How I Got Banned from KDP | What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

I had a dream. I had a dream that I would make children’s books and make money from it. Maybe not tens of thousands of dollars, but even a couple grand a year would be insanely awesome. Instead, I lost money and got banned.

The losing money was simple: I bought an old refurbished iPad to illustrate on and format the books and I didn’t make enough money from selling books to even pay for that. There were more expenses like a Canva subscription and styluses. But either way, I didn’t make enough off of the books to even cover a fraction of what was put into the process.

I think one of the reasons I didn’t make enough money from books was that I simply didn’t make the right kind of books. Looking back, I can immediately see what books would have done better. The books that got the bigger response in person are what I should have solely worked on. The character-driven ones where they moved through life. (Not cranking out another book about shapes or something). But I couldn’t see it for whatever reason.

After making about ten books, the sales numbers were still bad. So I jumped to making coloring books to try a different angle. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t just another angle, it was a different beast and market entirely. A market where, again, hindsight is twenty-twenty and I could tell you exactly which books might have continued to make money, even if only a little. But it wasn’t doing as well as I wanted and I didn’t realize that jumping to a new category wouldn’t fix it.

So I jumped.

Another realization I wish I would have made throughout this whole process, is that the plateau of learning can last a really long time. Like, really long. Also, pivoting doesn’t guarantee “fixing” things. But, at the time, it sure was more hopeful.

Hope is a beautiful thing. Hope keeps you going on a project. Few things can suck the drive (and fun) out of things when you don’t think there’s hope. You have to understand: I pivoted each time because I didn’t think I could EVER make it cover basic equipment or subscriptions.

But before we continue to the last pivot I made before getting banned, let’s talk about sales and friends…

The books I did sell were to friends and family. And I initially saw that as a problem because I thought my friends were having pity on me. Even that should have been fine if it was true! They were supportive! That’s exactly what you want a friend to do! I feel way more grateful about how my friends responded now. They rule! So if only your friends and family buy your stuff — please don’t be like me.

To better understand the effort I put in for all this book-making thing, I’d like to brag about all the things I did.

1. I went though all the work of setting everything up and learning the thing in the first place.
2. I learned how to draw characters and basically anything.
3. I learned how to draw things on different layers so I wouldn’t have to erase huge chunks or start from scratch if I messed up.
4. I learned how to make my own font.
5. I learned the difference between CMYK (color for print) and RGB (color for digital products).
6. I learned how to format the books.
7. I lived through the ugly embarassment of published typos and fixed them.
8. I learned how to focus on one creative craft.

I gained so many skills!

When it came to the process, I had it down. What used to take me months took me weeks. And I got bored. And I got greedy. And I was blind to how to make what I already did work. And I accidentally got dumb.

Since I started getting the hang of the process and was feeling the high of having my name on so many books (even though sales stunk) I wanted to have a bigger goal of how many books I had published. What if, instead of ten — it was one thousand?

Let me walk you through my thought process because that probably doesn’t make sense. For starters, this new format would allow for that type of number. This format would be notebooks. Once I had the inside done, all I had to do was make covers. And if all I had to do was covers, I could just draw and not think about story boards or drawing characters consistently or anything. I could theoretically also expand my chances of winning the lotto of KDP book selling. Can you tell I grew up in a state where raffles were legal?

That’s what I thought of it as. If I wanted strangers to buy my stuff, I thought I just needed better odds. And I sure wanted them in my favor — kissy-three-finger-Hunger-Games-salute and all.

I should also add that the notebook idea didn’t come from me. I took bad advice from someone on the internet.

She said to name all the notebooks “notebook” and to to tag categories that were remotely related to have a better chance of getting your books in front of people’s eyeballs. You, reader, probably already see how bad that is. I didn’t.

Finally! A cheat code to making money on KDP! I just had bad SEO!

So I quickly made almost five hundred designs. Which is kind of awesome and also stupid. Some were amazing and some were random. But I had lots of fun and I had lots of hope.

Until the email from Amazon.

It said something along the lines of, “Your notebook doesn’t comply.”

I emailed back. “Which one? I’ll fix it right away.”

Nothing.

I should have panic-taken-down every one of those five-hundred notebooks and figured it out from there. But I didn’t. I figured there was a nice person in an office over-seas that would email back. I had no idea which one it was and I didn’t realize it could be all of them.

There was never a reply. I got shut down.

I appealed. They said no.

I appealed again. They said I was banned for life.

It’s that simple. And that stupid.

I felt that simple. And I felt that stupid.

It still haunts me…

So what did I learn?

1. I can work hard.
2. Be very careful taking advice from the internet.
3. I can learn systems and programs if I want to push through the frustration of learning something new and knowing nothing.

I’d like to tell you that I learned more from the experience, but it would take multiple other things for me to learn more lessons. Because we definitely know that I can pivot…

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**Amazon Link To My Favorite Cheap iPad Styluses**