Real answers from a 6-figure KDP seller

Do not unpublish. Email KDP with your case ID, the specific policy you believe you comply with, and any supporting evidence. Unpublishing before they decide resets the clock.

Do not panic and do not fire off an emotional appeal. Read the suspension email carefully, they almost always name a specific policy even if it feels vague. The most common triggers: duplicate content, AI-assisted content without proper disclosure, misleading descriptions, and spiked review patterns. Write a calm, structured appeal that (1) acknowledges the policy cited, (2) explains what happened without excuses, and (3) details the specific steps you have taken. One well-structured appeal beats five emotional ones.

Use all 7 fields, up to 50 characters each. Never repeat words already in your title or subtitle as KDP indexes those automatically. Use the space for variations, misspellings, and related phrases.

The compliant way: build an ARC list before launch. These are readers who agree to read and leave an honest review in exchange for a free copy. iWrity is built specifically for this. You can also recruit from your own email list and from the back matter of books you have already published. What you cannot do: ask for positive reviews, offer incentives in exchange for a review, review-swap with other authors, or buy reviews from any service. Amazon cross-references reviewer accounts and gets smarter about this every year.

10 reviews at 4 stars or higher is the threshold where price resistance drops meaningfully. Below that, buyers hesitate. Above that, the social proof does the selling and a higher price can actually increase perceived value.

Spend without sales almost always points to one of three things. First, your cover or title is not converting clicks. If people click your ad and immediately leave, that is a cover or positioning problem, not an ads problem. Second, your target keywords are too broad. Check your Search Term Report and see what actual searches triggered your ads. Third, your product page is not closing the sale. Fix the product page first, then worry about the ads. Running ads to a broken funnel just means you pay to prove it does not work.

Almost always a review velocity drop. KDP's algorithm weights recent activity heavily. If review pace slows after launch week, rank slides. Running a price promotion or getting 2 to 3 more reviews usually recovers it.

Once in the title is enough. KDP reads the full title and subtitle as one string, so repeating it wastes subtitle space you could use for secondary keywords.

Pick one competitive category where you genuinely fit, and one niche subcategory where you can hit the top 100. Ranking in a niche category gets you the 'Best Seller' badge, which converts browsers on the main category page.

Each of the 7 fields allows up to 50 characters, not 50 words. Use the full 50 characters per field and do not repeat words that already appear in your title or subtitle. Amazon indexes those automatically. Do not use commas between keywords, spaces work fine. Focus on long-tail phrases that match exactly how someone would search. 'best keto diet book for beginners' outperforms 'keto' every time because it catches people further along in their buying decision.

KDP Select is better for launch: you get Kindle Unlimited reads, free promo days, and Countdown Deals. Go wide only once the book has stable organic rank and reviews. Switching too early kills momentum.

The 70% royalty tier kicks in between $2.99 and $9.99. Anything below $2.99 drops you to 35%. For most nonfiction, $4.99 to $7.99 is the sweet spot: high enough that readers perceive value, low enough that it is an impulse buy. For fiction in competitive genres, $2.99 to $3.99 tends to convert better. Test with a 2-week window at each price point and watch both unit sales and page reads.

Yes, but keep bids low. No reviews means low conversion, so high bids just burn money. Get 3 to 5 reviews first, then scale ads. Use auto campaigns to find converting keywords before switching to manual.

This is the classic honeymoon period drop. Amazon gives new books a temporary ranking boost to test click-through and conversion. When that window closes, your rank is determined by sustained sales velocity. If your ads or organic traffic were not converting well enough to maintain that position, Amazon pulls you back. The fix: make sure your cover, title, and first few pages of your Look Inside are doing the selling before you launch. Once you lose the boost, you earn it back through ad spend and reviews, not time.

No, description edits do not affect rank. Rank resets only happen if you unpublish or make a new version that KDP treats as a separate product. Edit descriptions freely, especially in the first 90 days.

KU makes sense if your genre has a strong reading culture there (romance, thriller, fantasy, most nonfiction). You trade exclusivity for access to readers who read 5 to 10 books a month. Going wide makes sense if you have an established audience outside Amazon, or if you are building a long-term brand that should not depend on one platform. If you are starting out with zero audience, KU gives you the fastest feedback loop.

Most common cover rejection triggers: third-party logos or trademarks in the background (even tiny ones on clothing), faces that look like real public figures, certain medical imagery, and title text on the cover that does not match your metadata exactly. Also check your file settings: KDP requires RGB color mode, not CMYK, and the file must be under 50MB. Export as JPG or TIFF in RGB and try again.

An ARC list is an asset you build over several launches, not something you assemble the month before.

ARC stands for Advance Reader Copy. The list is a group of readers who get the book free a few weeks before launch and are asked for an honest review on the day it goes live.

First, the gate almost nobody screens for

Amazon only allows an account to post reviews if it has spent at least $50 on that marketplace in the past 12 months, and promotional discounts do not count toward it. This is the number one reason ARC campaigns underdeliver. You can recruit 80 enthusiastic readers and find half of them are not eligible to post anything. Ask about it on your signup form. It feels awkward once and saves you a launch.

Related: Amazon keeps reviews separate per marketplace, so a review posted on amazon.co.uk does not appear on amazon.com. Ask which store your readers buy from and aim them at the one where you actually sell.

Where the names come from, in order of quality

1. Your newsletter list. Readers who subscribed because they like your books are the highest quality candidates you will ever have. Put a standing line in every issue: "I send early copies to a small group of readers, reply if you want in."

1. The back matter of your existing books. Costs nothing and keeps recruiting for years. On the last page: "Want to read my next book before anyone else? Sign up here." Point it at a form. Every copy already sold keeps working for you.

1. Your own past reviewers. Anyone who wrote three thoughtful paragraphs on your last book is exactly who you want back. You cannot contact them through Amazon, but newsletter replies and your reader community will surface them.

1. iWrity. This is what the review request system here is for. Post your book, and readers pick it up from the library and read it. Comprehension questions confirm they actually read it before a review is accepted, which is why the reviews that come through tend to be substantive rather than one-liners. Boost puts your book at the top of the library while your campaign is running, which matters most in the weeks you are trying to fill the list.

1. Reader communities in your genre. Read the rules before posting, most ban blind promotion but allow a clearly labelled ARC call.

The form fields that matter

Whatever you use to collect signups, capture:

• Name and email
• Which Amazon store they buy from
• Whether they have spent $50+ on that store in the last year
• Preferred format (epub, mobi, PDF)
• Whether they have reviewed for you before

That last field is the one that turns a list into an asset. After two or three launches you will know exactly who reliably posts, and those names are worth more than everyone else combined.

The numbers to plan around

Expect 20 to 40 percent of your ARC readers to actually post. For 20 reviews in launch week, plan on 70 to 100 people. A list of 50 to 100 genre-matched readers who reliably review beats 1,000 unfocused signups. Every author's first list is too small, so build it across launches instead of trying to force it in one go.

Timing

1. Weeks 12 to 8: lock the launch date, build the reviewer list, draft the request email.
2. Weeks 8 to 6: send invitations, confirm who is in, get the files out.
3. Weeks 6 to 4: one midpoint reminder. Note who has gone quiet.
4. Weeks 4 to 1: final reminder with the exact launch date and posting window.
5. Launch day: one email with the direct review link for their store. A reminder roughly doubles the posting rate, so this email matters more than any other.

The line you must not cross

Give the copy freely and ask for an honest review. Never require a review in return, never pay for one, never trade one for one with another author, and never suggest what to write or what rating to give. Your reader does have to disclose they received a free copy, something like "I received a complimentary copy in exchange for my honest review." Amazon strips reviews and sometimes closes accounts over this, so put the disclosure line directly in your ARC email.

Two guides on the site go deeper: Running an ARC Campaign covers the full 12-week timeline, and our Amazon Review Policy page covers exactly what is and is not allowed.

Positive feedback plus no sales means you have a visibility problem, not a book problem. And in this market, visibility is bought, not granted.

You have already run the two-year experiment: publish quietly, wait, hope. The result is in. Nothing about that changes with the sequel unless you change how you launch it.

The market you are actually competing in

Since the AI boom, the volume of new titles hitting Amazon has exploded. You are no longer competing against authors like you, you are competing against a flood. Organic discovery, where Amazon's algorithm finds readers for a small catalog on its own, barely exists anymore. The authors getting traction are the ones treating discoverability as a paid channel.

Ads are not optional anymore

Start with Amazon Ads, and point them at book 1, not the sequel. Book 1 is the cheap entry to your series: every reader who buys it and likes it becomes a sequel sale and an audiobook sale later. A $5-10 daily budget split between an auto-targeting campaign and a manual campaign on 20-30 relevant keywords is enough to learn what converts. Give it 60 days before judging, and judge per series, not per book. A loss on book 1's ads that produces sequel read-through is a profit.

What a launch still gives you, and what it does not

Amazon no longer hands new releases free visibility, those days are gone. What the launch window does give you is 30 days of eligibility for the Hot New Releases charts, where even a modest ad-driven spike gets you seen, plus a new-release notification to anyone who follows you on Amazon. So stack everything into that window: refresh book 1's description and categories, link both books in a series page, point your ads at the series, and release the audiobook close to the sequel so each format promotes the other.

Treat publishing as a business, because it is one

A business spends money to acquire customers, tracks what each sale costs, and reinvests what works. Set a monthly ad budget you can afford to lose while learning. Track royalties against ad spend. Kill campaigns that do not perform, scale the ones that do. You are not spinning your wheels if you are measuring. You are only spinning your wheels if you keep doing what the last two years already proved does not work.

Don't touch your ad budget yet. Ads don't fix a book that isn't selling, they just make you pay to watch it not sell.

Sales die in one of three places, and each one has a different fix:

• Nobody sees the book. That's a visibility problem: categories, keywords, ads.
• People see it but don't click. That's your cover and title.
• People click but don't buy. That's your description, price, reviews, or the Look Inside sample.

More ad spend only helps with the first problem. If your real problem is the second or third, extra budget pours water into a leaking bucket. A quick way to tell: if your ads already get impressions and clicks but no sales, the listing is the problem, not the budget.

So before spending another dollar, find out which of the three is bleeding you. That's exactly what Expert Book Feedback is for. Request it from your iWrity dashboard and I'll go through your actual listing (cover, description, price, categories, reviews) and tell you which lever to pull first. You get a diagnosis instead of guessing with your wallet.

Once the listing converts, ads start making sense, because every click you pay for has a real chance of becoming a sale.

$6.99 works against your goal. If the priority is early reviews, you need sales volume, and $6.99 on a debut ebook with zero reviews will choke that volume. Readers take a chance on an unknown author at $0.99 or $2.99. At $6.99 they scroll past to the book with 200 reviews at the same price. Organic review rates run at roughly 1 review per 100 to 200 sales, so if you only move 30 copies in your first two months, you will likely end up with zero reviews and no momentum.

What to do instead:

1. Launch at $0.99 for the first 2 to 4 weeks. You drop to the 35% royalty band (70% only applies between $2.99 and $9.99), so you earn about $0.35 per copy instead of $4.89. But in the launch window you are not buying income, you are buying rank, readers, and Verified Purchase reviews. Those compound.
2. Or, if you enroll in KDP Select, run 2 or 3 free promo days early on to seed a few hundred downloads, then price at $2.99. One caveat: reviews from free copies usually do not carry the Verified Purchase badge, so $0.99 paid downloads produce stronger looking reviews than free ones.
3. Once you have 15 to 25 reviews and a rank floor, raise the price stepwise: $2.99, then $4.99, and only settle at $6.99 if comparable books in your subcategory actually sell there. Check the top 20 in your niche; most debut friendly genres cluster at $2.99 to $4.99 for ebooks.

Two more things:

• Price only enables volume, it does not generate reviews on its own. Pair the low launch price with a direct ask: a review request page in the back matter right after the last chapter, when engagement peaks. Stay inside Amazon's rules: no paid reviews, no swaps, no reviews from close family.
• If the $6.99 refers to a paperback, the calculus flips. Printing costs eat most of that, and $6.99 may actually be too low to be sustainable. Price the print edition for margin and let the cheap ebook do the review gathering.

Short version: $6.99 is a fine cruising price, it is a bad launch price. Launch cheap, harvest reviews and rank, then climb to $6.99 once the book has the social proof to justify it.