Lavengro

Dealing with Kindle Direct Publishing

The world of self-publishing has moved on a lot in the last few years. It is not all that long since self-publishing on Kindle was a nightmare; now it is easy. There is one snag, formatting. Most books published for Kindle have plain narrative text; they are novels or text-based non-fiction. Fair enough, that is what works with Kindle’s reflowable text.

In my particular case that is no good. There are two reasons: my books have complex formatting of numbers, bullet points, spacing, headers tables etc. and they include phonetic symbols in the Times New Roman Phonetics font, which does not display on a Kindle screen.

However, there is a solution. Kindle Textbook Creator is a piece of software that takes a pdf file and converts it into an image of the page suitable for Kindle viewing, adding digital rights management (DRM) as it does so. This preserves all the formatting and fonts of the original. The result can only be viewed on devices that display an image, i.e. not basic Kindles but Kindle Fire, other tablets, phones and Kindle for PC. This is something of a drawback, but perhaps not so great a one since people use such books for reference and clarity of presentation rather than for casual reading, and the displayed text has the usual facilities for searching, highlighting, annotating etc. It also claims to incorporate pop-up images and mp3 audio files, though I haven’t tested this. All in all, Kindle Textbook Creator is a good idea.

Or it would be if it worked properly. The problem is that it doesn’t.

My books contain a large number of hyperlinks for cross references. A pdf file can easily be made that preserves these links functionally within the document. Unfortunately, Amazon have proved incapable of preserving these functional links when they add the digital rights management (DRM) protection to the pdf file before publishing it. Worse than that, the problem has existed since I first uploaded a book in February. During that time I have experienced the frustration of dealing with the Kindle Direct Publishing Help service, which does not send an immediate acknowledgement of messages posted via the web site, takes several days to send a boilerplate response to a specific request, does not allocate a reference or case number to each input and, once you fight your way through the boilerplate, signs each response with a different name so you never know who you are dealing with.

When I had this problem a second time and went back to their Help service, referring to my original complaint, I received the same boilerplate as before. That made me angry. I had no intention of going back to square one.

Finally, after some persistence, I received a clear assurance that they had at last solved this glitch and that the links would work on all image devices for Kindle. I published my book and downloaded it yesterday. Unlike most publishers, including Amazon’s print-on-demand arm CreateSpace, Kindle Direct Publishing offers no possibility for authors and/or publishers to obtain free copies of their own works. I found that the problem was exactly the same as before: the functionality of the hyperlinks in the pdf file that I uploaded had been removed by Amazon in the process of adding DRM and publication. As this is in flat contradiction of what I was told would be the case, and in view of everything that I have experienced in the last six months, I find it impossible to believe that Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing division is dealing with me in good faith.

I have new editions of two books ready to go, Great English Mistakes and Pearls of the English Language. My plan was to announce both print and Kindle editions of these two books at the same time, available from the same page on all Amazon sites, for the beginning of the academic year in September. As things stand, this seems impossible.

I will be on holiday for the rest of August. I hope that Amazon manage to solve this snafu before I return. If not, they will hear from my lawyer, claiming compensation for the loss and damage that my business has suffered as a result of their incompetence and untruthfulness, including delay to the publication of the print version if the two versions cannot be published simultaneously.

I should make it clear that my dissatisfaction is limited to Kindle Direct Publishing. I have no complaints at all to make about CreateSpace, Amazon’s print-on-demand arm, or Amazon in general as a supplier.

Dealing with Amazon CreateSpace

At one time I sold my books through Amazon and found it far from satisfactory. In those days amazon.es did not exist and I was limited to amazon.co.uk, others being unavailable since I did not have a bank account in France, Germany etc. This mean that I had to pay the extortionate postage rate demanded even between EU countries to send books from Spain the UK, which in turn led to a ridiculous UK price for the books.

Some time later I signed a contract with a Spanish company for them to take over Amazon sales. This actually worked out better for me than doing it myself, even with a lower price.

Now I find that Amazon has set up its own print-on-demand system called CreateSpace. I am using it to publish new editions of my three books, A Guide to English Language Usage, Pearls of the English Language and Great English Mistakes.

The system that they offer is flexible and even allows the printing and delivery of single copies of books to all of Europe at the same, reasonable price as well as to other parts of the world.

Like many things, it seems complex at first sight but it is manageable and has a good help service and support community. They offer templates for interior text in the various trim sizes that can be used. Covers can be provided by the author or selected from, their own range. Being American, they do all this in inches although metric measurements are also stated in most cases. They do, however, recognise the decimal system so I was bemused to work out that 0.0625" was the 1/16" that I remembered from my childhood!

There is no registration or upload fee so the only essential upfront cost is the ISBN. CreateSpace will provide one for free, but in that case CreateSpace is listed as the publisher. I have seen this on Amazon for some publishers that have simply copied public domain books that are out of copyright, but as I obviously want to keep my own Lavengro Books imprint I bought a Spanish ISBN. Authors/publishers can obtain copies of their own books for the cost of printing and shipping; these can be delivered anywhere, making it possible to offer any number of free copies for publicity and also to supply bookshops.

Sales and royalties can be tracked easily and payment is made directly into a bank account in any country. The registration procedure requires a declaration of whether or not you are a ‘US person’ for tax purposes.

Pearls of the English Language and Great English Mistakes are scheduled for publication soon, in September if possible, with companion Kindle versions. I had hoped to have them on the market by now but there has been a glitch with Kindle Direct Publishing, about whom I am unable to report positively.