There have been a couple changes to Amazon including Kindle cover requirements, book descriptions and sales reports.
Kindle Cover
In August, I noticed that Kindle required uploaded Kindle covers to be at least 1000 pixels on the long side. I recently updated my eBook Formatting and Publishing Guide, and was required to upload a properly sized cover to meet the requirements. (my book originally had the size at 800 pixels on the long size).
This can cause minor headaches if you don’t know exactly where your original book cover is. I wasn’t able to bypass the cover request, even though my book has been up since 2011. It was either not update the book, or fix the cover.
KDP Spell Check
If you haven’t seen this yet, you will love it. KDP now has a spell check tool. It does a quick check of your book before you publish, which you can ignore if you want to.
Descriptions
I have always utilized HTML in my book descriptions. I the last couple weeks I have noticed that feature getting slowly stripped from each of my books. I am uncertain of this is a glitch and have asked Amazon to elaborate.
While removing HTML from descriptions isn’t a huge issue, it does leave an odd (and somewhat unsightly) blemish if you have HTML in your description.
Heading tags, that normally would look like this:
Sale
Began to appear like this in the description:
<h3>Sale</h3>
It is fortunate that I monitor my books daily and have since modified them to regular bold text. However, I cannot find anywhere on the net that the ability to use HTML has been removed from Amazon descriptions. I have subsequently written to Amazon regarding HTML use and will post their comments here.
UPDATE 10-29-13: Well, still after 5 tries, Amazon has not answered my question “Why are my allowed tags looking like text?” However, I did get this in the email today which shows that previous other uses of HTML are now not allowed:
[If your] book description contains unsupported HTML tags. While we’ve allowed this HTML in book descriptions before now, after November 2, 2013, we no longer support it. For more information about what’s allowed in book descriptions, please see: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A377RPHW6ZG4D8
So, What does this mean for MY descriptions? I just removed the HTML and left it at that. Perhaps after this changeover in November, I can get them back up.
KDP Reports
When you view your sales reports on KDP you may notice a few changes. Instead of listing the ending day of the week for sale/downloads (ie/ 09/14/13), it now displays like this:
09/08/14-09/14/13
I have also noticed that the indicators for Free Promotions or Standard are now listed under “Transaction Type.” I like this as I can easily differentiate between “sales” and “freebies.”
