I am new to being a published author in the modern era. More specifically, I am new to the operational reality of being an Amazon-only author through Kindle Direct Publishing.

Here is something I did not know before I needed to know it: to bring complimentary books to a signing, you have to order “author’s copies” — KDP’s mechanism for purchasing your own book at cost, for marketing use. Simple enough. I placed an order for 300 paperback copies, and then waited anxiously for several weeks while they made their way to me. Timing was tight. I was scheduled to bring 40 copies to EIC in Berlin, but I was on a different trip just before. I’d be home for less than 72 hours before my international flight.

I arrived home to this.

More books kept coming over the next two days. An order of 300 books had arrived as nearly 300 individual orders. The porch looked like Amazon had declared some kind of personal weather event at my address.

This is not a complaint about Amazon. I have since learned that this is simply how KDP’s on-demand printing function works; the vagaries of production capacity mean this outcome could happen at any time. The system did what it was designed to do; I simply hadn’t thought to ask what that was.

I now had two days. I started opening.

I kept thinking: this is like Christmas. Except the experience was: “Ooh, what’s in this one? … Oh. A book.”

Open, extract, flatten, stack. Open, extract, flatten, stack. The envelope pile grew. So did the book pile. Sabrina remained bemused.

It took me two more weeks and two more trips, but finally all 300 books were unwrapped, counted, and arranged.

The rest of the story: I made all my flights. The 40 books made it to Berlin, found new homes at EIC, and were gone within an hour. And 35 more met their new owners in Atlanta. Another hundred are en route to Las Vegas for Identiverse. And...I’ve had to order more books already.

What I’ve learned so far about being an Amazon author, one operational surprise at a time: the platform is powerful, it assumes you know how it works, and it does not explain itself. Every assumption I brought from the physical book-publishing world of 30 years ago — including the most basic: that 300 is an order quantity, not a unit count — turned out to be wrong in some instructive way.

Come find me on the book tour, where more signings are scheduled. Subscribe here and you’ll get updates on where I’ll be next. Complimentary copies of Mastering Digital Identity: From Risk to Revenue are available at each one.

No unwrapping required.

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