Can I Change My Book Title After Publishing?

Not straightforwardly. Retailers treat the title as part of a product's identity, so a live listing generally cannot simply be renamed. In practice you publish the retitled book as a new product — which means a new ISBN for print, a new listing, and the loss of every review, ranking position and sales-history signal attached to the old one. It is possible; it is just expensive in ways that are not money.

The longer version

Why it is not a simple edit

Most metadata is editable after publication — description, keywords, categories, price, even the cover. The title is different because it identifies the product across an entire supply chain: retailers, wholesalers, libraries and catalogs have all recorded it.

Print with your own ISBN: the ISBN is registered to that title. A title change makes it a different product and needs a new ISBN
Print with a free platform ISBN: same outcome, and you cannot reuse the identifier
Ebooks: Amazon's title field is not freely editable on a published book. Minor corrections are sometimes accepted through support; a genuine retitle usually means publishing anew
Subtitles are often more flexible than main titles, and are worth trying first

What you lose by republishing

This is the real cost, and it is why the answer is usually "don't":

All reviews. They attach to the listing, not to you or the work
Sales rank and history, which feed the algorithms that surface your book
Also-bought and recommendation associations built up over months
Any external links — blog posts, newsletters, ads, other authors' back matter — all pointing at a dead or orphaned page

A book with 200 reviews that gets retitled restarts at zero. For most books that is a worse outcome than an imperfect title.

When it is nevertheless right

The title is genuinely harming sales — unsearchable, misleading about genre, or colliding with a much bigger book
Very few reviews so far, so there is little to lose. If you are going to do it, do it early
A trademark or legal problem with the current title
Repositioning for a different market, where the old listing was not working anyway

The cheaper alternatives to try first

Change the subtitle. Often editable, carries real keyword weight, and can reframe the book without touching the main title
Rewrite the description and keywords. Free, immediate, and usually the actual fix when a book is not selling
Change categories. Also free and reversible
Change the cover. No new ISBN required, and it changes the first impression far more than the title does

Most "my title is wrong" problems are really positioning problems, and positioning lives in the cover, blurb and categories.

Common exceptions

Unpublished drafts can be retitled freely.
Typo corrections in a title are sometimes accepted by support; a rename is not.
A new edition with substantive changes legitimately warrants a new ISBN, so if you are revising anyway, retitling costs comparatively little.
Series names and numbers are usually more editable than the title itself.
Policies differ by retailer, and Amazon's have changed more than once — check current KDP help before assuming.

Sources

Amazon KDP Help — editable metadata fields and title change policy.
International ISBN Agency, ISBN Users' Manual — when a new ISBN is required.

Retailer policies change. Verified 9 August 2026.