An Indie Writer’s View of Amazon’s New Print Platform

First off, this is an opinion editorial. It is strictly based on my own experiences with the new KDP platform. If you have a different opinion and experience, please feel free to express it. Maybe Amazon will finally pay attention to what we say if enough of us say it.

I’ve come to the conclusion that whoever designed Amazons new print program is either a complete idiot, or the program for switching previous customers of Create Space into Amazon’s print format is flawed. At first everythng looked alright; my books seemed to make the transistion easily, the price was right, etc.

Then I decided to update them with new covers and re-edit them because I had noticed a few typos and awkward sentances. Wow. When I tried to upload the edited manuscripts Amazon not only didn’t honor the ISBN Create Space had assigned my print books, it wanted new ones! That’s when the realtrouble began. I kept gettin error messages back saying the ISBN used 1) was already assigned to another book, or 2) it wasn’t the right ISBN.

They were correct of course; because of the difficulty I had uploading the newly edited manuscripts, there aremultiple ISBNs assigned the books! Unable to decipher Amazon’s cryptic answers to my questions, I eventually listed all of the ISBNs assigned in the front of the books, hoping this would correct the issue.

This did correct the issues with my distribution site D2D, who, thank God, now has a print platform, which I can assure you is muchmore user friendly than anything available on Amazon’s KDP. It’s too bad that when they ate Create Space, Amazon didn’t also incorporate their user friendly program for setting up books. Instead Amazon replaced it with an extremely awkward system for creating covers which has only generic stuff (making any cover created on it look exactly like everyone elses), and in some cases, the same, because different writers chose the same cover from the few available!