- Today we're gonna be talking
about five Amazon KDP publishing features
that you probably don't know about.
Stick around.
(rock music)
Hey, I'm Dale.
I'm a best-selling author,
as well as a self-publishing advocate
that wants to show you how to publish books that sell.
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so that way you don't miss a single one of these videos.
Gonna give you a fair warning ahead of time.
Actually this video is sponsored by Kotobee.
I'm gonna tell you about 'em a little bit later on,
but if you wanna skip to the chase,
you can always just go over to dalelinks.com/kotobee.
That's K-O-T-O-B-E-E,
dalelinks.com/kotobee.
If you've been publishing
on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
or if you're considering on going to Amazon KDP
and are new to this business,
you might feel somewhat overwhelmed
by the tons and tons and tons of features.
Truth be told, if you just stick with the basics,
yeah, you'll be able to get pretty far in this business,
but there are actually five very underutilized features
that I see that a lot of authors aren't very aware of
inside your Amazon KDP dashboard,
so let's go ahead and talk about those five ones.
And I'm gonna tell you, stick around to the end,
'cause I'm gonna save the very best for last.
This one not too many people are utilizing.
I can promise you that 99% of you
that are watching this right now,
you're not using the number one feature
I'm gonna tell later.
So we're gonna start it out backwards
with number five, Contact Us.
Okay, you're probably going, "Dale, what?
"Contact Us?"
Yes, believe it or not,
inside your Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard
if you scroll all the way down to the bottom,
you'll see a little link that says Contact Us.
It's kinda hidden down there a little bit.
I get a lot of people that'll ask me questions
about Kindle Direct Publishing or about KDP,
and there's some ambiguity,
and they're kinda always like, "Hey, I'm gonna go ask Dale."
And I have no problem with you asking me the questions.
That's great.
But I almost always will defer it over to KDP
if it's kind of a sketchy situation.
So if somebody's like, "Hey, there's another book
"that's the same title as mine.
"What should I do?"
I typically say, "Reach out to KDP."
Find out that it's okay, and then make sure
that you're tracking some of that dialogue.
I always recommend,
never throw away any mail communication from KDP
when you're asking them questions.
Always keep track of those things.
But I'm gonna say this, the Contact Us.
There's actually so many ways you can utilize this,
everything from getting any just small questions answered,
or if you want to, even more importantly,
not just doing it through, say, email,
they actually have phone support Monday through Friday.
And I highly recommend if you have the ability
to call in, do that.
Now, they don't have a direct line in.
They actually will get it
to where you put in your own phone number,
and they'll call you right away or within five minutes.
I almost always, if I can help it,
unless it's a weekend and it's really a burning question,
I will try to get on to phone support
because the Contact Us feature is one of the best ones,
and it's one of the greatest ways to kinda get things done.
And what I would recommend is if you do something by phone
that you have them reiterate it by email.
So essentially if I ever ask a question via phone,
I say, "Hey, could you be able to send that to me by email
"so that way I don't forget?"
And they almost always go, "Yeah, sure.
"What's your email?
"I'll go ahead and send it on to you."
And they get it done.
Number four, browse paths.
Okay, you've heard me call 'em browse paths,
categories, and niches.
They're all essentially the same thing.
Browse paths kinda work just like this.
When you look over inside the Amazon Kindle store
or inside the book store,
you'll see on the left-hand side of most books
and such like that the category that they're in.
It'll say typically something like Amazon Store,
Kindle Store, Short Reads,
Literature & Fiction.
That's just one example of what a browse path is.
It's the entire niche that just goes from niche, sub-niche,
sub-sub-niche, and so on and so forth.
Now, these browse paths, believe it or not,
aren't readily available in your dashboard.
Normally what you can do is you can select upwards
of two of the browse paths
inside your book's metadata right out the gate.
They're actually called BISAC,
and that's the industry standard for categorizing your books
in the U.S. and the U.K.,
but Amazon doesn't use that necessarily
inside their book store.
What they're actually gonna do is they take your BISAC
that you select, as well as the keywords
that are associated with your title
and the amount of content,
be it the number of pages and such like that.
And then they kinda figure out with this machine-learned AI,
and it kinda says, okay, this probably goes
over into this particular browse path,
and it's probably this browse path as well.
So it tries to make sense
of what you've done with your metadata,
and then you're kind of left to your own devices thereafter.
Believe it or not, you could have upwards
of 10 browse paths per eBook and per print book.
So you're essentially given two right out the gate.
They give you a third one kind of as a consolation prize.
Sometimes it's not the best fit.
What I almost always will do is I'll wait for my first sale,
I'll see exactly what browse paths are showing up
for my given book, and then I'll determine from there,
okay, is this appropriate, or is this not appropriate?
At that point, I will say
whichever one that's inappropriate,
I'll get ahold of them through the Contact Us feature
and say, "Could you please remove this browse path?
"It's inappropriate."
And replace it with X, Y, and Z.
Now, this is up to you on the browse paths
that make the most sense to your publication.
You'll wanna make sure, though,
if you're asking for browse paths that are for eBook
that they're just for eBooks.
If you're asking one for print books,
they're just for print books.
There's other little categories, like Kindle Singles
and Kindle Short Reads to a certain extent,
which actually I've got some more videos
about that coming here pretty soon, that are invite-only.
Now, there are some exceptions to the rule,
and I'll talk about that in future videos
when it comes to Short Reads,
or just stay tuned to this channel,
and you'll find out more details about Short Reads.
Either way, though, load up your book
with the most relevant browse paths.
And all you have to do is find out the browse path,
then go to Contact Us,
tell them your ASIN or your ISBN number,
and tell them that you want it put into this.
Tell them the ones that you wanna get rid of,
and tell them the ones you want to keep.
Now, every now and then,
you might lose track of your browse paths,
and that will happen.
The beautiful part is when you go into Contact Us,
all you gotta do is just go in there and say,
"Hey, I lost track of all my browse paths.
"Can you tell me which ones are associated
"with this ASIN or this ISBN?"
And they'll tell you exactly the ones that you have.
That way if you need to tweak
or put different categories in, you can do that.
KENPC, also known as Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count.
Now, this feature, believe it or not, it's kinda automatic.
There's not much that you can do with it per se,
but it's that information that is gonna be the most lethal
for you to understanding your placement.
Now, you remember how I kinda mentioned
the whole Kindle Short Reads before?
Now, Kindle Short Reads is invite-only.
Now, this is one of the metrics
that they kind of pay attention to
to actually categorize you automatically based on your BISAC
and your keywords and essentially your KENPC.
Now, your KENPC is essentially the Kindle page count.
Now, your manuscript,
let's say you did it through Microsoft Word,
or you did it through, say, Kotobee.
It might be, say for instance, 10 pages.
But when it gets actually processed through KDP,
KDP's actually going
to determine your actual Kindle page count,
hence why it's called Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count.
It typically takes upwards of about a week or two
before you actually get your official page count,
and from that point you can determine, okay, does this,
is this applicable to, say, a Short Read?
And if it's not applicable to a Short Read,
sometimes it might even be a good case
that you can go and say to them,
"Hey, could you remove it from that category
"and move it into this category?"
Knowing how to get the KENPC is the harder part.
All you need to do is go into your dashboard.
Click Promote and Advertise.
It's gonna open that up.
It seems you're crazy.
You're like, "Why am I going to Promote and Advertise?"
Don't worry, you don't need to pull out your credit card.
You don't need to go to your bank account.
All you gotta do is just scroll on down,
and it'll say your KENPC.
And before we get to that very last number one point,
I told you the juicy stuff I was gonna save for last,
I thought it was very important that I go ahead
and show you a little bit more about Kotobee
in about less than a minute.
I'm gonna show you exactly how you can see
about formatting your eBook.
First of all, head over to dalelinks.com/kotobee.
That's K-O-T-O-B-E-E. When you head on over there,
you're gonna download it for Windows,
and it's also available for Mac.
And you're gonna install this.
As soon as it's all done installing,
we're gonna open it on up.
We have choices of reflowable or fixed layout.
If you have questions, click the Help button.
I'm gonna take my Microsoft Word document,
and I'm gonna copy and paste it over into Kotobee.
And at this point, I can start
to format this however I wish.
I can insert links and pictures and so on.
And now we can format it in any variation that we wish to.
I'm gonna do it for EPUB
so I can upload this to any platform I want.
Gonna hit Create, Save.
And now if I want to, I can head over to KDP.
I can head over to Apple.
And all I need to do is put in my book's metadata,
and then I can just upload that EPUB,
or I can upload in this instance a MOBI
if I had that formatted.
And number one, X-Ray.
Now, X-Ray is kind of an interesting one.
Think of it like Easter eggs for your book.
So if you have, say, DVDs,
which some of you still own DVDs out there, I imagine,
they have Easter eggs,
some things that are hidden inside the DVD
if you click a certain area.
Or even some movies
that you'll go to have hidden little Easter eggs
from the director or producer,
and it gets a callback to another movie
or a famous person of some sort.
Well, X-Ray's kind of the same in the aspect that
what it does is optimizes your publication.
Now, this is only available for eBook, okay,
so you're not gonna be able to do it for print book.
And what it's gonna do is it's an automated system.
All you need to do is go to your eBook,
all right, inside the KDP dashboard,
and it says Enable X-Ray.
Don't worry, this doesn't cost everything.
It's not gonna put you in danger
of any kind of problems or anything else like that.
In fact, they actually encourage it.
All you need to do is click Enable X-Ray.
You sit back and wait.
Now, depending on the length of your book,
it might take a little longer
for KDP to put together something for you.
But what it's gonna do is it's gonna go
through your publication and figure out important names,
places, and anything that's going
to grab a person's attention and get it to where, oh,
they want to learn something a little bit more about this.
So if you're a fiction author,
here's a great time for you to showcase maybe the villain
or your book, your protagonist of your book,
the antagonist in the event of the villain.
You would go ahead and maybe make that something
that's going to be clickable in X-Ray
and explain the development behind that.
And your eBook readers are gonna really enjoy
that little extra something.
In fact, this is what KDP says about X-Ray.
"X-Ray is a unique Kindle eBook feature that allows readers
"to learn more about a character, topic, event, place,
"or any other term simply by pressing and holding
"on the word or phrase that interests them.
"X-Ray for Authors is a free Kindle Direct Publishing tool
"that enables you, the author,
"to add your own descriptions or commentary
"that will show up
"when the reader engages the X-Ray feature.
"With X-Ray for Authors, you can add new X-Ray entries,
"edit existing ones, or enable X-Ray for a new book.
"X-Ray is only available for eBooks published in English."
All right, so know that that's just for English right now.
I imagine they'll eventually roll it on out.
But I kinda glossed over the fact that nonfiction,
it's really kinda nice in that.
For instance, if you're doing something
like my friend here, Evan Carmichael,
he has one with famous people
that he's interviewed and such,
and inside it they can always be able
to give a little bit more of a backstory on,
say, someone like a Tony Robbins or a Oprah Winfrey
or a Gary Vaynerchuk.
So X-Ray is probably one of the best utilized features.
And here is a small bonus.
Now, if you enable X-Ray,
and especially if you are a nonfiction author,
you actually get yourself qualified
for something that's called Great on Kindle.
I've talked a little bit about Great on Kindle before.
I'll probably go ahead and leave a link down below.
If I don't for some reason, I forget it,
you can always just search up Great on Kindle program Dale,
and you'll be able to see the video,
and their gives you a better idea in getting yourself
to where you're qualified for this program
and invited into it and get rewarded for utilizing X-Ray.
It requires a little bit of work upfront,
but I promise you it's gonna be something
that your readers are gonna truly appreciate.
And while we're still talking about Amazon KDP,
why don't we go ahead and address the elephant in the room,
Amazon KDP Select?
Is that program really still worth it?
I mean, gosh, here we are, 2020.
Does it make sense for you to go ahead
and put your book into that program?
Well, why don't we go ahead and find out?
I'll see you in the next video.