alt Hacker News> 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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> 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.
> 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?