Have You Recently Checked Your Book’s Amazon Page?

ByPhyllis Zimbler Miller

If you have not recently checked your book’s Amazon product page, now would be a good time to do this.

You might be surprised at what you find.

For one thing, Amazon is rolling out the removal of the tag feature on all book product pages. Even if your book page still has tags, these will soon disappear.

On the other hand, Amazon is rolling out featuring the Shelfari information more prominently on book product pages. While this feature will not help in the Amazon search results, it will help with offering additional information on your book page.

Do you regularly check the reviews that your book gets on Amazon?

Once again one of my books has gotten a lambasting review because of the html code showing up on the Kindle ebook. When I see such a review, I immediately leave a comment on the review offering my email address and telling the person to email me for a well-formatted Kindle ebook. (I also ask on which device the person attempted to read the ebook.)

Then I add in the note the explanation of why this suddenly started happening to previously well-formatted ebooks:

Sometime in 2012 Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) stopped supporting third-party conversion software. Now KDP only supports KindleGen.

Apparently if you do not upload a new version of your ebook, there may not be problems with the ebook.

But if you frequently re-upload your books, as I do (to add info on the newest ebook), the previously well-formatted ebooks now look lousy UNLESS you re-convert the ebooks using KindleGen.

My business partner Yael K. Miller spent a great deal of time researching the steps for converting my ebooks using KindleGen so the ebooks would again be well-formatted.

Now that I have re-converted 11 ebooks using Yael’s research, my company Miller Mosaic is offering a Kindle ebook conversion service. (Click here to see www.millermosaicllc.com/kindle-conversion)

© 2013 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks, including TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK and the cozy mystery CAST THE FIRST STONE.

Click here to visit her Amazon author page at amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller

She also has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com

10 Comments

  1. I uploaded my epub to Amazon b/c like you said, they no longer accepted Calibre mobi files, but their conversion of my epub is great, so far no problems.
    Thanks for the tip!

  2. What about the books submitted through Smashwords? With so many writers using their conversion process, that would mean millions of books with problems. Is there any record of problems with them?

    1. Bard — That’s an interesting question about books submitted through Smashwords and I don’t have an answer. (I no longer use Smashwords.)

      But as I understand it, if you have not made certain changes to your Kindle ebook and then re-uploaded to KDP after KDP stopped supporting third-party conversion software, your books should probably be okay on regular Kindle readers. How your books look on Kindle Fire is another concern.

      (A reason two of my ebooks got really messed up is because I uploaded via KDP a new cover for each of those books.)

  3. So that explains it! Thank you for this post Phyllis. I recently received a review of my children’s book “LUCCI- The No Smoochie Poochie,” where the reviewer pointed out problems with the formatting of the book on his Kindle Fire. I had never heard received complaints on the format before, but now I understand why. I plan on revising the book and now know what I need to do; thank you for this.

    1. Donna — I’m pleased that I was able to explain the “mystery” with your children’s book on someone’s Kindle Fire. I so wish that Amazon and KDP had sent emails to all of us authors alerting us to this issue BEFORE we started getting the reviews about formatting.

      I’m now looking for reviews on Amazon to “push down” the review I just got about formatting for my romantic suspense spy thriller CIA FALL GUY before the ebook’s free day on Feb. 7.

      The person obviously got a copy before I re-converted the ebook via KindleGen. And now his review is at the top of all the reviews on the right-hand side at http://amzn.to/Sp29TC

      If you know any people who might like to read this type of story for a possible review on Amazon, please let me know at pzmiller@millermosaicllc.com and I will contact them about sending a free Kindle format.

  4. Wait, just to be clear: you can’t use Calibre anymore? What DO you use? I made an alteration to my .mobi file a few months ago, still with Calibre. Haven’t had any complaints. About to upload a new book, so very glad I found this article!

    1. Joanne — To clarify what KDP has told me “KDP no longer supports any third-party” conversion software and KDP specifically mentioned Calibre as I had said that’s what I use.

      Now, to be perfectly clear, I don’t know what happens if you upload a brand-new ebook to KDP that you have converted via Calibre.

      The problems definitely occur when a book converted to Calibre and originally uploaded several months ago is re-uploaded, perhaps with a new cover (as I did in two cases). Then the formatting is totally messed up — definitely for Kindle Fire and maybe for other Kindle devices.

      (KDP did indicate to me that there were some changes that wouldn’t trigger the formatting issues, so perhaps you made an alteration that did not trigger the issue.)

      Bottom line? The only safe thing in a perfect world — all of us authors would a) re-convert via KindleGen all our uploaded ebooks not converted via Kindle Gen and b) only convert via KindleGen for all new uploaded ebooks.

      And let me tell you, using Kindle Gen and wanting a well-formatted ebook is much more time-consuming and difficult than converting via Calibre!

  5. I simply corrected a typo, so it was nothing major. But I guess I’d better allow some extra time for formatting my new book. Calibre was so easy to use.

    Do you know if there are any problems with untouched Calibre uploads from earlier?

Comments are closed.