Amazon Restricts Authors From Self-Publishing More Than Three … – Slashdot

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from each (fake) “author” account, but don’t hold us to it, and we already had a limit, but don’t ask, because we weren’t serious about that one either.
There. That’ll learn them.

against Stephen King
Nora Roberts has him beat by a country mile. She must use each hand to write its own book.
She’s the George Philipp Telemann of novels.

against Stephen King
I knew that there ways something about Stephen King that made me want to say, “Huh ?”
By lunchtime I will positively die!
Don’t know. Why don’t you ask the black box that decides which books sell and which don’t? Ask the robot that decides which books are deleted from search results without notice.
It’s address is in Seattle, WA.
Why does it always have to be about race?
Is there a legitimate use case for an author publishing 3 books per day?
I guess if the author was stranded on an island with spotty wifi, and absolutely had to upload the three books (s)he worked on for the last 3 years in a single short time window of 2 minutes because there’s a tsunami on the horizon and it’s now or never, yeah that would justify the limit, most certainly.

Seems unconvincing. Even if the trilogy is available simultaneously, a reader needs time to progress through the books in order.
I guess if the author was stranded on an island with spotty wifi, and absolutely had to upload the three books (s)he worked on for the last 3 years in a single short time window of 2 minutes because there’s a tsunami on the horizon and it’s now or never, yeah that would justify the limit, most certainly.
If you look at typical book sales I suspect there’s a big spike on day one as you push out the announcement across your social media followed by a rapid and steady decline, so make the most of that first spike.
If it’s a trilogy released all at once you have a shot at turning that 1 sale into 3. Not to say 3 separate announcements won’t do better, but I’m guessing that’s the idea.
It was obvious then that the way to maximize eposure for a project would be to space out regular updates at least a week apart. I am sure the same is true for trilogies. You do not want to publish them all on th
The tricky bit will the trilogy is that no one is going to buy just books 2&3, and there probably is a bias toward buying new releases, so if they only catch the book 2 or 3 announcement they may skip altogether rather than starting with #1.
I don’t know how it balances out, but in sales obvious logic doesn’t always win.
I’d guess they picked that to allow for publishing a trilogy all at once.
You can accomplish that many other ways. Say, 10 books a year – you can publish 10 books, all at once or spread out through the year. That way your trilogy can be released on the same day just fine.
And honestly, if it’s popular, you probably will have an agent and a publisher and they can release your entire library of books all at once through negotiations with Amazon directly.
I’d guess they picked that to allow for publishing a trilogy all at once.
The way they could handle that would be “Your account gains 0.2 points per day until you reach 3.0 points or higher, after which, points will accumulate at a lower rate until reaching a maximum balance of 5.0, or maximum 30.0 total recharge points in a month.” — Publishing a book depletes 1.0 points.
So you can publish several books at a time, But Not several books every day over and over again.
Sure – if I write a series and want to publish them all at the same time, perhaps.
I would think something like 5-per-month might be a better way to stop it. It won’t impinge on legitimate individual authors in the least bit, but would effectively prevent someone from publishing garbage – while still leaving room for “legitimate” AI-generated works, where people take the time to curate the result into something holistic and not-complete-shit.
Is there a realistic model for someone publishing that many books a
You’re thinking full-length adult novels. Short stories that back in the day might have been submitted to an anthology magazine like Asimov’s might get published individually as “books” these days (because why not? there’s no printing or distribution costs). I could also imagine writing more than 5 children’s books per month.
Granted, they’re not going to be quality works at that rate, but a human could certainly do it.
I think you under-estimate the difficulty in writing children’s books, at least good ones. Dr. Seuss seems to have taken around a year per.
The real way to get up to something like 5 per month, which is close to “1 per week” would be chapters in a serial – think less magazine and more “newspaper” back in the day, where they might have a new chapter each week.
One of the most famous examples might be “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, which started publication in 1851, and ran for 40 weeks.
https://blogs.loc.gov/headline… [loc.gov]
Its not beyond the pale that someone might legitimately publish multiple editions of the same book at a time. (Different languages for example, or might publish a cohesive longer work as a series of episodic ‘single chapters’ as separate works.
Or its possible that someone working on a series of childrens books might publish several together rather than one at a time, if you got them edited and illustrated as a group, they might naturally come together and be finished at one time, and you might well naturall

Is there a legitimate use case for an author publishing 3 books per day?
Not since George Simenon and Isaac Asimov passed.

Is there a legitimate use case for an author publishing 3 books per day?
Only if you are Amazon and you have your own worthless pulp creation farms.
I like to read books on certain history topics but I find Amazon can be filled with history books that have interesting titles yet they are “written by” totally NO-NAME authors that no respectable author-historian might reference.
I can think of at least one legitimate case for someone publishing n books per day, for some pretty large values of n.
Imagine someone has written many books over many years, but they didn’t try selling through Amazon (which I must admit, is something I wouldn’t predict). Then one day, they decide to start selling their books on Amazon. So on the first day, here’s suddenly 20 years worth of books that they’re introducing to Amazon’s system.
Speaking as a writer (one novel published, second probably later this year, and I have a small press as a publisher, this is *not* self-published), the answer is NFW.
Novels these days run 70,000-120,000 or so words. How fast can you type, even if you know every word you’re going to write?
For authors who haven’t proven their identity, have a very small limit per day, per week, and per month. Maybe 3 a week or 10 a month or something like that. In the USA and some other countries, tax-filing requirements will kick in at some point anyway, meaning authors who are making more than a small amount of money would need to identify themselves.
For new authors with verified government ID on file, have a realistic but small limit that can go up once the author is “established.” I would start off wit
You could conceivably have 3 books ready at the same time, after spending months writing then sending them all off to an editor who might do all your material in a batch.
So I guess “3 per month” would make a lot more sense?
Amazon has decided that writing 90 books per month means you’re a real author instead of an AI. Clever of them.
Depends. I guess I could write 90 books along the lines of “Jack and Jill go up the hill” and similar stories for 2 year olds.
Nobody said anything about pics made by AI, right?

Theres no way a legitimate single author is writing 3 complete legitimate books a day much less a week. Limit should be more like 1 per week
Yep. You write one good book then publish three crap ones in a day and hope people buy all three before realizing they’re junk.
Theres no way a legitimate single author is writing 3 complete legitimate books a day much less a week.
There’s plenty of ways they could. Heck there are entire newspapers that roll out a complete issue every day.
When a blogger wish to release a daily compilation of their postings as a book, then a weekly release every Monday can very well add up to 7 books being published in a day covering the past 7 days.
If Amazon would like to limit the selection to “higher quality” works, then they should really c
Wrote I, the Jury in one weekend because he needed some money to buy his house. Still considered a classic.
But he didn’t create an entirely new book every weekend for the next ten years….
If he had wanted to buy a house that was 500x as expensive, who knows what might have happened.

Wrote I, the Jury in one weekend because he needed some money to buy his house. Still considered a classic.
So 6x slower than the publishing limit set here by Amazon?
So that’s 1/6th of Amazon’s rate limit, assuming he could keep producing one book every two days indefinitely. And only for self published books.

A day. Really. REEEAALLLYYYY?
That’s like running a university and establishing a rule that “the no student can earn more than 3 degrees a day”. It’s an explicit admission that the product was worthless to begin with.
It certainly suggests that those college essay-research-thesis mills are slacking off on the job.
How about don’t buy self-published books on Amazon?
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