gone so if for example you do want your book to have an ISBN or the look inside feature you might decide to say that your book isn't low content to avoid losing those features all this does is waste your time because your book will be rejected until you answer the question correctly these are some of the most common things that I see on Amazon that really aren't the best use of your time and aren't going to do much to move your self-publishing business in a positive direction hopefully by avoiding these things you'll be able to use your time more effectively and see results much quicker thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Self Publishing Central

Views: 22,623

Keywords: kdp activity books, amazon kdp activity books, how to create activity books for kdp, kdp low content books, kdp low content publishing, low content kdp, low content books, low content books amazon, kdp publishing, how to make money on amazon, amazon kdp, kdp coloring book, kdp coloring book niche, low content publishing kdp, paul marles, kdp activity book niche, low content coloring book, how to make a coloring book, self publishing on amazon 2024

Id: 7jFhgdpstlQ

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024