The Publishing Times
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Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's self-publishing platform for Kindle eBooks, paperbacks and hardcovers. Official site: kdp.amazon.com
Streaming apps already tune themselves to each user, and books are starting to follow. SlumberTales is betting on personalized bedtime stories read aloud by a parent. What it makes, why, and what the shift means for authors and publishers.
[The Publishing Times weekly digest for September 26, 2026. Stay ahead with indie publishing news, book award highlights, KDP updates, and expert analysis.] This Week in Self-Publishing — September 2
The Wool author has released NEO, a free, MIT-licensed word processor for Mac, Windows and Linux that opens on a bookshelf, saves plain local files and exports KDP-ready EPUBs.
Amazon paid $69.4 million to KDP Select authors for August 2026, down $1.6 million from July but up $5.9 million on a year earlier. Here are 13 months of Amazon's own figures.
AAP's July StatShot shows publishing revenue up 14.0% to $1.0 billion, with trade up 16.4%. Adjusted for inflation the gain is smaller, and a handful of bestsellers did much of the work.
Publishers, retailers and the Copyright Office are asking about AI use. Writing tools are adding process logs. How to keep a record that shows how your book was written.
BookBub now sends a Featured Deal again the next day to some subscribers who didn't open the first email. BookBub says to keep the price low for at least two days after the deal date.
Since September 21, KDP lets each account create two new titles per format per week, down from ten. Here is how the reset works and what it does to a release calendar.
The Publishing Times sends a Friday Weekly Dispatch and publishes a Sunday Weekend Read. It is a weekly indie news desk — not a daily email, and not a paid review service.
Effective July 7, 2026, the 70% ebook royalty band on Amazon.com runs $2.99–$12.99, up from a $9.99 cap. Amazon does not require authors to change an existing price.
Amazon’s own KDP Help pages and the notices inside a KDP account are the policy record. The Publishing Times explains those pages, with the official link, in a weekly Friday dispatch.
Many indie authors log into their Amazon KDP dashboard, look at 50,000 impressions, and feel a surge of validation.
For Kindle eBook pre-orders created on or after September 2, 2026, Amazon KDP allows release dates up to 18 months out, softens first-miss penalties, and widens postponements.
With AI generation tools flooding the market, do authors still need to hire a professional book cover designer, or is human artistry becoming obsolete?
ACX exclusivity, wide aggregators, Spotify’s expanding indie tools, and digitally narrated lanes — 2026 asks authors to choose a door, not collect every keychain.
KU does not pay like a bookstore sale. It pays from a shared pot for pages readers actually finish — KENP — and the per-page rate moves. Here is the mechanism without the fog.
ACoS is ad spend divided by attributed sales — the blunt ratio every KDP advertiser meets first. Here is how to read it without mistaking a dashboard for a business.
Many self-published books suffer from prologue syndrome: an unnecessary history lesson, an info-dump of world-building lore, or an overly poetic scene that has …
Catch up on the best indie author reads for September 20, 2026, featuring Singapore's reading incentives, 2026 print trends, and weekly news.
Singapore is paying citizens to read. As the global reading crisis deepens, we examine whether state-sponsored incentives can save the book.
Discover how the 2026 print landscape offers independent authors advanced short-run and perfect binding innovations to compete with legacy houses.
The publishing industry has undergone massive digital transformation over the last decade. While platforms like [Amazon KDP](https://kdp.amazon.
Legacy houses ignored the physical details, but independent creators are leveraging niche KDP print formats to redefine memoirs and cookbooks.
The landscape of social reading has matured drastically since its breakout years. In 2026, BookTok is no longer a chaotic frontier of random breakout hits; it i…
The traditional publishing ecosystem has undergone a radical structural transformation.
Traditional literary gatekeeping is crumbling as indie book awards take center stage, validating self-published authors and rewriting the rules of industry prestige.
The opening quarters of 2026 have redefined how major publishing houses evaluate risk.
The modern self-publishing landscape demands that indie authors own their direct audience rather than renting space on social media feeds or volatile retail alg…
Relying solely on Amazon KDP leaves indie authors vulnerable to algorithm shifts and market concentration.
Forget romance novels and memoirs. The real revolution on Amazon's platform is corporate and niche B2B book printing on KDP.
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