Changing author name on already published book?

[larabelli]

I am confused about this. I know some fellow authors have done it but I've read on KDP guidelines that author name or title of the book can't be updated unless republish the book as a new title from the KDP Bookshelf.

Any insight on this? Have you changed author name/title of any of your books and it worked well?

Thanks in advance.

[TimothyEllis]

I've changed the title without any problems.

I did it on 3 books in a series of 6 when I rebadged the series with new covers.

Before that, I merged a trilogy into an existing series, after I figured out I'd been wrong doing them as 2 trilogies.

I've not tried changing the author name, but I cant see that you can't. But it means changing the metadata, the cover, and the front matter.

You can't do this on paperbacks though. The ISBN registration is fixed. If you change it, it has to get a new ISBN, and that means unpublishing, and publishing again with the new details.

Changing titles always confuses some people who already have the book, so you should include an 'originally published as' statement in the front matter after the copyright statement.

I'm not sure why you'd want to change the author name. The only way that doesn't cause confusion is if the book hasn't sold any copies so far.