Taylor H Lunsford

Here we are one month (and one major revision) after the launch of my first book through Kindle Direct Publishing- The Myth of the Thucydides Trap. It’s been a tremendous learning experience taking my manuscript through Amazon’s KDP process on my own, and I wanted to share some of my takeaways here for the benefit of any readers who might be considering self-publishing their own book through Amazon.

Overall, I found the KDP process to be pretty intuitive. You upload your materials, write your product description and metadata, set pricing, and so on through a step-by-step process, which is likely to catch most serious ommissions before the book goes to the presses. There is also a semi-automated review process for your manuscript and cover art that will catch most formatting errors (but not content errors!) and kick the book back to you for corrections. This process sets up guardrails to help authors avoid catastrophic mistakes, and for the most part it works as you’d expect. However, there are a few edge cases that I encountered that other new authors should be aware of and plan for.

First, it’s important to understand what KDP’s review process will or won’t catch, and how it can impact your time to publication. It is not a substitute for careful editing- think of it more as a tool to help ensure that your quality manuscript goes into a quality physical package. This review process is mostly automated, and while it’s great at catching certain formatting errors (the font size on your book’s spine is illegible, for example, or there are unrecognized characters in your manuscript), it does not check for spelling errors, inconsistent text formatting, missing footnotes, or the like.

Review timelines can also work differently than you would expect at first glance. Although some parts of the KDP interface seem to say that new KDP books are published within 3 days of submission for review, this is actually their best-case scenario. Dig a little deeper into the Help pages and you’ll see that the timeline is actually 3 to 10 days- and if the review catches any kind of formatting error, however minor, the clock resets and you’re looking at up to another 10 days from the time you correct and resubmit.

3-10 days is still lightning fast compared to traditional publishing, which can sometimes take a year from the completion of the manuscript through to the book actually appearing on shelves. But where this can lead to frustration is when there are more than one issue to fix. In my experience, the automatic review will only flag one issue at a time, kicking the product back as soon as any one problem is identified rather than identifying a full list of issues for you to address in one go. In my case, this first problem was some too-small text on the spine of my book. I made some tweaks to correct this issue then resubmitted, only for the book to be kicked back again, this time because during the manuscript upload one letter (the “ü” in a Chinese name, Lü) had ported over as an unrecognized character. That was already a problem the first time I submitted- but it was not flagged until the second time I submitted for review.

This continued for a couple more rounds until my book was finally accepted and placed on the market a few days later. Fortunately, I hadn’t planned much fanfare for this book, so delaying its launch by a few weeks didn’t cost me any money or cause me too many headaches. But if I had carefully planned a launch with paid marketing or a coordinated social media campaign, I would have been extremely frustrated to find my release pushed back as a result of this process. And not only was the process delayed, but I didn’t know when precisely the book would become available- since I had chosen to “Release my book for sale now,” it would be released as soon as KDP’s review and setup was complete, which again can take anywhere from 3 to 10 days from submission.

There is a way to mitigate these problems- by scheduling your release in advance. As you can see from my experience, selecting “Release my book for sale now” does not actually get your book on the market right away- it gets it on the market as soon as the KDP system completes your review and creates your marketplace page, which can take anywhere from 3 days if you’re both lucky and perfectly well-prepared, up to several weeks if you have any formatting issues and need to re-submit. But by scheduling your release a few weeks to a month out- leaving yourself reasonable time to work out the kinks with KDP’s review process- you can keep precise control over when your book is released. Having learned the hard way with my first release, for all future books I definitely plan on scheduling a release.

I have thoughts on the business side of self-publishing as well- writing is work, and we would all like to be paid well to do it- but that will have to wait until a future post. For now, I hope that these notes on the KDP process have been helpful.

To see my finished product, don’t forget to check out The Myth of the Thucydides Trap on Amazon!