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.