In today's video, we are going to be talking about the top 10 mistakes that Amazon KDP sellers make. Now, I've had to learn these mistakes the hard way, but I have condensed everything that I have learned and what to avoid doing into this one video to save you guys a ton of time. Now, if you guys know my style of videos, there's going to be no fluff in this video. I'm just going to keep it to all of the valuable information that you really need to know, and I'm even going to put you on screen recording to show you real examples of each one of these mistakes. So guys, without further ado, let's get straight into this video. All right, so switching over to the computer here, this is one of my actual Amazon KDP listings. So I'll be able to show you the actual Amazon listing page, but then also behind the scenes, what this looks like when you are uploading it to Amazon KDP. This will allow us to break down the different mistakes that I've made or mistakes that you may be running into, and how to solve them. So with that being said, getting into the very first Amazon KDP mistake, this one is about the books title. Now, where this mistake comes into play is when you are uploading your book to Amazon KDP this box right here that says Book Title, what you enter here, Amazon really wants that to match exactly what is on the cover of your book. For this book specifically, it says "Horses Word Search," that is the title of our book. Now, as you can see, we have additional text down here. Sometimes Amazon's going to be really particular, and they want you to put every word that is on your cover as your book title. Depending on how strict your reviewer is from Amazon KDP, that may be the criteria that they're specifically looking for. So the real example here is that this book has been approved with "Horse Word Search Puzzle Book." This is a very close match of the title that I've entered to what is on the actual book's cover. What I can say to you guys is this is not always the case, but if your book is not getting approved on Amazon KDP, try different combinations of specific words that are on your book's cover. Now, this brings us right into the second Amazon KDP mistake. This is another very common one, and instead of the title this time, it's actually in regards to the subtitle. So on your Amazon listing here, you have your title first, and then you have a colon, which is these two dots here, and then everything after that is all your subtitle. Now, this is what this looks like on the front end, actually on Amazon. On the back end, it is all entered in this one box right here. So below title, you have your subtitle. Now this goes all the way to the right. Over here I'll show you everything that I've entered. And there are two common mistakes that you can run into here. The first mistake is that Amazon does not want you to use specific keywords in your subtitle. The two most common ones are going to be "Free" and "Best Seller." So they don't want you to say that your book is a bestseller in your subtitle because it may not actually be a bestseller on Amazon. Additionally, they don't want you to say that your book is free. Now, this is just so people don't think that your book is free for some reason because it says free in the title, when it's actually for sale for a price. So in my listings, and this is something that I use on a lot of my books, at the end of it, I say "Gift for Vacations, Holidays, and Free Times." Free times is just an easier way to say leisure or downtime. But Amazon sometimes flags this because the word "free" is in it. Now, this does not happen all the time. It just sometimes happens depending on who's reviewing the book, and if it does happen, I will switch free times to relaxing or leisure. So if you are running into the same issue and you can't figure out why your book is getting rejected for the subtitle, just see if you have the word "free" in there somewhere, even if it's not in the context of saying the book is free, and try changing that out to something else. Now, the second common reason that people's subtitles get rejected from Amazon is because they have a repetitive keyword from their title into their subtitle. So a perfect example of this is in our title, it says "Horse Word Search" or "Horse Word Search Puzzle Book." We do not want to repeat that again in our subtitle. This is what Amazon will consider keyword stuffing, where they think we are trying to game the system by trying to get a ton of the same keyword into our listing. So as you can see, as you scroll through this entire subtitle down here, we do not match that same keyword from the title in our subtitle. I know these seem like very nitty gritty things, but they take so long to figure out specifically what Amazon wants and where these mistakes are stemming from. So guys, if you are enjoying this video, please just give it a thumbs up, and we will continue on with the rest of this video. Alright, so moving right into the third Amazon KDP mistake, this one comes from margins on your cover. So when you create your cover file and you upload that to Amazon KDP, sometimes they will send that book back and say that there's an issue with your margins. So to show you where this mistake stems from is when you are creating your actual cover file. So this is the cover file for that book we've been talking about. Your color of the background needs to go all the way past the edge of your cover. You don't want to just line it up right here, because if you zoom in all the way, you may find that there's actually a tiny bit of white cover still there that you didn't cover. We need to make sure that we pull this all the way over the edge so that everything has that background color. And when this book is printed, it doesn't have a tiny bit of white that was mistakenly put there. And then any elements, graphics, text, anything that's important, is all within the cutoff line. So all this is within the dotted green here. Now, just as a quick note here, for any of you guys who this software doesn't look familiar to you, this is called Book Bolt, I will put a link to it down in the description below. This is what I use for all of my KDP books. Oftentimes, when I show things like this without explaining that, I get comments down below saying, "What is that software that you used?" So the link to it will be down in the description. There's full tutorials on how to use it on this channel. But needless to say, hopefully that clears up all of the issues on the cover. All right, just like that, let's get into the fourth common mistake for Amazon KDP, and this one's in regards to the author name. So if your book is getting kicked back for an author name or contributor name, first, just know that they often batch those together. So when you are uploading your book to Amazon KDP, you may only have an author name, and no contributor name entered at all, and they may come back and say that you need to change your contributor names. We'll take that with a grain of salt because they often batch that with author names. So they may actually be saying you need to change your author name. Now, there are two common reasons that your author name gets rejected. First is simply because someone else on Amazon is already using that same author name. There's no real easy way to check this on Amazon right now, you can search for the author name on Amazon and see what comes up, but it doesn't always pull up the results that we need. Now the second common mistake is that the name that you are using for your author name is protected or owned by someone else. In some cases, this could be another author that is building up their business and they wanted to protect their name, so they formally filed to own the rights to it, or this could just be a company or brand name that you are not aware of, something you haven't heard of out there, but they actually own the rights to that name. So the big takeaway here is that if your author or contributor names are getting kicked back for some reason, just change it to something entirely different. What a lot of people don't realize is that you don't have to use the same author name for every book on Amazon. If we go back to Amazon here and look at the listing, Golden Page Press, that's what I've used for this specific book. However, in most cases, I'm using a different author name on every specific book that I'm uploading. So if yours is getting kicked back for some reason, just change it to something totally different, resubmit that, and hopefully that will solve the issue. Now, this actually brings us very nicely into the next common mistake, this is one that's not talked about often. What this one is is in regards to copyrighted and trademarked material. Now, copyrights and trademarks are roughly the same thing, and what they are is that other people can only writes to specific things. This can be names, this can be graphics, it can be logos, it can even be people's reputations like celebrities. So the big mistake that a lot of people make is when they're creating their covers for Amazon KDP, they use copyrighted materials on that cover. So let me show you a real example of this. So if you go over to Amazon, you type in something like "baseball word search", this will give us some examples to show this. As you start scrolling through here, you're going to see none of this is branded. This is a great cover here, you have no specific teams, no specific logos, no specific celebrities, that's a great result right there. Again, right here, you have nothing specific on here, it's not infringing on any copyrights or trademarks. So here's the first example right here. As you can see on this cover, you have three baseball players. You can identify who they are, these are just photos of them. The argument here would be that the person is getting sales based off the reputation of these players. So I would not recommend putting actual photos of players on the cover. Now, here's another example, you can see the same thing here, you have real players on the cover. These are very identifiable people, you don't wanna have that on your cover because you may get taken down for copyright or trademark infringement. The specific term that you may get notified about is right of publicity and right of privacy, essentially, using a celebrity's reputation to try to profit from. Now guys, this is not just limited to celebrities or athletes, this also applies to anything else that other people can own. So think about company names or company logos, car brands, car logos, even movie or TV show characters. These are all things that have built up a reputation and we can't just slap them on our cover and try to profit off of them. So moving right along here, let's get into the sixth Amazon KDP mistake. This is one of my favorites here, and this is that a lot of people think that when you are creating books on Amazon KDP, you have to run paid ads. Let me just show you a real example of this and why you don't need to run paid ads. You can just use a slightly different strategy to get totally organic sales. So as we said in the beginning of this video, we are going to use this book as a real example. So this is going to work perfectly to show these paid ads. So if you go over to Amazon and you type in "horse word search," the first two listings here are sponsored, meaning that people are using paid ads, they're paying to be there. But then these other ones here are not sponsored, they're just showing up organically on the first line of the first page of the search results. Now, the big thing that I have learned here is that if you find these smaller niches like a horse word search book, which is a very niche-specific thing on Amazon, you can create these books and they will show up on the first page of Amazon without you paying for any ads. Now, something that's actually really cool that goes to prove this even more is that I've shown you guys in another video here, I'll put a link to it down in the description, how to create this horse word search book, and you guys have followed along that tutorial, created them yourself, and your books are actually outranking my own book, which is awesome. So this just goes to show that this really does work. If you are finding these smaller niches, creating books in those niches, they are just organically going to show up on the first page of Amazon. Now guys, this goes hand in hand with the next common Amazon KDP mistake, and what that is is having the wrong mindset of going into Amazon KDP. A lot of people go after trying to find what books are selling the most, and then create their own version of that book or try to create something better. However, what I can say from years of experience selling on these marketplace websites is that you don't want to just go after the really big sellers. Instead, use that strategy that we just started to talk about in the last point of finding all these smaller sub niches where there are still a lot of people searching for that niche, but there are not many other people who have found a yet and created books to offer. If you can find all of those niches, you can create as many books as you can, upload them into that niche, find another one, create books and upload it into that niche, and rinse and repeat this process. And then as all of these people are searching for these niches on Amazon, you are the one that has the most books to offer for sale. So organically you are going to be getting sales because you are one of the only options to choose from in an underserved niche, meaning there's a lot of people searching for it and not many options to buy. Now, guys, again, I never like to just offer theory here, I always walk you through things step by step. So I've already covered this in another video, I will put a link to it down in the description below. This will walk you through how to find all of those underserved niches and then you can go on to fill those niches with as many books as you can. So moving right along, the next Amazon KDP mistake is something that took me literally years to learn. What that was was back in 2018 when I was starting Amazon KDP, I was creating high content books. Now, if you're not familiar, high content books are where you write out, basically, a full novel, this can be fiction or nonfiction. Although this book still sold and it's still selling to date, that's just a nice perk to Amazon, it just passively sells over the years, it did not generate and still hasn't generated any crazy amount of money. The mistake that I learned here is that I was competing against bestselling authors by trying to sell a high content book. As someone who is not a bestselling author, does not have a reputation in the author space, these are not the types of books to create if you're trying to make money. What I learned is that the types of books to create are low and medium content books. Essentially, these are functional books. So people are coming in not looking at who the author is, but what is the function of that book? I will put up a big list on the screen here of a bunch of these different low and medium content book ideas, just so you can see what I'm talking about here. But a lot of these are books filled with templates or filled with word searches or puzzles. These are the types of books where it doesn't matter who the author is, people are buying these books for a specific function. All right guys, the next Amazon KDP mistake is one that most people do not even know exists. What this one is, is that once you've found specifically the type of low or medium content book you want to create, you need to go find sub-niches within that type of book. So for example, this is a horse-themed word search book. Word searches are an excellent sub niche within medium content books. However, I've gone one step further and I've niched that down even more to a horse-specific word search book or a baseball-specific word search book. Doing this one extra layer of breaking this down just one more time into another niche is kind of the secret sauce to Amazon KDP. This is where you're going to find all of those niches where there are actually a lot of people searching, but no one's come across those niches yet. Now guys, if you've made it this far, we are onto the last Amazon KDP mistake. This is the one that affects the most people out there, and I try to help you guys in the comments as much as possible with this one. What this one is is having paralysis by analysis. Essentially what that means is you're trying to analyze what is the best business to start, what is the best way to start Amazon KDP, that you're actually paralyzed in your decision and you don't get started. All I can say for you guys is just give this one an honest try. In my 10-plus years of starting online businesses, Amazon KDP has been the easiest one to actually start and start making money. And this is in 2025, so this is not dated information. So guys, if you do want to get started with Amazon KDP, I'll put a link down in the description below. And if you scroll through my channel, you're going to find full step-by-step tutorials. All of these are totally free. I'm not charging you anything in a course for them, and they will have everything that you need to start this business and start making money. So guys, as always, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please just give it a thumbs up. Let me know if you have any questions down in the comments, and I'll be seeing you guys all in the next video.