KDP Quality Notices

 Authors and KDP speak out!

         Last week’s blog on KDP Quality Notices to authors generated a lot of interest. Here are some things I gathered from your responses.

1.     Everyone is in favor of the Quality Notices. The end result will improve the reader’s experience.

2.     A universal concern is that KDP will send them to all authors as needed, not just independently published ones. In particular, everyone feels that big name authors need to receive them equally.

3.     There is a fear that by locating and complaining about a few errors, readers will be able to use that to demand their money back for the books they buy.

4.     Also, there is a concern that complaining about a few errors (which every book has, believe me, and I read about two a week!) will become a way to persecute the author for a grudge held against them.

I contacted KDP and asked if they would please share any information on how they distributed the notices. Here is their response:

Hello Marla,

I can understand you wanting to know how we get to the point of sending Quality notices to our publishers.

When you publish a book, it will be set to "In Review" status for a short period of time so we can ensure that we are providing the best possible eBook experience to our customers. Should we miss something (however small) in this process, our readers can submit feedback, report poor quality or formatting from the book's product detail page on the website.

If we get more of the same feedback from a number of customers about the same book, then we send a quality notice to that book's author.

I hope you will find this information helpful. If you have any further question about this or any other topic please feel free to contact us, we'll gladly assist you with your request.

Thanks for being part of the Amazon KDP family.

Then, in a response to a question about my own books, I got this answer:

Hello Marla,

We appreciate your attention to our recent notification.

Content published through KDP is held to the high standards customers have come to expect from Amazon. To ensure this, we react to reports from readers who experience problems when reading KDP books and perform random quality audits on books in the Kindle Store.

If we confirm the problem within a book negatively impacts the reading experience, we will always notify you of any problems we find and will make sure to point you in the right direction to get the problem fixed.

Thanks for using Amazon KDP.

Not sure why, but when responding to my direct question they only mentioned reacting to readers complaints, and in the other message, they did tell me that random audits were being performed. I think most of us would feel the notices were being handled in a more fair and consistent manner with the random checks. I must say, that KDP has been responsive to my questions and been professional and helpful with their answers.

Dear readers,

I think we all understand KDP notices a little better. Personally, at the risk of sounding whiny and whingy, it seems somewhat strange to spend time reprimanding an author for one or two typos, when all books, even the NYT best sellers, have a few.

What I’m hearing all of you say, though, is that there is an appreciation by authors for having errors pointed out in order to perfect the manuscript. I’ve fixed mine. And am once more resolved to learn how to do my own formatting so I can go in and clean up problems by myself! Probably won’t happen, though. I have little patience for formatting! I’ll have to perfect the proofing process.

Have a great week everyone!

Marla