Having listened to The Creative Penn’s latest podcast, Book Marketing: How To Find and Fix Your Book Sales Problem With Dave Chesson, I decided to follow his advice and change some of the keywords on my KDP listing. That’s when I noticed that somehow the file I had submitted had somehow become corrupt. It probably happened during my last formatting tweak (I really need to leave these things alone). The contents page was everywhere and I was not happy. No wonder I haven’t had any sales for a while. Obviously, I’m mortified by what happened as it looks like I don’t care about the quality of my work. This could not be further from the truth. In self-publishing, it’s vital, that our books look every bit as professional as those produced by the traditional publishing industry. How else are we going to finally shed the stigma that self-publishing is just another wing of the vanity press? Thankfully, self-publishing on KDP, only means I had to go into the file to correct the problem. Thankfully it didn’t take too long to update and the new preview is now available.

The podcast is well worth a listen, It was packed with loads of great advice on search terms as well as information on how they worked, So, if your sales are struggling too, give it a listen, take some notes, then do some tweaking of your own. You never know, it might help.

While I was doing the keyword updates took the opportunity to move my book from CreateSpace over to KDP. While I realise that it’s the same story content, based on some feedback I’ve had about the sans-serif typeface and line spacing I used, I took the opportunity to change the formatting in both versions to two slightly differing serif fonts, as well as make sure I didn’t have any other formatting problems. So, now are two versions that readers can choose between based on their own preferences. The ISBN for the new version is 978 198 39 46 165, which is the number I was issued by CreateSpace when I first published there in January this year.

If anybody notices any further problems, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me so I can correct them.