How to change publication date on your Amazon self-published book

As I described in yesterday's post, learning Amazon's self-publishing system can lead to problems for you later - especially if you load a draft version of your book to the site and press the publish button to see how it looks.

You might think pressing the publish button on an unfinished book is silly but unless you advertise your book, no one will see it. So you can relax on that front. The reason to do it is to see how your book would look on Amazon. Then you simply hit the unpublish button to remove it. It really is that simple.

But the publication date stays with the book. So when you formally release your finished book, the publication date listed is from the time you were playing around with the system. This date can't be changed.

The workaround is to unpublish your book.

However, do not press publish again. All that happens is your book gets relisted with the same out-of-date publication date.

Once you've unpublished your book, rename it to Test Book or something similar. Then change the cover. Even if you'v paid an artist to draw you a stunning cover, get rid of it. Unfortunately, there's no 'Delete Cover' button. Instead, go into the cover creator and just pick any old cover at random, press preview then save it.

Now your book will be called Test Book and it'll be listed in your Bookshelf as unpublished.

Now click on the 'Add new title' button and re-load your book again, going through all the same steps you did previously. A bit of a pain, I know, but this is what you have to do. When that is complete and you hit publish, Amazon will see the book as a brand new title and will assign it a new publication date.

It's a pain to re-load your book but it will save you hours of pulling at your hair and writing to the Amazon help, begging them to change the publication date for you. Having done that, I can confirm that the method I describe above is by far the quickest way to change your publication date!

Unfortunately, you're now left with a 'dead' entry in your Bookshelf. You can't delete it from Amazon's system. However, only you will ever know that 'dead' book exists. So just ignore it.

However, it can come in handy when you want to test how your next book looks on Amazon. Just edit its details to reflect the new book and play around with it. When you're finished, just rename it back to Test Book.

Easy.