Negative Discovery On Publishing Public Domain titles

Hello Everyone,

As many of you know, I have been publishing books and ebooks since 2009 and then it was on CreateSpace which Amazon took over and now everything is on KDP Amazon.

I have 1,780 titles currently and only just discovered what Amazon will do that Directly impacts my Public Domain titles and sales.

I contacted their support and they aren't going to change anything.

What's the problem?

Since anyone can publish public domain content, there can be multiple copies of the same title on Amazon. As a result, Amazon can CHANGE our retail price to what is the trend which is always lower.

An example: I discovered this as ChatGPT and I have been going over my entire publishing account with Amazon.

I have a regular edition title that I listed for $9.99 and in my back office that is the price that still shows.

In reality, the Retail price is now $6.24 and who knows how long that has been that way.

Its been a very successful title for me and I've earned over $3000 with it.

I was going to run an Amazon Ads Campaign to boost the title, but at $6.24 there is little profit to support an Ads Campaign.

To say I was upset is an understatement. :-)

Then today I hit a new problem for the first time where Amazon limits the number of titles of specific formats to only 10 for the week right when I was close to finishing an ebook series that I created.

I have contacted Support about that and they are supposed to email me within 2 days to see if they will make an exception for me considering how many titles I have published and for how long.

I am not optimistic about that, but we'll soon learn their answer.

So if you intend on publishing public domain content on Amazon and you see there are several other copies by others available you should also notice what the lower prices are and that may be what you are stuck with no matter what price you list your title for. Will it be worth publishing then?

So anyway, I will continue publishing on Amazon, but have to be more selective in what I publish.

To Our Success!

Mel Waller