In case you missed my post from last month, I was invited by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to participate in the beta version of their new program for producing print-on-demand hardcover books. I promised you an update when the first, physical proof arrived. Guess what came in the mail today!
All I can say is that the book looks and feels amazing. It’s sturdy and way more substantial than I expected for a smallish 150-page book. The print options I chose were for white paper and a gloss finish on the cover.
Some folks believe you should use cream paper for fiction, but I have produced books in both cream and white, and the white paper looks and feels better to me. I also find the high contrast with black text makes white paper easier to read. I’ve produced books with both matte and glossy covers, and I tend to prefer the shiny gloss that really makes the colors vibrant. But matte finish is also nice, and I’ve gone with that several times when it felt right.
The binding is beautiful inside and out, and I love the way that about a quarter-inch of the cover color and design is visible inside the book when opened, where the cover wraps around the edges.
I think authors will be pleased when this hardcover option is available to everyone. I already feel the urge to make hardcover editions of about half a dozen of my books. I’d love to release the first Meteor Mags Omnibus in hardcover, but at more than 580 pages, it exceeds the maximum page count of 550 for a KDP hardcover.
Besides page count, authors will want to consider price points and profit margins. My paperback edition of The Singing Spell has a wholesale printing cost to me of less than USD $3. But the printing cost for the hardcover is $7.28. (Again, this is for a 150-page book. Longer books will cost more.) To sell the hardcover and make a reasonable per-unit profit on Amazon, I needed to price it at $14.95, as opposed to the $6.95 price for the paperback and the $2.99 bargain price for the Kindle ebook edition.
This doesn’t make much of a financial difference to me, since I design my own books, but authors who need to pay a designer to format the cover for a hardcover edition will want to consider whether they can recoup the additional expense with hardcover sales at a higher price than the other editions. Will their target market be willing to spend the extra bucks for a hardcover? It’s a question I can’t really answer for anyone without market research.
Either way, I expect my fellow authors and readers will be impressed with the quality of these hardcover editions, and I’m looking forward to the day when this program is no longer in beta testing but available to all self-publishers using the KDP platform.
July 2021 Update: The hardcover edition of The Singing Spell is now available on Amazon, and I’m working on making more hardcovers for some of the older books in my fiction series. More and more authors are seeing this option available as the program successfully moves out of the beta-testing phase.
October 2022 Update: I’ve designed and published a total of nine hardcover editions since this option became available to all KDP authors. They look and feel great. As you might be able to tell from the comments on this post, the hardcover option was gradually rolled out over a few months to all KDP authors and should now be accessible to you from your “Bookshelf” in your KDP account.
Mars Will Send No More 
Freaking georgous! Absolutely! But I cannot find an option on my KDP which is very sad. I’m going to have to go with LuLu or something else, and I would surely love to keep it all in house with KDP.
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Thank you! I made four more hardcover editions this month, and they all look really nice. You can’t find the option in your KDP account because it’s a beta program that was, apparently, by invitation only. I don’t know how KDP choose who to include in the program, but I’m glad they asked me to test drive it. It will be exciting when the program is out of beta and made available as a standard option for all of us using the KDP platform! But when that will be, I don’t yet know.
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I’m now seeing the hardcover beta program popping up in the various KDP accounts I manage for my customers; it just didn’t happen for all of them at the same time. Log in and check your account again! It might be there now!
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Yep I have it! Already created three hard covers! Sad thing is I haven’t sold one yet! 😦
But I’m sure it’s coming!
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My option for hardcover on kdp just turned up a couple of weeks ago. Keep checking your dashboard. They are beyond words, just gorgeous! i have written 42 books so far though, so I will be getting one at a time!
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I found they are kind of like tattoos. As soon as you get one, you want another! Best of luck to you.
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This is the best news of the year! I have just re-joined B & N because it does hard cover. I have also had to use LULU (beautiful coffee table covers created in Belgium) but now I see the word BETA hard cover on my bookshelf. Yes, yes, yes. This is what I wanted for a long time. I see a few posts about this now. I may have missed an email about this? But, I am happy as a pig in mud. Contact KDP, Black Dragon, and see what happens next. Good luck everyone! Hard covers are the next best thing to Audiobooks! Great for gifts too! Thanks for this Mars will send no more…
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I’m glad to hear your hardcovers at Lulu came out well. I occasionally point them out to authors who want printing options beyond what KDP will do (calendars, comic books, etc.), but I don’t have any experience with them. Have fun with your new hardcover at KDP! I liked my first one so much that I made four more this summer.
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How do the KDP hardcover compare to IngramSpark hardcovers in terms of fees, user interface, author price, quality and distribution?
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I don’t know Ingram well enough to fully answer that question. But there are no fees with KDP other than their costs when a print-on-demand book is ordered, and that is just taken as a cut of the sale, not a separate fee charged to the author. The KDP user interface is pretty simple to use, and it allows you total control over your books – including if you need to make a correction or update to them, even after they have been published. And, KDP’s reporting interface for sales data is completely transparent. I’ve had more than one author come to me for help because they were unhappy with Ingram for various reasons — all for problems we solved by setting them up with their own KDP account where they had total control and access to all information. But I do know a few people who seem content with Ingram, so this is not intended as a slam against that company. Sometimes different solutions are needed for different goals; for example, I also use Smashwords to get some additional ebook distribution channels that are not available through KDP.
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