I don’t want to knock Amazon KDP publishing platform (well, not by much anyway).
Over the last eight years KDP has provided a way in for countless new authors and publishers. It has almost singlehandedly, wrested control of publishing away from the stale suites governing the big five publishers.
Today KDP is a place for anyone to publish (nearly) anything. Never before has it been so easy to produce an ebook or paperback. While others have played their part, it has to be said that this is mostly down to Amazon KDP.
So credit where credit is due.
But KDPs success has also thrown up a few niggles and irritants. Here’s my current irritation with KDP.
Why the hell can we not archive unpublished ebooks?
I appreciate that once an ebook has been published will still have to be available to those readers who bought or received a free copy. Even if the ebook is subsequently unpublished. I have no problem with that.
But when you get a number of unpublished books cluttering up your KDP bookshelf it just makes things so hard to get to!
God knows there must be people out there with 20, 30 or even more failed and unpublished books/ebooks in the bookshelf. They must be in a state of despair.
So simply put:
Why can we not archive (i.e. put somewhere else!) those books we have previously sold/given away and have now been unpublished? Could we not (for example) have a sub-folder in which we can put stuff we do not access often (i.e. failed and unpublished ebooks)
I cannot believe that this would be difficult to do. Especially for a firm the size of Amazon.
OK. So this has just triggered another simple moan with Amazon KDP.
Why can we not order the books in the bookshelf AND THEN DEFAULT TO THAT SELECTED ORDER next time we log in? Maybe this would actually solve the archive problem in itself! You just put all the duff stuff at the bottom.
Anyway. For a gargantuan company, Amazon should be able to solve this pronto.
Whether they ever will though is another question.