Moving Beyond Amazon Self-Publishing Purgatory

Presented at A New HOPE (2022), July 22, 2022, 6 p.m. (50 minutes).

Back in 2014 at HOPE X, John did a talk called "A Self-Publishing Success Story" detailing his process moving a book from a publisher to self-publishing on Createspace/Amazon. He had a good run on Amazon, updating the book again in 2017. Then, in 2018, Amazon merged Createspace into its "Kindle Desktop Publishing" (KDP) platform. In 2020, Huntington decided to update several paragraphs in the 475-page book, and this attempt at a simple text change led to his book being stranded in a virtual, dystopian Amazon purgatory. The only reasonable way out was to abandon Amazon KDP altogether. This led to moving everything over to IngramSpark for print copies, Google Play Books for EBooks, and DPD for individually watermarked, DRM-free PDFs.

In this talk, John will discuss the horrors of his Amazon nightmare, successfully moving onward, the self-publishing process in 2022, and the economic aspects of his recent self-publishing experiences.

Presenters:

• John Huntington
  **John Huntington** (**@jhuntington**) is a professor of entertainment technology at New York City College of Technology, also known as Citytech, which is part of CUNY. At Citytech, he leads the audio, live video, and networking/control areas and, through his company Zircon Designs, he freelances as an author, entertainment and show control systems consultant, and sound engineer. He is also an award-winning photographer and storm chaser. He has presented talks at every HOPE conference since 2010.

Links:

• https://scheduler.hope.net/new-hope/talk/3PFV3X/
• https://infocon.org/cons/2600/A New HOPE (2022)/A New HOPE (2022) Moving Beyond Amazon Self-Publishing Purgatory.mp4
• https://infocon.org/cons/2600/A New HOPE (2022)/A New HOPE (2022) Moving Beyond Amazon Self-Publishing Purgatory.srt (subtitles)

Similar Presentations:

• HOPE X (2014) / A Story of Self Publishing Success
• DEF CON 15 (2007) / Self-Publishing and the Computer Underground
• May Contain Hackers (MCH2022) / Self-Publishing in the Wretched Digital