Friday, July 22, 2022: 6:00 pm (DAC 416ABC): Back in 2014 at HOPE X, John did a talk called "A Self-Publishing Success Story" detailing his process moving a book from a publisher to self-publishing on Createspace/Amazon. He had a good run on Amazon, updating the book again in 2017. Then, in 2018, Amazon merged Createspace into its "Kindle Desktop Publishing" (KDP) platform. In 2020, John decided to update several paragraphs in the 475-page book, and this attempt at a simple text change led to his book being stranded in a virtual, dystopian Amazon purgatory. The only reasonable way out was to abandon Amazon KDP altogether. This led to moving everything over to IngramSpark for print copies, Google Play Books for EBooks, and DPD for individually watermarked, DRM-free PDFs.

In this talk, John will discuss the horrors of his Amazon nightmare, successfully moving onward, the self-publishing process in 2022, and the economic aspects of his recent self-publishing experiences.

John Huntington