Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months.
The company announced the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Monday. “While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations,” read the statement. KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and list them for sale on Amazon’s site.
Amazon told the Guardian that the limit is set at three titles, though this number may be adjusted “if needed”. The company confirmed that there was previously no limit to the number of books authors could list a day.
No author publishing even 1 book a week is legit. 3 books a day? Yea, that’s still AI.
I suppose the idea is that it’s possible that someone has written several books in the past, and wants to sell them on Amazon now.
Imagine if it took an entire week to list your life’s work on Amazon.
Plus multiple editions, languages, etc.
They even admit this rule is trash.
A book in one language yes, but don’t forget translations. Books of famous writers are sometimes released in multiple languages on the same day.
Do famous writers self publish?
Probably not, but it strongly depends on the implementation by Amazon, if it has any effect.
They could have written them and are just getting around to publishing them on Amazon if it is a one time thing.
Do they short stories as titles? Stephen King could have cranked out that many if he didn’t care about quality control back in his cocaine days.
He kind of didn’t.
It seems plausible that an author might have a catalogue of more than 3 books and might choose to publish them on Amazon all at the same time. Still, that could probably be alleviated by having the throttling kick in after some initial threshold is reached, say 12 total.
But then they could also just create new accounts, no?
Many authors write parallel works, so it is not impossible to in fact have more than one work ready for publishing at the same time. It even makes more sense if we consider that different books will take different amounts of time to proofread, review, etc.
What I do like is, because of this, publishing as it exists can be shooting itself on the foot.
If it becomes accepted that an independent author requires real time to write a book, then the same is true for a publisher backed one. So, if an author can churn out more than one work trough that channel than the indie one, that may imply the publisher is in fact using shadow writers to put more books out than humanly feasable.
There are incredibly talented and focused author that will put out a lot of work in a short time window but that is not the rule for the average person.
What if I publish really short stories? What if I let GPT write the books, but I edit them heavily so that they fit my vision? I’m pretty sure I could publish one story every week that way.
Then you wouldn’t be writing anything, would you?
Editing involves more than just deleting and rearranging text. It’s sort of like adding the final touch here and there. In the case of GPT created text, the editing process will be particularly heavy handed, and it involves a surprising amount of writing.