Amazon KDP in 2025: The Game Has Changed… (Do This or Get Left Behind)

[Music] in this video I'm going to show you exactly how you should be publishing on Amazon KDP today to actually work with Amazon's new algorithm let's get into it so Amazon KDP has changed what do I mean by this it's a very clear difference between old Amazon KDP how people used to publish on Amazon versus how you should be publishing today make sure to watch this to the end because I promise you this video will make you a lot of money if you change the way you do Amazon KTP if you publish how Amazon likes

your books will be favored before we begin if you want to learn my entire publishing process step by step make sure to join over a thousand people taking my completely free Amazon KP course which I will leave in the first link in the description so first things first let's talk about the Amazon algorithm so the old Amazon algorithm was an SEO based ranking so basically the more keywords you had in your title your cover your metadata your description the more your book will Rank and the more your book will be prioritized and this also led

to people doing a lot of keyword stuff titles they would just cram as many keywords as they could in their book title and so basically they were creating a book to rank not a book to actually get clicks and so if you still publish like this today I promise you your books will not sell and so the new Amazon algorithm is a performance Bas algorithm to keep it simple if your book does well Amazon will favor it in the rankings and show it to more people and so we have the AIM for consistent sales if

a book isn't making consistent sales nothing is telling Amazon that people want it and there's no reason why it's going to show it to more people or prioritize it when it comes to the ranking of our keyword we also want to make more sales for longer so the more sales you get for 30 60 90 plus days the more your book is going to stick to the top of the ranking so if you can launch your book properly get ranking on page one and get consistent sales this is what's going to tell Amazon that people

want your book and if it should keep it there nothing to do with keywords anymore and it's everything to do with the performance of your book so we will dive into how we should be executing our book specifically in a second but something to note is as long as you're targeting your main search term you have your one main search room in your title that's all you need if you have your one main search room in your title it's going to be prioritized for that ranking and if your book sells well it's also going to

be favored when Amazon decides where your book should go should it rank at the top of page one should it be shown to more people but most importantly is we have to find one high demand topic create a title targeting that specific person and if we do that our book will rank anywhere else that's relevant because that's what the important thing is here we want to rank where relevant because the old version of Amazon KDP where you just ranked everywhere you could and made sales cuz there was no saturation or competition does not work anymore

we have to find a very specific topic for a specific person make a book for that person and then Amazon's going to prioritize us a few other things to note is I've also heard that Amazon will monitor retention so are people actually buying and reading your book specifically the ebook because they can see exactly where people leave off in their ebooks and so if they're buying your book reading a page a chapter and stopping and if there's tons of people doing this Amazon's not going to going to think that people want your book so we

have to actually make a good book so that people buy it and actually read a good chunk of it not only that but also leave reviews if they're buying a book They're reading it they're leaving feedback they're leaving a positive review this all takes into account when Amazon decides where your book should rank another thing when it comes to Old Amazon KDP is there was no quality control so basically you could just create lowquality books which is what people did they put a bunch of keywords in their title so it ranked everywhere and because there

was no quality control or no competition their books would just sell but nowadays there's very very strict quality control so you have to have good quality content inside your book you have to have high quality formatting that's professional and works well in ebook format as well as paperback format as well as originality are you just plagiarizing and copying other books or articles or are you actually creating unique content that solves the reader's problem in an effective way we want to create a brand with our books we want to have high quality content that looks a

specific way it's branded and formatted that's an enjoyable read for the customer we want to have original content where the customer is actually learning something and they choose to buy our books over other books because of the experience they get there's also some Shadow Banning going on so if you do have a spammy AI written lowquality book Amazon's not even going to rank it it's not even going to rank it or show it to anybody and even if you do get sales because it's low quality people aren't going to read it people are going to

leave bad reviews and regardless it's going to end up in page 5 6 7 and Beyond and not get seen by any customers and the other side of that is lowquality book books won't even be let through so they are cracking down with their approval process if they don't think your book is up to their standard they're not even going to allow it to be on Amazon and I'm seeing this happen more and more and the simple fact is Amazon wants to keep their reputation they want to have good quality products for their customers if

you're not putting good quality stuff on their website they're going to say no sorry we don't want it here but the ones that are high quality that people like they buy they read they leave reviews Amazon will favor these because it's making Amazon money it's making their site look good and these are the ones that's going to get shot up in the ranking how many keywords you have the relevancy of your metadata is irrelevant what's relevant is do you you have a good book and are people buying and reading it and like I said as

long as you're targeting your main topic that's all you need so when it comes to low content books you have to actually make it enjoyable so for some reason I feel like people who publish low content books just think they have a pass and they can just create a bunch of crappy AI generated books publish them to Amazon and expect to make money it doesn't work that way and a perfect example of that is coloring books is people are making these lowquality AI coloring books with no quality control there's nothing wrong with using AI but

if you are actually look at the pages how is this experience going to be for the reader and if you want to know more about this experience go and read some reviews of some coloring books and you'll very clearly see that people have a horrible experience in this case this book has half the pages that are just colored in Gray so you can't even color it the one purpose it's looking to solve which is giving you a book to color the person can't even do so of course are going to leave a bad review and

also a lot of the images don't make sense they have really random a generated stuff in them and people just don't like them but people continue to make these books with no quality control they just pump them out and then wonder why they don't make money with Amazon KDP but it's very obvious and of course when you get these negative reviews people don't like the book Amazon's not going to prioritize it and not going to show it to anybody when it comes to high content books you want to Simply solve their problem take them from

point A to point B and deliver what your book Promises no no more no less seems like a simple concept but a lot of people just miss the mark a book doesn't have to be expensive and complicated to solve somebody's problem do adequate topic research find out what people are actually buying and what they want create a strong book outline that's very detailed completely outlining exactly what the book should be and think about it think about what the reader's experience is going to be like when they work through this book and make sure you showcase

that in your book outline and then go and find a good Ghost Writer even if you don't have a high budget you can still vet ghost writers look at their portfolios read their reviews give them a message especially when using sites like the urban writers they make it easy to do this so go and find a good ghost rer within your budget and deliver them a strong outline based on your topic research and if you have a high demand topic you create a book that people want to click with your title and your cover and

you have a book that they want to buy because it's speaking to their problems they will have a good experience they're going to have a good experience they're going to read through the book and they're going to leave a review and all these things combined tell Al and let people like your book it's going to rank it higher and when you are ranking High let's say on the top of page one for your main search term when there is high demand your book sells very well the hardest part about Amazon KDP is finding a high

demand book topic and getting our book in front of people's faces and when we do that and we have a good book people just buy it and it's quite effortless and so most likely you don't need any more Amazon ad training or any of these complex marketing strategies what you need to do is find high demand book topics and create a book that people actually want to buy so another note is if your account does get terminated it's for a reason Amazon is cracking down on quality and if you're making lowquality stuff against their terms

of service they're going to terminate your account and I've never seen somebody lose their account for no reason and even if they did they've always gotten it back so if you do lose your account or you're afraid of losing your account as long as you don't do anything wrong you won't you'll be fine and even if for some reason you do lose it it's very possible to get it back they don't want to ban a accounts Amazon makes money from people like us who publish our books to Amazon and sell it to the masses they

want us to publish books they don't want to terminate accounts unless you're creating lowquality products on their platform and abusing the system so just create high quality books publish the right way what you're learning in this video and you're not going to lose your account so another thing with the old Amazon is low quality reviews so people will get very low quality unverified reviews and of course they still do this and Amazon is a lot more strict now with the review policies so I personally would only get verified reviews if I am using things like

review sites or anything similar because I want people to actually purchase my book and then leave their feedback people also used to do a bunch of review swapping so they would swap reviews with other Publishers and this is a Surefire way to get your account terminated today they would also get friends and family to leave reviews on their books so Amazon doesn't like when people who share addresses leave reviews on each other's books because it's kind of juking the system they want your books to get honest feedback and so avoid having any friends and family

leave reviews so today is very different the review policies are a lot more strict and we have to get high quality reviews we have to set our book up for organic reviews so you want to set your book up so people buy read it have a good experience and leave their feedback this looks very good in the eyes of Amazon and Amazon will rank your book better if it sees this happening we also want verified reviews we want people to actually buy our book and then lead their feedback so if you are using review sites

make sure you're getting verified reviews and simply just make a good book if you give the customer a good experience your books will sell they will leave reviews and it will be prioritized in the ranking so I will leave my complete review strategy video linked below as well as I do walk through it in the free course so another thing that is important is the old cover design so there a very specific cover design that people use to do on Amazon and it does not work today at all it looks very outdated it normally has

a bunch of corny stock photos on it they don't really add any value they just add clutter and and make it look like an old school DIY book they also have long subtitles so of course because they were keyword stuffing their titles before they're going to have these long subtitles on their cover they don't look very good it simply does not come across as a bestselling author and all these combined together just make that self-published look and once you see the self-published look you can't unsee it and a lot of the time these books are

not selling as well as compared to the books that look like best sellers so the new Amazon KDP is we have to position oursel as a bestselling book and have a bestselling cover so we will get into some examples in a second but we want to be design focused have a high quality design for your cover that focuses on things like the fonts the colors the images or illustrations you use is it of good design or is it that old school corny look so we also want to build our cover around the title so before

people would create a book cover they would make some image on it they would put their author name and then they would slap the title on it however we should be doing the opposite the title is a big reason why somebody is is going to click on your book and we want to build the cover around that that should be the focal point of her book and their eyes should draw to the title not the image on itself the title is going to tell them what they want to hear what the book solves how the

book is going to help them and that paired with good design is what's going to make somebody click on your book we also want it to be easy to read so this might sound simple but there are so many books I see on Amazon where you simply can't read the title somebody is scrolling through their phone looking at books to buy if they can barely read your book title title they're not even going to try they're just going to go to the book that's closest to it that they can read and so make sure your

title is actually large nice font and it's legible and of course we want our cover to stand out what does it look like on our keyword compared to all the other books ranking and is it going to stand out is it going to blend in with the cover design and the title or is it going to stand out with the colors and have a bold title that is enticing and desirable and a better offer than the other books so here's some examples of the old cover design so as you can see they always have these

stock photos on them that are kind of corny they kind of look DIY I don't really like them as well as they always will have this font that's almost faded away it looks like that '90s early 2000 slideshow font that everybody used and they always have these long subtitles so in my opinion these covers just don't work anymore they don't look good they look DIY and when you compare them and put them beside the bestselling covers it's a night and day difference so as you can see with the bestselling cover it's a very simple concept

you have bright bold colors that are nice on the eyes that stand out from the competitors you have a very clear title that's not only enticing but easy to read and looks nice it's the focal point of the cover like this one here million doll weekend if someone's looking to start a business and they see this book over here with this cluttered chaotic Visual and just how to start a business and some long subtitle versus the million doll weekend the surprisingly simple way to launch a seven figureure business in 48 hours it's very clear which

one they're going to pick so keeping on with the theme they just have bright bold colors they have titles that speak for themsel they're desirable they tell the customer what they want to hear how to day trade for a living business Made Simple stop overthinking and they don't have too much clutter it's just title focused good design a good color palette maybe one visual that makes sense to the topic like this one here the making of a manager and that's it so this is how we need to be designing our covers moving forward and compared

to these ones these ones will get clicked all day long so something to note as well as most people's exposure to books are going to be best selling books books by very high level authors whether a friend is recommending them a book they're walking into bookstores they're looking at the top bests sellers on Amazon they're always going to be these very highlevel books if you go look at these highle bestselling books they're going to look like this so in most consumers Minds this is what a bestselling book is and so if they see books that

look like this they have these corny stock photos with money jumping out of the computer these dated fonts and these long subtitles in their brain it doesn't even register as a bestselling book and so if we simply design our book covers like the bestselling authors do it's going to click in their brain that this must be a highlevel author and so because there's so much more competition and saturation on Amazon these type of covers do not work anymore we have to create books that look like bestselling authors just to reiterate title focused have a strong

enticing desirable title that's the core focus of the cover have one visual explaining the topic or even none at all and have a strong color palette that's nice on the eyes that stands out from the competitors so this is actually a new thing but I also recommend staying away from AI images so my opinion the AI images is the new version of the self-published look once again you're not going to see bestselling authors using AI images lowquality way of making book covers and in most cases they don't look very good in this case this retirement

book the guy's head is literally in front of the windshield like it doesn't make any sense no one is going to buy this book what does this tell you about the quality of your book and if your cover has this low quality control what's the Insight going to look like so when it comes to the categories for our books with old Amazon KDP is we used to be able to do seven plus book categories and this would lead to people abusing the system so they would put their book in a bunch of unrelated categories to

get the bestseller tag and of course people still do this but now that new Amazon KDP is they've changed it so you only get your three categories now which you can change on your main KDP dashboard but they're cracking down on the relevance of your category so if you are putting books in random categories they really don't like this and I've actually seen people get their accounts terminated but of this we only want to put our book in relevant categories not just to keep our account safe but no one's going to buy our book if

it's in a random category so we want to make sure we put our book in categories that are relevant not just to keep our account safe but so people who actually are looking for our book see it like we talked about it's not just about ranking anymore it's about making sure that you have a book that somebody wants for a specific audience and showing it to that audience not showing it to a bunch of random people people know what they want to buy on Amazon and if you have a book that is for somebody specific

and you're showing it to them that's how you have the highest chance to sell books so we figured out what we should be doing now compared to Old Amazon but now let's dive into some more new tactics we can use just to make Amazon love us there's a lot of important things we need to be doing when it comes to our book launch and a lot of different things so how can we make Amazon prioritize our books and actually rank them well so the first thing of course is prioritizing our book launch like we talked

about the new algorithm is a performance-based algorithm and that first 30 to 60 days that your book is live is one of the most important because it actually tells Amazon if people want your book those first few months are going to determine where your book gets ranked and of course you can always still rank it well if you don't do the best in those first two months however they are very important so one of the most important takeaways from this video is that when you publish your book to Amazon nothing happens when you put a

book on Amazon it sits on the fifth or sixth page and literally nothing happens nobody sees it it doesn't rank on page one it doesn't get reviews it doesn't get sales we need to prove to Amazon that people actually want and like our book so a proper book launch and getting reviews in the first 30 to 60 days is one of the most important things you can do so what I do from my book launch is I basically publish my book and make it desirable so I have a good title and cover of course however

more importantly is I'm going to discount it it's going to have a 9.9 ebook and a $9.99 paperback if I'm publishing high content and from there I'm going to run a free Price promotion in which I get reviews from my book so this will not only get a bunch of free downloads which will spark your book and tell Amazon that people are downloading it but it's also a great time to get reviews from your revieww sites book bite book Bounty so that they're very inexpensive and go a lot further from there I'm also going to

put the A+ content onto my book so my book is basically desirable and ready to make sales it has reviews it has a low price it has A+ content has a good cover and title and then that's when I'm going to officially start my book launch and the main thing to do that is just driving Trav to your book so of course the first thing is Amazon ads but more importantly you have to be in a high demand topic if we're in a high demand topic with Organic traffic then we're just going to of course

make our book desirable Drive traffic to with Amazon ads and then it will slowly creep up in the rankings and start to actually get seen and picked up by the organic traffic and the most important thing with your book launch is having an end goal we want to inevitably rank on page one for our main search term so you need to know what your main search term is make sure that it has high demand create a book for that customer and that search term and nothing else and then make our book desirable launch it by

driving traffic to it and Amazon is going to rank it most likely to page one if you do these first two steps properly and then once it's there the organic traffic will pick it up and it'll start to make sales and because you're the desirable option you have reviews you have a nice cover and title you're making consistent sales you're telling Amazon people want our book it's going to continually rank better inevitably to the top of page one and when you're in a high demand topic you're going to have thousands of people searching up this

topic and seeing your book and this results in a lot of sales so this is the biggest thing when it comes to selling books on Amazon if you're solely relying on Amazon ads to make sales it's going to be very hard to be profitable and even in my case as someone who's been doing this a long time my ads aren't perfect either some days are 30% AC cost some days are 70% but the important thing is my books rank high on my main Search terms and they get a ton of organic sales so my royalties

are always more than my Amazon ads at the end of the month so create a book that people want and then tell Amazon that people want it and they like it if you do this your book will be ranked and prioritized and it will make organic sales and do well so of course I will leave my book launch video linked below as well as once again it is also in the free course also linked below so another thing when it comes to new Amazon KDP is we simply want to create books that people want so

we want to Target one specific topic find your main search term that's solving one main problem and create a book for that person we're not just trying to rank our book in as many places that doesn't work anymore at all all it doesn't work in the eyes of Amazon and it simply doesn't work based on how people shop there's too much competition and saturation and just ranking somewhere is not going to make you sell books it's going to make you sell books is having a specific topic for a specific person and ranking in front of

that person and then from there we want to create a title for that one keyword that one topic something that is enticing it's speaking to their problems and giving them a strong offer I'm going to help you solve your problem in this way this easily this fast whatever you want to do but it's important that we have one specific topic and in our title we're targeting that specific person and the more specific you go once your book gets put in front of these people's faces they're going to know it's for them they're going to be

very inclined to buy it of course like we already talked about we want to create that bestselling cover we need to make sure that our book falls in the same category as bestselling authors and bestselling books it's a professional design and it's not some DIY looking self-published book that has an AI image or some corny stock photo and the most important thing is only care about ranking and creating a book for your main search term I can't stress this enough people on Amazon are not just buying books that they see they are buying books that

they want and so we need to find a very specific place that people are searching whether it's wall potties for women balance exercises for seniors we find one specific place and we make our book only for that audience we have our title our cover our interior content it's all catered towards that one one audience then what happens when we publish our book we make it desirable during our book launch we drive traffic to it it starts to rank better the organic traffic starts to see it that book is clearly for them and what happens is

they buy it and the more sales you get which you will get sales if you publish this way the better you rank because Amazon's a new performance-based algorithm will start to see people want your book it's going to prioritize it and move it up to the top of page one I know it sound like a broken record but when you do have a good book that's for one specific person ranking at the top of the search term and that topic has high demand has a ton of traffic going to it your book will sell very

effortlessly so to keep it simple find what people are buying create what they want and launch your book properly to put it in front of their face and what happens when you do this is you will also rank anywhere that's relevant anywhere your book should rank if you target your main search term you'll have enough keywords and relevant data in there to rank anywhere else that relates to that topic then most likely will be in front of other customers so don't worry about ranking anywhere else make a book for your main topic and you will

rank anywhere that's necessary and why we want to rank where relevant is because ranking in general does not sell books ranking where your book is relevant sales books so when you have a book for a topic that is for a person and it ranks in front of those people your books will sell we only want our books to rank where relevant and that is done by finding a specific topic and making a book for that specific person so one thing I have noticed as well with the new Amazon KDP today is high content is a

lot Superior the reason I say this is because I feel like they're very much cracking down on low content a lot of people who are creating low content books even if they're doing the right way we're almost getting pulled in with the lowquality Publishers because low content books are becoming extremely saturated people are pumping out lowquality AI generated books activity books coloring books and it's hard to monitor these an's having a tough time with quality control for all these books and so it's very hard to stand out with the saturation and of course there's no

barrier to entry so you're having so many people creating so many books and the saturation is extremely high it's very hard to stand out in compete in topics that take one day to make a book for some people and so when new topics do come out they're very quickly just saturated with books another thing with low content books is people spend more than they think on them so of course high content books are more expensive to make however if you're spending anywhere from $30 to $70 on a low content book and you're doing that 10

20 30 times the cost is way higher than a high content book and I can promise you the odds of you making money with a high content book is a lot higher because it's a lot easier to predict how your book's going to do you're looking for a high demand topic you're proving that books are selling and because people can't make books in a day you know that the topic is not going to get crazy saturated overnight and so you can simply create a high quality book for for that spot you launch it like I

showed you you make your book cover like I showed you it will rank high and it will sell well a low content books if you're spending a lot on them and not getting results it's better off to take that money and spend it on high content books because it's just a totally different game and it's a lot less competitive than you think so just to go over what we should be doing today to get the most out of our publishing business is you want to find high demand topics that are specific solving a problem for

a specific person we want to create a book for that one topic we're not trying to rank in as many places as we can we're making a book for that specific topic and we will rank anywhere that's relevant we want to have an enticing title in cover and of course a high quality book because Amazon prioritizes high quality books that sell well when it comes to ranking we want to launch it properly make sure we're getting reviews making our book look desirable and then driving traffic to it and then of course our goal is to

rank high in a good topic if you have a strong book that ranks high in a high demand topic your book will sell very effortlessly and so all these combined tells Amazon that people want to buy a book and this is the new meta for Amazon is if people want to buy your book they buy it they leave reviews they read through it Amazon's going to think people must want this book and it's going to show you high in the rankings and show you to a lot of people this is another reason why I think

high content publishing isn't as competitive as you think because there's a lot of books that even if they have a couple hundred reviews they have these outdated covers they only have four star are rating so people are leaving bad reviews and so what's happening is a lot of newer books that are prioritizing their book launch getting sales getting reviews verified reviews and people are reading and having a good experience is Amazon is ranking these books over the old books even if the old books have more reviews and so there's very much a cycle and that

high content cycle is always rotating because the new algorithm favors performance and high quality and so it's very easy to beat out some of these books that have been there a long time because they were old school sellu they did not focus on quality they focus on ranking so if you do want to learn my entire high content publishing process start to finish I will leave my completely free course in the first link in the description so that's it for this video we'll see you in the next one [Music]