Self-Publishing: Reformatting and Re-listing My Book on Amazon

When I originally created my first children's picture book Angria, I knew I wanted it to be a wide format - 11x8.5. Due to the format size, I was unable to list the book on both Amazon KDP and IngramSpark as I had done in the past for my chapter books in the Somnium Series. Unfortunately Amazon KDP doesn't offer an 11x8.5 trim size.

The good news is that as long as you don't have an Amazon KDP book set up using the same ISBN number in both Amazon KDP and IngramSpark, than your IngramSpark book will appear on Amazon within a few days. I was delighted when Amazon even placed an order for 20 copies of both the hardcover and paperback versions. For the first year or so, the paperback sold pretty steadily and Amazon even placed a repeat order.

Then, all of a sudden, sales dropped pretty significantly. At the same time, the impressions (the number of times people saw my ad) also dropped on my campaign. I wish I knew what happened, but it was hard to identify a specific cause, especially because I wasn't paying close attention. The only thing that I noticed around the same time was that shipping for my book changed from being available in a few days to over a week. I can only assume that Amazon decided to stop stocking my book and that the turn around time for IngramSpark to print the book contributed to the delays.

I have noticed a direct correlation between clicks on my ad campaign, sales and impressions. Essentially, the more that people are clicking on my ad, or better yet, buying my book, the more impressions I get. The less engagement my ads get, the less sales I get, and ultimately the less impressions I get. There is a definite positive feedback loop, which makes sense since Amazon is looking to make money via clicks and sales themselves. I have no doubt the algorithm takes all of that into account - especially in comparison with books competing for the same ad space.

To try and rectify the delayed shipping times (and hopefully increase the odds people would order my book), I decided to completely reformat my book so that I could list it on Amazon. Since I couldn't use the 11x8.5 format I chose the next best option - an 8.25x8.25. This meant cropping down my wide format book to square, which thankfully turned out to be easier than I anticipated and I didn't lose as much of the images as I expected.

Since Amazon only offers this size as a paperback, my hardcover is only available in the wide format. The new format meant a new ISBN, so Amazon now has both the 11x8.5 and 8.25x8.25 paperbacks available for sale. Needless to say, none of this is ideal and I had to play around with the book prices in both systems to get the Amazon version to show when first when landing on the product page.

So, did the new format solve my sales issues? Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have made much difference and my impressions remain quite a bit lower on my ad campaign. My assumption now is that the algorithm likely also takes into account the book's overall standing and since the new version has sold significantly less copies, it has a much lower overall rank.

If I had it all to do again (which I will with the release of the second Angria book) - I would start off with a format that Amazon KDP offers. This will likely mean an 8.25x8.25 printed via Amazon KDP and an 8.5x8.5 version via IngramSpark - because naturally they don't both offer the same sizes. Not ideal, but since IngramSpark sells far less books for me, I think it's more important to make the book appealing to Amazon customers first.