Amazon limits authors to 3 books a day to combat AI-generated material
themessenger.com
themessenger.com
For his books (authored + edited) that comes to an average rate about two orders of magnitude under Amazon's limit. Even if Asimov had stopped writing non-book stories, essays, letters, and postcards to devote more time to books, he probably would still be an order of magnitude away from hitting Amazon's limit.
I assume Amazon wanted to set their limit high enough that no legitimate human authors would hit it, but they were way more conservative than they needed to be.
Quality is another thing. A while back my library was purchasing tech related kindle books just because of the title. I know this since I borrowed one and it was just garbage. It was a combination of Wikipedia articles plus stuff that was gathered from the web with no editing.
But yes, I see your point.
Something tells me these "authors" will not be winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, inclusion in the Book of the Month club, or any literary honours for that matter.
The Mikkelson Twins are running a massive MLM scheme but instead of steak knives or scented candles, it's "training and support for creating your own EBook Passive Income Stream" which leads to what we see on Amazon ebook listings.
The video also goes into the darker side of the incentives that lead people to commission ghostwriters, AI editors and the crushing labour demands of the people employed to write these books:
- is copy pasted from another source or the internet
- respects copyright
- is written in the language it says it is
In graduate school nobody can understand each other's papers, so the colleges set up a massive list of formatting guidelines. The idea being the focus on formatting means you at least had to spend a minimum amount of effort.
Something like 60/month seems like it'd be a little more reasonable to allow these legitimate upload waves though.
That would cause scammers to create new accounts, upload 60 books, hope to sell a few on the first few days until they get caught, then rinse and repeat.
Amazon will probably also monitor accounts who upload 3 books a day using some heuristic so that they can stop it before it becomes an issue.
Same way illustrators could publish their roughs and croquis as books, etc.
As those can be set with a 0$ price, and virtually no inventory issue, it feels like a practice that doesn't penalize either amazon, nor the author, nor the readers.
Amazon has a separate service within KDP for exactly that kind of serialization, [0] so while its true that KDP handles a wider range of books than just the novel-size works people seem to be thinking about, that particular example is probably an explicitly not-prioritized use case for regular “book” publishing on KDP.
[0] Kindle Vella: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GR2L4AHPMQ44HNQ7
Your friend might be part of the problem.
KDP “books” include “low-content books” (prompt journals, etc.), not just novels.
https://www.agathachristie.com/news/2021/a-life-in-numbers-1....