What are KDP medium content books?
This is a common question I've been getting asked over the last few months
and it's an important question because you need to differentiate between what is
a low content book and what is a medium content book. Because if you don't,
it could have implications in terms of maybe costing you more money.
And two, it may delay the publication of your book on Amazon.
So we're going to look at this a bit more closely. Now,
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My name is Paul Marles and Ida Videos and how to make it, keep it and grow it,
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so why is this important? Well, if we go over to the KDP dashboard,
this is the first page where you fill in things like title, author name,
description, and keywords. We've got this section here,
which is categories, and we've got the option of ticking or leaving this box,
unticked,
which tells KDP whether your book is a low content
book or not. Now if you tick that it is a low content book,
you then go on to the next page and in the section where it says Print ISBN,
now ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number.
You see that you now have two options,
either one to publish without an ISBN or two to use your
own ISBN. Now, if you choose the first option,
it's not a major problem. However,
you don't get this feature here, which is the Look Inside feature. Now,
this is an adult coloring book. If we click on that, we can see,
we can look inside the book and see what the pages look like. Now,
as you can probably imagine,
this helps a lot with the sales of your book because if a customer can have a
look inside your book,
there's going to be a a greater chance that you do make that sale.
So without the look inside feature,
it may be that you do lose that crucial sale. However,
it's not a deal breaker because if we scroll down,
we can see this section here where it says from the publisher and we've got all
these examples of the book cover.
We've got examples of the book interior and there's this section here where
they're promoting their other books as well.
And this is called Amazon A+ Content. Now this is free to create,
it's relatively straightforward to create,
and I've actually done a video on creating A+ content,
which I'll leave a link to down below. In the description.
It shows you how to create it and also there's some access to some free
templates where you can create mock-ups of your book covers and your book
interiors.
So not having an the look inside feature is not a huge deal.
There are workarounds.
Now you may decide that you do want an ISBN,
and in which case you would tick.
This box here, use my own iSBN.
Now the only way to get one of these is to purchase one.
So if we go over to the US site,
which is by a company called Bowker,
they seem to be the only place where you can get ISBNs from.
If you do know of any other places then please let me know in the comments
below. And I'll show you the price. They are not cheap. For one ISBN,
it's $125, and for 10 it's $295.
So works out at about $29.50 per ISBN.
Now if you have a look in the uk, they are slightly cheaper,
but at a similar price,
91 pounds one or 169 pounds for 10,
slightly cheaper. But take a look at this in Australia, for one,
it's 44 Australian dollars,
but for 10 it's 88 Australian dollars,
$8.80 per book, which works out at around $6,
which is a lot less compared to the $29.50
in the US. Now,
I'm not sure why this is probably due to some legal reasons around
publishing in the different countries,
but either way you can see the price for an ISBN is
not cheap. So if you are gonna be publishing a number of these books,
it can quickly add up. Now,
if you decide your book is not a low content book and it's a medium content
book, you can leave that unticked and Amazon will give you a free
ISBN.
So you will get that look inside feature and it won't cost you any extra money.
So you can see it's important to know the difference between a low content book
and a medium content book.
Now there's this little bit here that you can hover over and it'll tell you
what a low content book is,
but for a lot of people they still find this a bit vague.
It says they have minimal or no content on the interior and
pages are generally repetitive. So a simple
way to decide on whether your books are low content book or medium content book
is to ask yourself the question,
are the pages or are most of the pages in the book identical?
So those books that would have identical pages would be things
like lined notebooks, dot grid journals, graph paper journals,
story journals, Cornell Notebooks and Logbooks,
which is a very big area. All these books, the pages tend to be identical.
Now you may have some pages that are slightly different. For instance,
you may have the first page,
which is an area that the book owner can write in. You know,
this book belongs to whoever.
So every single page may not be a hundred percent identical, but most are,
and in that case that would be a low content book and you would tick
that box.
So books where the pages are not identical would be those books
like coloring books, puzzle books, activity books,
kids educational books. So things like handwriting books, math workbooks,
all of those, the pages will not be the same or most of them won't.
And in which case it would be a medium content book and you would leave that box
unticked and get your free ISBN.
So what happens if you leave that box unticked and your
book is actually a low content book? Well,
all that will happen is Amazon won't publish it and you'll get an email
usually to say that they've not published it because it's actually a low content
book and you need to go back, tick that box and republish it.
So it can delay the publication of your book.
But a lot of people worry because they think this is gonna look bad on their
account and they could risk their account getting terminated or suspended.
That won't be the case.
It's perfectly fine to make this error. All you'll do, as I said,
get that email, you can go and correct it and it won't affect your account.
So don't get too overly concerned with it.
And the way this can cost you money is that you may mistakenly think your
book is a low content book. Tick that box,
go and buy an ISBN and you didn't really need to in the first place cuz you
would've been entitled to the free ISBN.
Now if you are new to this whole publishing business and have not yet created
your first book,
then I recommend watching this video next where I run through the steps of
creating a basic lined journal, uploading and publishing it on Amazon.
Thank you very much for your time. It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.