An Ultimate Guide To Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

With the exponential rise in digitalization, the publishing industry has taken a drastic change for the better. Now any normal person with a book idea and dedication can become an author. Digital publishing methods are available for anyone with multiple benefits and higher reach. 

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing is a self-publishing platform of Amazon that allows its users to create both paper books and eBooks through it. Along with this, Amazon publishing services provide access to their already established wide audience base with no upfront cost or inventory.

Exploring The Benefits Offered By Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

Amazon is an internationally recognized publishing platform with millions of daily users. Here is a list of some of the advantages you can gain through Amazon KDP.

Free To Use

A great benefit of Amazon KDP is that it is completely free to use for any aspiring writer. Any writer can easily publish their books on Amazon KDP without any sort of upfront cost. 

The platform only takes a specific cost out of the sales which is clearly explained on their platform. KDP is also free to use for readers which is why you get more audience base.

More Audience

Amazon is one of the biggest digital publishing platforms that has many well-established authors with several online users. 

This means that by publishing your book on KD you can get access to their global audience base. This way you have a higher chance of getting noticed by your targeted audience.

Print-On-Demand

Another great thing about KDP is that they offer print-on-demand options to their users so that only those books are printed that have been preordered by users. 

This saves a great amount of extra costs for authors that go into printing, delivery, and inventory of books that are not sold.

Creative Freedom

Amazon KDP provides complete control of creative freedom to their authors. They are free to create their own book cover, layout, images, formatting, and many more. 

They are also free to change and modify the book’s description or title at any time they want to whatever they want. 

More Royalties

Another benefit of KDP is that it offers a higher amount of royalty than other traditional publishing platforms. Amazon KDP is great at offering a higher number of royalties to their writers and you can also check the amazon publishing pros before publishing a book.

They allow royalties up to 70% to their authors which is much more than what traditional publishers offer. You can earn more money with a higher number of book sales. 

Promotional Plan

With KDP, you also get access to more amount of boo marketing and promotional tools through which you enhance the online presence of your book. 

Along with this, you can also use keywords and categories to increase the easy navigation of your book on different search engines. 

A Glimpse Into Some Of The Disadvantages Gained By KDP

Besides the several amount of benefits offered by KDP, it is not beneficial for every aspiring writer. Here are some disadvantages that are offered by KDP.

Higher Competition

Although there is an increasing amount of global audience on KDP, the competition is also equally high between authors. There are many great books with excellent marketing strategies, so it gets difficult to be noticed among them. You need to invest more time and effort in book promotion.

Paid Reviews

A great disadvantage of Amazon KDP is that they only allow their paid users to leave reviews on books. Amazon is free for everyone so a higher amount of users read books without paying for the membership. After considering the paid viewers the users allowed to leave reviews get more limited.

Upfront Cost

While Amazon KDP is free to use for writers, there are outsourcing charges for self-published authors. Self-published authors will need to outsource experts for their editing, proofreading, book cover designing, formatting, or marketing strategy. There is an upfront cost for these services on KDP.

Exclusivity Clause

Another disadvantage of Amazon KDP is that they make their authors sign an exclusivity clause which restricts them from publishing their book on any other platform. This means that they can not in any way sell their eBook on other websites or platforms that limits their reach to KDP’s audience.

The Bottom Line

Anyone can easily get their book published on Amazon KDP with some efforts and dedication. Moreover, it is better for first-time writers to promote their books on KDP as it gives access to a large audience base while being completely free.