As you know by now, I’m releasing Over Her Knee on Friday, February 6 (pre-order by clicking here). It will be both an ebook and a paperback. 

One of the steps I usually take when publishing a paperback is ordering an ARC so I can hold the book in my hand, make sure the art looks right, make sure the pagination isn’t off, etc. I recently received the ARC of Over Her Knee, and something looked weird about it. See if you can figure it out. 

Can’t quite tell? Try this picture instead:

The paper used in Over Her Knee is white, whereas all the rest of my books use cream-colored paper. 

White paper is the default in KDP; when you go to the create-a-paperback section it auto-selects that. You have to manually change it to cream-colored paper. I forgot to do that, so fortunately I have an ARC so I know what I need to fix. 

Except I can’t fix it. Once a book has been published, the paper color can’t be changed. But I haven’t published the book; I’ve made it available for pre-order, sure, but I haven’t actually published it. 

Maybe in Amazon’s use of the word “published” I actually have published it. I don’t know. 

Amazon, as you might have guessed, doesn’t make it very easy to reach a human for assistance. There is a KDP community, though, where Amazon gets people to help others without paying them — a neat trick if I ever saw one. There is a post about paper color, and apparently the only way to change your paper color is to unpublish your book, archive it, create a new book, give it an all-new ISBN (because ISBNs are forever), and republish it. That’s fine, except that according to the community if your book has the exact same title, even if you increment the version number, it will somehow stay unpublished. (I have to look into that some more.) 

So what do I do? Do I have just one book with white paper and the rest with cream? Do I try to unpublish and republish, and hope for the best? The paper color will drive me crazy if it’s not the same as the rest of my books, but if I somehow am unable to sell the paperback on Amazon at all that’ll drive me even crazier. 

This is a relatively simple change — just one click, one item in XML or JSON. Amazon could easily make this doable. All the books come from the same printer (at least, all of mine seem to come from the Columbia, SC, printer; maybe it’s geographical), so they definitely have the right kind of paper on-hand. It doesn’t make sense why Amazon wouldn’t allow this change to be made. 

I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. Right now I’m leaning toward “just leave the paper as-is and don’t dick around with the publishing of the book,” but I might change my mind. We’ll see. 

Amazon has all sorts of things they do that don’t make sense when it comes to self-publishing; I’m sure I’ve written a post about how the Kindle Create app “works” (thought I can’t seem to find it right now). But that at least would require some development to fix. This is literally one tiny change; no dev required. I have no idea why they don’t allow it, and I probably never will.