2026-07-26 · all guides

How to Publish a Second Edition on KDP Without Losing Your Reviews

The dilemma that isn't

You published a book years ago. It has hundreds of reviews. Now there's a new edition — revised content, maybe a new subtitle, necessarily a new ISBN — and you want the old one gone. The apparent dilemma: unlink the editions and lose the social proof, or keep them tangled together and confuse buyers.

The dilemma is mostly an illusion, because of one fact about how Amazon works: reviews attach to the work, via linked editions — not to your file, your ISBN, or your KDP bookshelf entry. As long as the editions are linked on the product page, every review posted on any edition displays for all of them.

What unpublishing actually does

Unpublishing the first edition does not remove it from Amazon. Print listings persist forever (marked “currently unavailable”); old ebook listings linger for a while and then stop being purchasable. What unpublishing does is close the purchase path: nobody can buy a new copy of the old edition again.

Combine those two facts and the strategy writes itself: unpublish the old edition and keep it linked to the new one. Shoppers landing anywhere on the shared page can only buy the in-print edition — the format selector routes them there — while the review history keeps displaying. Nobody is confused, because there's nothing stale left to buy. The only first-edition copies that remain purchasable are third-party used copies, and those exist whether you link, unlink, or pray.

When the linking is wrong

The messy middle happens when Amazon's catalog links editions oddly — the old paperback paired with the new Kindle edition, the new paperback floating alone. This is a catalog operation, and it has a specific home: Author Central, not the KDP contact form. Contact Author Central support, list every ASIN involved (old paperback, old Kindle, new paperback, new Kindle), and ask that they all be linked as editions of the same work. These requests succeed routinely; the catalog team does this all day.

By contrast, “please migrate my reviews from the old book to the new book” requests are frequently declined — review migration between unlinked listings is something Amazon does rarely and grudgingly. Proper linking gets you the same visible outcome without asking for the thing they don't like doing.

The rules, in order

1. Publish the new edition fully (new ISBN; a revised subtitle is fine — keep the main title identical, since matching titles is what makes linking natural).
2. Unpublish — never delete — the old edition's formats from your bookshelf. Deleted books can't be referenced later when support needs to fix linkage.
3. Give the catalog a couple of weeks to settle. Cross-linking often resolves on its own as the new edition propagates.
4. If linking is still wrong or missing, go through Author Central with all ASINs and ask for the editions to be combined.
5. Don't panic when the old print listing never disappears. “Currently unavailable” is its permanent, harmless retirement state.

One caution about “new edition” timing

Do the linking work after the new edition is live and stable. Fixing catalog relationships while a book is still in review, or while metadata is changing, tends to produce exactly the tangled pairings you're trying to avoid — the catalog links what it sees, and what it sees mid-transition is inconsistent.

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