4 ms·
3 books a DAY? How about 3 books a month? Or 3 books a year? Only the most prolific authors have managed 3 books a month.
by cratermoon 3y ago
3 books a DAY? How about 3 books a month? Or 3 books a year? Only the most prolific authors have managed 3 books a month.
- paulpauper 3y agobecause Amazon allows anything and no quality control. someone can just re-publish Wikipedia articles as books, which a lot of people do.
- koreth1 3y agoWhat would "quality control" look like for self-published books?
- ceejayoz 3y agoPay a few bucks for someone to skim through it?
- envsubst 3y agoA 15 minute human review process that checks if it: - 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.
- dragonwriter 3y agoA 15-minute human review is not going to be able to check all three of those things, or really do much of a job on even either of the first two in isolation.
- envsubst 3y agoAutomation + human judgement. It works for iOS.
- balderdash 3y agoThat would impede their money laundering and stolen credit card revenue…
- hotnfresh 3y agoWell. A lot of things suddenly make a lot more sense now.
- Ancalagon 3y agoWhy didn't I realize this before? I'm laughing at myself this makes so much sense now.
- selcuka 3y agoMoney laundering might be a thing, but I can't see how they could benefit from stolen credit cards. They have to refund when the card owner contacts their bank, don't they?
- ronsor 3y agoThat assumes the cardholder actually realizes their card has been stolen. Many people may not notice an extra $50/month being siphoned from them, especially if they already use Amazon.
- Finnucane 3y agoLionel Fanthorpe legendarily wrote a book every weekend, but he is also legendarily one of the worst writers of all time.
- angry_moose 3y agoI could see that for a few reasons. Someone new to Amazon adding their entire library at once, an updated edition of a long running series, different language versions of the same book, etc. Probably not many (any?) legitimate authors writing 3 books a day, but there are lots of instances where an author might be trying to add several at once. Something like 60/month seems like it'd be a little more reasonable to allow these legitimate upload waves though.
- selcuka 3y ago> Something like 60/month seems like it'd be a little more reasonable That would cause scammers to create new accounts, upload 60 books, hope to sell a few on the first few days until they get caught, then rinse and repeat. Amazon will probably also monitor accounts who upload 3 books a day using some heuristic so that they can stop it before it becomes an issue.
- flangola7 3y agoAmazon holds onto funds for at least 30 days. You can't bait and switch that fast.
- selcuka 3y agoFair point. It still pollutes the marketplace, though.
- internetter 3y agoNo one would pollute the marketplace unless expecting profit
- makeitdouble 3y agoThe notion of "book" is way fuzzier that it was in the olden days. There's nothing stopping an author from releasing one or two thousand words every as a single book, inside a larger story (basically having a book for what could have been single chapters ?) Same way illustrators could publish their roughs and croquis as books, etc. As those can be set with a 0$ price, and virtually no inventory issue, it feels like a practice that doesn't penalize either amazon, nor the author, nor the readers.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> There’s nothing stopping an author from releasing one or two thousand words every as a single book, inside a larger story (basically having a book for what could have been single chapters ?) 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 https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GR2L4AHPMQ44HNQ7
- twobitshifter 3y agoMy friend wrote a children’s book using AI. Even without AI, it may be possible to make a few children’s books with the same characters in a single day. I’m curious though, who are the authors who have published 3 long form books per month?
- bombcar 3y agoDepends on your definition of what a book is. If you step outside of novels you have books that are mainly tables of facts, or get updated monthly, etc.
- __loam 3y agohttps://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-children https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-chi... Your friend might be part of the problem.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Only the most prolific authors have managed 3 books a month. KDP “books” include “low-content books” (prompt journals, etc.), not just novels.