The Publishing Times
All the News That’s Fit to Publish
Coverage
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 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.
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 …
The publishing industry has undergone massive digital transformation over the last decade. While platforms like Amazon KDP
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.
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…
Every indie author knows the sinking feeling of reading a brilliant 80,000-word novel only to stumble through a rushed, confusing, or unearned conclusion.
Deep point of view represents a fundamental shift in how readers experience a novel.
Many debut indie authors make the fatal mistake of transcribing real-life speech onto the page.
The phrase "show, don't tell" has echoed through creative writing workshops for decades, yet its application remains one of the most elusive challenges for fict…
The traditional publishing landscape has undergone a radical transformation. When major houses like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster fo…
ACX's legacy table still shows 40% exclusive and 25% non-exclusive. As of May 26, 2026, the new model is 50% and 30%. Spotify's September 9 tool makes five English audiobooks free, non-exclusive.
The hybrid publishing model sits directly between traditional publishing and independent self-publishing.
The barrier between self-publishing and Hollywood has completely dissolved. In the past, studios relied exclusively on literary agents pitching Big Five manuscr…
To effectively lower your ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales), you must first master the mechanics of how Amazon's ad auction evaluates your book.
Hachette Book Group will handle U.S. sales and North American distribution for Flame Tree Publishing from January 1, 2027. What the deal and others like it mean for independents.
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