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.
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.
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.
3 books a day? Yea, that’s still AI.
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.
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.
It’s crazy that this is even necessary. I can’t imagine the sheer amount of crap people upload every day, completely ruining it for us serious Indie writers in the process.
Now people will avoid self published books even more than before.
I give up there sooo much garbage on there I have no way to get people to find my novel and word of mouth isn’t enough. I am currently looking for an agent for my next book.
Now people will rely on social cred. Indie authors would have to rely on social media and blogging to come accross as attractive enough for their written works to be interesting. Same with any other indie-related fields, really.
That’ll only last for a few seconds.
But this time next year, the number of Astro turfed fake online personas that are AI generated is going to be insane.
Unless someone finds a way to fight it (which I’m not counting on)
The ai authors will have real conversations with other ai profiles, making it look like a real person with real family and real friends.
We are entering the post-truth era.
May your deity of choice have mercy on our souls.
Every generated thing I’ve ever read has been pure garbage.
If you truly think a terrible imitation of AI can replace your work, you might just be a fucking awful writer.
Not if they are regulated to put an “In Full or in Part AI Generated” label on it.
Self publishing is here to stay. What indie authors need is to create imaginative ways to guarantee their work is theirs and comes from their mind and not parsed through a meatgrinder to produce a poor substitute good.
Do I have any answers? No. I’m on that train myself, scared my work can be taken away from me. But I’m not willing to let my dream die and I will write ad publish.
If you’re gone go that way, then limit it to one book per MONTH, anything faster than that would be suspect
I don’t see a problem with someone publishing a backlog of multiple books at once. 3 per day seems pretty reasonable. Maybe even something like 3 per day and at most 10 per month might work.
On the other hand though, say you’ve been writing a web novel that could be sliced up into 3 separate books or you just have 3 books that’s only now getting released. You could release them over time or you could choose to have all 3 go up at once. Not to mention as a first act of defense, it’s a reasonable action to make and is easily adjustable later on.
There’s probably other reasons why someone would release more than one book at once that’s completely understandable, especially when considering what technically counts as a “book” such as translations or a company publishing titles of multiple authors under one name,
Multiple authors published in one book wouldn’t happen in self-publishing because there’s no incentive. The point about a collection of short stories is that it isn’t economical for a publisher to publish them individually, but with self-publishing that economic restriction doesn’t exist.
Unless they’re short stories, or someone putting out a chapter at a time for cheap and then compiling them into collections later. Still 3 chapters a day is pretty extreme, maybe a chapter a day I could see if you have the work ethic of Stephen King.
Amazon restricts authors from self-publishing more than three books a day after AI concerns
Amazon enables AI books to continue self-publishing
FTFY
If they actually wanted to stop them they could, easily, but why would they, they clearly make them easy money…
What’s this easy fix then? Just a lower number? That will just mean more publishers.
AI detection tools don’t work, and humans aren’t much better, unless they’re subject experts. How do we stop AI books?
Thanks for messing it up for those of us who can pump out a 10 book series in just under 16 hours. Thanks a lot.
