Beware the Distribution Arms if You're in KU

Happy Wednesday, everyone! I know I'm late, but I'm HERE, and that's what matters. My schedule fell on its head today. haha! But still managing to make time to get in here and blog. Today, I'm going to talk about something that happened to a friend of mine. We can all learn from it, so get your coffee and let's get going!

So, for a long while, my friend had her books wide (being distributed to all vendors everywhere). She decided to pull her books from wide and go all in with Amazon KDP Select. This enrolled her stories in Kindle Unlimited automatically, and she started getting paid by the Global Fund pot for pages read.

Everything was going fine for a good, long time, until one day, she discovered her titles had been pulled from Select. There was no email telling her why. Nothing.

She freaked out (wouldn't you?).

You see, this friend of mine is always on the up and up. She's done everything by the book and to the letter of the rules. So, when this happened, she was completely taken aback.

After a LOT of digging around, she discovered those titles that had been pulled to go into Select were available via one of the distribution arms of a popular distributor.

No, I'm not going to say which one. That's not what this post is about. I'm just issuing a warning here and showing you how you might want to delve more deeply if you're pulling from wide distro to go into Select.

Let's move on.

These books weren't pirated. Amazon doesn't yank your books for that. They were legitimate arms of distributors that simply neglected to remove a title that was no longer available.

Needless to say, she's still fighting it. No one at Amazon will get back in touch with her, and last I heard, she was planning to reach out to the distributor to see if they could help.

But the damage is, sadly, done. Her royalties for pages read have come to a screeching halt, and she doesn't know when or if she'll be able to get back into Select. When Amazon bans you, it's usually for at least a year.

So, there's one situation to be hyper aware of. If you pull your books from wide, be sure you check everywhere before clicking the "Enroll this book in KDP Select" button. She thought she did, and it's really messing up her money right now.

Have you heard of something like this? Anything strange happen to you?

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

So You Wanna Make a .Mobi from MS Word

Happy Thursday, everyone! Yeah, I missed my post from yesterday, but I needed at least one day off this week. *grin* Today, I'm gonna talk about how to make a .mobi file from an MS Word document. Screenshots are provided. Ready? Let's get going!

Let me be very clear on one thing. You cannot output a .mobi document from MS Word (not yet, anyway). So, I'm showing you how to create one online.

Go to your KDP author account on Amazon. If you don't have one, make one. Click Sign in.

Next, click Create New Title in the little box on the top left:

Scroll alllll the way to the bottom where you see these:

Click the relevant buttons above and upload your book files. Remember!
Images must meet the following requirements:

• TIFF (.tif/.tiff) or JPEG (.jpeg/.jpg) format
• At least 1000 pixels on the longest side, with an ideal height/width ratio of 1.6. 2500 pixels on the longest side is preferred.

Now you wait a few minutes.

A few more...

Okay! When you see this, you're ready to go!

Here's where the magic happens! Click download book preview file:

and Save (NOTE: if you happened to fill out the title info above, then it'll show up here as the file name):

There's your .mobi from your MS Word document! If you don't want to publish this book EVER, you can go back to your dashboard right now by clicking in the bottom left corner:

Then hover over the ... and clicking delete like so:

Confirm deletion, and you're done!

I hope that helps some of you! If you have questions, pop them in the comments!

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo