> Amazon lets individuals upload a maximum of six books a week, allowing for endless churn.

That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]

It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.

I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.

How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?

[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.

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AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent | next [-]

> That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.

Suppose you're a 50 year old human author who has published a book a year since you were 18, and would now like to start selling them on Amazon for the first time. Should they hold you up for multiple years because you're rate limited to uploading one a month?

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jzb 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Surely Amazon could invest in some form of support for niche case authors? Especially since there are not going to be very many legitimate "I have an enormous backlog of work" authors who aren't represented by a legit publisher.

Not saying there are zero, but if you're faced with a thousand scammers and one niche-case author... you go with blocking the scammers if you're serious about it.

	▲	vidarh 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The vast majority of authors are not represented by any publishers, and KDP is built around exactly those. The KDP limits does not affect anyone represented by larger publishers - only indies and small press (and genuine small press as opposed to imprints of larger publishers are few)

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jakeydus 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the tradeoff for removing millions of false positives is one false negative then yeah, that's worth it.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Except that's not the trade off, because the slop producers would then just create more accounts instead of uploading more books on the same account. Which is probably what they're doing even with the existing rate limit. So all you'd be doing is inconveniencing the actual human who just wants to use one account for all their books. Of which there could easily be more than one. Moreover, trying to justify things with ratios like that proves too much, because slop can give anything a ratio like that. They can generate trillions of books, any number. If you banned everything then you'd be banning millions of pieces of slop for every one human-authored book, but you'd also be banning every human-authored book. What you need is the thing that minimizes false positives, because the base rate of true positives is now so high that even a negligible false positive to true positive ratio would swallow most of the real books.

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xpct a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The example is disingenuous. It's a tradeoff we have to make, and there's not many 50 year olds hoarding their masterpieces.

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AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent [-]

It has nothing to do with hoarding. There are lots of authors who have published works using something other than Amazon, and for each one that uses Amazon there is a first time they started doing so. Amazon didn't even exist 50 years ago.

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win311fwg 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Tell us you're a software developer without telling us you are software developer. The real world doesn't have to follow strict algorithms. The 50 year old with a long history of publishing books, who now wants to sell those books on Amazon, has provenance to justify his case for exception.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 20 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Amazon is a website that follows strict algorithms. And what "provenance" are you supposed to have that their support staff could verify over the internet? Anybody can set up a website with made up dates on it.
	▲	vidarh 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Good luck trying to get through to a human at Amazon KDP that has any kind of authority to override any kind of system.

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Capricorn2481 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

That's such an unreasonably niche and unlikely situation to justify letting the rest of your customers drown in slop

That'd be like saying a forum can't have rate limits for posts because someone may write 10,000 discussion topics over a year and post them all at once.

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vidarh a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]

Note that it is 2 per week per format. So if you want to publish an e-book, print book and audiobook of your title, you can publish 2 titles, not 6.

Still more than most humans will typically sustain but it does change publishing patterns.

E.g. on Kindle+ (formerly Kindle Unlimited) a lot of people would publish short stories or short novellas. You absolutely can turn around more than 2 short stories per week.

The changes may push some writers to change what they write or bundle up stories.

> How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?

For books, I'm hearing there are literary agents who now won't even sign anyone unless they have a sizeable social media following.

Conventional discovery for books will get you a very slow drip. But Amazon massively reward you if you publish lots and often by showing each of your works if someone clicks on one, letting you link series, and letting you do giveaways that are actually quite heavily promoted.

This, of course, incentivises people without a budget for promotion to push hard to release often. E.g. shorter titles, short-stories/novellas.

And that as noted above is being affected by the reduced limit.

> [0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough.

It includes anyone who is not large enough to get Amazons attention to get access to send them feeds directly.

I have a client that runs a small press, and basically their only option for Amazon is going via aggregators (and that too is relatively limited) and only pushing their top titles direct as until/unless they sell a lot more than they do now it seems they won't even get to talk to someone with any power to even escalate to anyone with authority to let them bypass KDP.

For e.g. Google on the other hand they got ONIX feeds set up no questions asked (ONIX is an XML format for feeding larger book catalogues to retailers) and pushed their entire ca. 200 book backlog right out of the gate. But Google e-book sales are tiny compared to Amazon - last I heard it was about 5% of their revenue.

The problem for Amazon - and for everyone else - is that for anyone but the biggest publishers Amazon is so dominant that most of the effort from people who want to push out high volume will continue to target Amazon.