More than a decade ago, just like the proverb 'strike while the iron is hot' - many people
began publishing old classics on amazon kdp that are in the public domain, available freely
on the internet.
This way money started flowing into their accounts with little efforts.
But the side-effect to this was that many low standard ebooks started flocking and piling
up on the Kindle ebooks ecosystem.
For example, you would be knowing this book 'Pride and Prejudice', which has more than
100 editions and versions with mostly all same content and no much difference.
But there is no value addition in having same content in different versions. Do we?
With the passage of time, we might even reach 1000 versions and more.
That's when, Amazon took note of it, got annoyed, and put some policies and guidelines in place.
which is what we are seeing right now on the screen. Amazon clarifies that their program
allows the selling of content that is in the public domain. But they want a proof that
the book is indeed in the public domain. At the same time, they also clearly specify that
the book that we are trying to republish must have undergone some improvements in the form
of either translation, annotation, or add original illustrations pertaining to the book.
Not having understood this information, we still have some people who happily try to
publish public domain content without adding any further value or enhancing its related
information. This could lead to the book getting banned, and if continued, their KDP account
can get blocked too!
That's why it becomes all the more important to first learn how to choose a public domain
book that has some room for improvement while also remain profitable. So, how do we choose
which public domain book to republish - that is if you really want to add value to it?
So let's first see what Amazon KDP Team has to say about this.
We need to provide proof that the book is indeed in the public domain, and also provide
the names of its authors or translators. This is first and foremost - you might have already
observed this when trying to publish a public domain book - an email arrives as soon as
the book gets into the 'Review' phase in the publication efforts.
At the same time, we must ensure the book has improved in its value by adding a translation,
or annotation or add illustrations to the book. This is what is being referred to as
'Differentiation', as you can see here on the screen. Just one or more of those requirements
- if you can get more than one, then all the more good chances of getting approved.
If you observe, there is no much guidance on what needs to be done except for these
important distinctions. However, there is a good number of items that clearly shows
what doesn't count as being differentiated. These are okay to do, but doesn't win you
the approval of the book from the KDP Review team, if you do.
When it comes to translation, it's straight-forward - just pick a language that you are fluent
in, translate it into another language that you are confident in writing. Typically, English
is pretty common, so if you find any book that are in your native language, you can
translate that to English. Or vice-versa - find a book that's in English and translate it
into your native language.
Next, with annotation, here are some ideas that can be categorized into 'Annotating'
a book. You could add a section with glossaries, guides, explanations, significance of the
ancient texts and their impacts on the society, etc.
Then, with illustrations, we need to add a minimum of 10. The more the better. That's
why, it's best to know which book you are dealing with - thus making it inevitable to
review that public domain book at least once to understand it better.
Overall, to summarize, adding extra content is compulsory. Imagine you are the buyer of
that public domain book. What would you expect when you pay for it, instead of just freely
downloading it from Gutenberg or any public domain websites. Start from there!
Alright, let's now see how to research on how to choose a public domain book.
You might be already aware of this website called 'Feedbooks'. Once you are there, click
on the 'Public domain' tab to see a huge list of books that are in the public domain. But
how do we decide on which one to choose from this huge list? Some books might be famous,
while some could have been in the oblivion for long, without many noticing its existence.
The difference between both the numbers could be vast. So, how do we know which book gets
downloaded or searched by the masses?
Well, click on this 'Popular books' section. As we can see here, The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes' is at the top in the search results for Popular books. We can easily pick this
up and publish, but there is an obvious risk here that many will do this same step, thus there
is more competition for this particular book. Now, it makes sense that then we can choose
another book from the top 10 or top 20 or even top 100 in this list.
Let's say I have chosen the secret adversary book. I also see a download button here. This
is exactly when many commit the mistake of directly downloading from here and uploading
it on to Amazon KDP. No wonder, the books don't get published and they end up getting
their account suspended.
The problem here is that although its mentioned the book is in public domain, you can also
see that there is clear note given inside this book that says 'this book is strictly
for personal use, and not to use this file for commercial purposes'.
Am not saying this is the only reason that triggers the account suspension because there
are some who get past this level of scrutiny as well - and am also pretty sure that it's not difficult
for Amazon to crack those publishers someday. If not now, the account will get eventually suspended,
if this practice is followed blindly, because there is a clear case of 'explicit' text that
disallows the commercial use of these books from Feedbooks.
That being said, the positive side of this development is that we at least got to know
that this book is one of the top-most searched book by real people around the world. There
is also another information that's gold here - just observe their 'source' section which
clearly mentions that this book was actually sourced from Gutenberg itself.
So, let's now head to Gutenberg website and search for this book in their database. Once
you find it, click on this Bibliographic Record tab - where we can validate two things - one,
the copyright status that the book is indeed in the public domain (this is helpful when KDP Review
team asks us proof), where we can send this hyperlink and two, the number of downloads in the last one month. This translates
into more than 100 books per day!
Now that we have validated that this book is a good choice, we also need to check the
competition on Amazon itself to ensure we add unique sections to our version of the
book, in order to encourage people to buy this version.
Additionally, you can also click on the Author's name (or the category names) on Feedbooks
website to find more works from the same author. This is a useful information because it helps
you to guide your readers to pick their next book. Since, they have read this one (hopefully
the complete book) chances are more that they may want to read more from this same author.
Just make their job easier by adding a note at the end of your book like this one, while
linking to another similar book from this same author - which you can create as well.
All the links given in this video are provided in the video description below. Just click
on 'Show more' to get them.
Alright, now that we have seen how to pick a public domain book to republish, there is
also a risk of picking something that has a tight competition as I mentioned earlier.
The Kindle Review team could reject our works citing this as a reason. So, in my next video,
we'll see how to find how many are published, how many downloads are done for a specific
book on Amazon, and how to decide if we want to proceed with the publishing or not. I will see you again in my next video. Until
then, you take care. Thank you!