What happens when you unpublish?

[NeverGiveUp]

I have a set of 6 serials that are all tied together in an omnibus. I want to unpublish the serials once they age out of KU so that I can clean things up on my author page. Question: What happens to them once they're unpublished? Will they disappear from my author page, or will they stick around and show that they are no longer available?


If they're going to hang on, I may as well keep them published. Please advise!

[Edward M. Grant]

Mine disappeared, but they took a while. They're still in the dashboard, and print books will stay around forever, just showing out of print.

[Maggie Ann]

If you just want the books removed from your author page, I'm pretty sure you can go to Author Central and remove them without unpublishing.

[guest153]

If they're only available as ebooks, then once you unpublish them, they'll disappear from Amazon. But if there are paperbacks, those will remain on the site even after you've removed them from distribution. The reason is for third-party sellers selling existing copies.

If you just want the books removed from your author page, I'm pretty sure you can go to Author Central and remove them without unpublishing.

No, you can't remove books from Author Central. Once you add them to your author profile, there's no reversing that.

[LD]

It shows up as a draft on your dashboard, like you didn't finish the process of publishing it.  They're also taken off the stores.

[She-la-te-da]

Ebooks never disappear for those who bought them. Amazon keeps the files in case the buyer wants to download them again. But they won't be for sale, and I don't think they'd even show up in a search, because they can't be bought. I believe you can ask Amazon to remove stuff from your dashboard if it never sold a copy, which will clean it up.

Print never goes away, even if it's not for sale any longer. And third party sellers can keep them listed forever.

[ragdoll]

No, you can't remove books from Author Central. Once you add them to your author profile, there's no reversing that.

Correct that there is no facility on the authorcentral dashboard, but I have heard directly from someone who contacted kdp support to get them removed. This would be necessary, e.g. if you wanted to split a pen name into two (such as sweet versus spicy romances) after you had already claimed the books on authorcentral. If you want to keep the ASIN (and thus the reviews), you can just change the author field on your kdp dashboard, but the "more about the authors" section at the bottom of the book page on the amazon store would show both the old author name (since you claimed it under authorcentral) and the new one.

Again, no facility for unclaiming, but kdp support can do it for you (or perhaps it was authorcentral support if they are not one and the same).

[scotcmorgan]

Also, if any of your books have been catalogued on Goodreads, they will be there forever (unless you get one of them to break their own rules about removing titles from GR—unlikely). Though they do have the option to request a merge of different editions of the same title.

[sassybeewriter]

 It's extremely annoying when you want to rework something old! It's impossible to really get anything published scrubbed from the Internet

[guest153]

Also, if any of your books have been catalogued on Goodreads, they will be there forever (unless you get one of them to break their own rules about removing titles from GR—unlikely). Though they do have the option to request a merge of different editions of the same title.

And the annoying thing about that is Goodreads doesn't seem to listen when I tell them to use the most recent edition as the default one and keep showing old covers.

[NeverGiveUp]

I was able to unpublish all of them. Only the compilation (which I want) and episode 1 (which I don't want) remain on my Amazon author page. The rest of them dropped off on their own within a couple days of unpublishing them.

Normally, I wouldn't consider unpublishing anything, but I haven't had a sale or page reads on the individual episodes in ages, and my author page was looking seriously cluttered. I will do the same thing when I have the compilation of all of the episodes of Book 2 put together for sale.