- This happens more than you think.
An author publishes that they wish they hadn't rushed,
and they're embarrassed and wanna unpublish it.
Or the world changes so much,
they need to do a big update.
Or the author gets a book deal from a publishing house,
and then the publishing house goes out of business
or stops paying royalties.
If any of these things happened to you,
how do you unpublish your book,
and then, republish it after?
If you're wondering how you unpublish a book,
then this video is for you.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, I'm Julie "The Book" Broad from Book Launchers.
We're your professional self-publishing team,
helping you write, publish, and promote a non-fiction book
that will help you have a huge impact on your readers.
And darn right, will help you grow your brand,
build your business, and make you money.
The best part?
You, yes you, keep all rights and royalties.
Okay, before I get into this,
let's cover the hopefully obvious.
If you didn't publish the book yourself,
you went through a publisher,
make sure you actually have the rights
to get your book back and republish it yourself.
Most of the time, if a publisher has gone out of business,
and this happens more than you wanna think,
we've helped quite a few authors with this,
but most of the time the rights revert back to the author.
But double check your contract,
there are scenarios where it's not that straight forward.
For example, if it's an in-print closing
with a parent company that's continuing,
the publishing parent company may transfer rights
to another in-print or just hold onto rights,
as long as the book is in print.
They can choose to revert rights back to the author,
but it does come back to what's spelled out
in the contract.
We had a few authors where the publishers
were really good about it,
and one or two where this was a big battle.
In other cases we've worked on,
it wasn't so much of a case
of the publisher going out of business,
but rather legal battles,
because they weren't paying royalties anymore.
There's some shady publishing houses,
and some publishing practices
that are pretty questionable out there.
It's worth checking the ALLi list of reviewed services,
which I'll link to in the description below
before you sign with any publisher
or pay money to a company to publish your book,
especially if they're going to retain
any control over your book.
And really, that's my first piece of advice.
Prevention is the best medicine.
Read your contracts carefully.
I'm a huge fan of self-publishing
because you retain control.
And if you do that, it's also a really smart idea
to make sure you have all the source files for everything,
even if you don't have the right software
to open it on your computer,
get it and save it for the future.
But let's say the ship has sailed,
and you're stuck with a book that you wanna take back.
You wanna take it down and unpublish it for whatever reason.
How the heck do you unpublish that book?
You can unpublish an eBook, and it will disappear
poof, from Amazon and other digital locations,
it's not that big of a deal.
And if a publishing house has gone out of business,
this is hopefully happening already.
But, if you unpublish a print book,
the listing stays so that the secondhand book market
can still trade.
So, if you've published your book through IngramSpark,
which where we publish a lot of our clients' books,
removing a listing can take up to eight weeks.
To unpublish in Ingram, you have to email them the request.
The email must come from the same email account
that is your log-in for Ingram,
and it must include the ISPN of the book,
and we always include the title too
as a verification point.
We keep a running list the retailers
that got distribution through Ingram
and check them off as the listing is removed.
Then, about a month later
we start contacting companies directly
if they still have the book for sale as new.
Again, you're not gonna get rid of it
with the secondhand market,
but you can stop it in the new market.
To unpublish your book on Amazon,
there is an unpublish button in KDP Amazon.
When you release a new version of your book,
you will need a new ISPN in the vast majority of cases.
And you will then reload it
as a second edition or a revised edition.
By the way, I was trying to figure out
what the difference is between revised and new edition,
and there isn't really a standard rule
as to what you would release as a new edition
versus a revised edition.
In my mind,
a new edition is one that has a lot of new content.
A revised edition is just less updated.
Now, I don't know, there's no industry practice
on this it seems.
When you add the new edition,
it will start as its own listing on Amazon.
But you can contact Amazon
to have the listings collapse together.
The reason you might want to do this
is to keep the reviews you have from the first edition
or the previous edition.
Usually, the reviews from the first edition will connect
to the second version so you get
to keep those hard earned reviews.
Of course if you have a lot of bad reviews,
you might not wanna do that, you might wanna start afresh.
A couple of tips, make it really clear
when a book is new edition
so readers don't crush your book with bad reviews
about how this was all repeated content.
In the description, it can also be a good idea
to clearly explain what was added so readers can decide,
or at least make it very clear that it is new content.
We worked on the revised edition
of "How much Money do I Need to Retire" shown here.
You can see the clear indication
on the cover and then another note at the top
of the description to make it clear that this
is a revised edition.
In this situation a lot of new material
was added to the book and it was updated
for the current market conditions.
So even previous buyers might have wanted to repurchase it.
Ultimately needing to unpublish
and republish a book happens a lot.
It's not as simple as clicking a few buttons,
but it's not that challenging if you have the rights
and the right files to make it easier,
and of course, a little patience
to sort out all the details will help to.
Have you had to unpublish a print book before?
How did it go?
Let's chat about it in the comments below.
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