The first tangible sign that generative AI was disrupting KDP came when Amazon quietly imposed a three-book daily upload limit.
Three books a day, for a platform designed for individual authors!? Who, you might reasonably have wondered, is uploading more than three books a day?
Of course generative AI was the answer. It has enabled the hyper-fast production of books and almost overnight, KDP with its zero barrier to entry, felt the result.
Most of these fast-produced and published books are non-fiction; cookery, self-help, celebrity biogs, anything that’s easy to generate in ten minutes on Claude. Some of them are novels.
The result is a saturated marketplace. To be fair, KDP has long been saturated. There were always thousands of books a month appearing on Amazon, but the exponential rise in numbers is changing the landscape. Discoverability for authors who spend a year writing and publishing a single novel, is now harder than ever. Their handcrafted stories are lost in the flood of AI titles.
I think it’s time for a radical move by Amazon KDP. Charge $300 per title to publish.
You’ll get the $300 back after the title has made $500 in royalties ($1 added for every $1 earned in royalties over $500 until the $300 is paid back). Think of it as a reverse advance.
Overnight, the wash of low-content, bland, generic AI books will disappear.
The business model for that AI production line relies on a few sales to unsuspecting consumers before the bad reviews and lack of interest leave the book buried.
But 25 sales multiplied by 1,000 books a year is a business that pays regardless of the quality of content.
Not all AI-generated content is without merit. You will know from this page, I am very open-minded about the new technology’s abilities. Writers such as Coral Hart produce AI-generated books that sell, using their experience of writing dozens of novels in the past combined with deep market understanding and a talent for expert prompting. Her system produces upmarket books compared to the usual AI generated mulch.
But I doubt Coral is producing three books a day. In fact I’d be surprised if it was even three a week. So AI writers such a Coral will also benefit from this change. It’s a system that rewards those who put the most effort in. This change will force those writers to spend even more time on a single title to ensure it will earn back the advance.
I’m not naïve enough to imagine the Amazon board is sitting around wondering how they can make KDP better for indie authors. In fact, I am certain they sit around wondering how to make KDP better for Amazon shareholders; that is their job, after all. And there will be voices around that table that see this sudden glut of titles that sell little-and-often as the new model. Does it matter to Amazon if they sell 25 copies of a million new books, rather than 2,500 copies of 10,000 new books?
Well, yes, I think it does. The end result in $ might be the same, but Amazon also has to consider the reader experience. This is an oft-quoted reason for policies regarding content changes to existing titles. Amazon cares about the reader experience.
So I hope there is at least one voice around the Amazon boardroom table that wonders if the dilution of KDP is serving their loyal customers in the long run.
A $300 charge doesn’t stop the author who wants to write and publish, even if they use AI, but it does stop the ‘author’ who produces bland AI books with the sole intention of making a handful of sales as their business model. And that’s a good thing for the reader, which should, rightly, be Amazon KDP’s primary concern.
James.
Well, I’ve woken up to a lively comments section! Firstly, let’s be civil. No need for insults.
Secondly, it’s just a speculative idea and surely this is the place for speculative ideas?
Mostly the negative comments have come from the AI writing community, a community I have braved the storm to publicly defend (and I will continue to do so). I am trying to think of ways to help the KDP author community I have been a part of since 2015. I think this idea also helps readers.
For clarification, my (speculative) idea is that the $300 ‘reverse advance’ would be per title, not derivatives. So it would cover all versions; paperback, boxset inclusion, translations, special editions for a single fee.
I guess there are more indie authors uploading dozens of books a week than I thought. And this does hurt that business model.
Maybe $300 is too much (lol’ing and people treating me as if I am actually setting the price inside Amazon). Suggest your own figure?
But the three books a day limit doesn’t really exist. It’s easy to have multiple KDP accounts. We should be aware we are up against farms that produce dozens (maybe 100s) of books/day.
A friend produces a range of non-fiction titles, they are well written, well-designed. The style and brand he has created is instantly copied and published with low-value AI content. Those sales steal from him.
If you write billionaire romance, you are up against thousands of AI written billionaire romance titles published every month. Even if each only sells 10 copies, or get’s 50 page-reads, that adds up. The readers only spend so much money to go around.
Using AI to write books is fine! I’ve said that before (and been attacked for it). But leveraging AI in conjunction with your storytelling prowess should produce books that sell more than a few copies.
Yes this changes the market and it favours books that have more time and effort spent on them, but I firmly believe that favours the dedicated author, including AI authors over the factories that churn out the generic and bland.
James.
hey James -- I read this, and there's probably no level on which I agree with you.
The AI glut is hurting no one. There's already 8 million books on Amazon that don't get read enough to earn out the price of a hamburger in their entire lifetimes. Books that don't serve the market, don't get served, period. So most of the stuff that's getting posted up there willy nilly isn't doing anything but costing Amazon some slight hosting fees, and it's definitely not picking up steam or making $.
$300 is an obscene amount of money to ask people to pitch in on a per-book basis. I strongly suspect most indie books don't make $300 in their lifetimes, either, and/or if they do they take months to get there (bc most indies don't understand the basics of marketing or facebook ads.)
That $ would also put Amazon back in the position as a gatekeeper -- like -- the whole point of indie publishing is to NOT have gatekeepers? I wouldn't be surprised if they started weighing trad pub books more heavily because (in very high theory) they're representative of more 'quality' -- but we shouldn't be tossing that back onto Amazon's plate.
And, lastly, Amazon doesn't need to be keeping $$$ interest free from authors -- it'd be like how Starbucks cards work, where they earn interest off of your $$$ after you load up but before you buy your coffee. I don't begrudge Starbucks that 'cause I only load up $20 and I zip thru it pretty fast, but there is NO WAY ON THE PLANET that Amazon needs to be given more disposable income to sit on and accrue interest on, for free.
I could get into all the reasons why $300 is particularly onerous for marginalized communities and people of color, who are already under represented in the store and have had socioeconomic trends against them for CENTURIES but yeah, there's that, too -- many, many of the people I know who use AI (and I have been in the trenches since late 2022) are there because they couldn't afford to get pretty covers otherwise, and installing an arbitrary $300 surcharge on which books are 'worthy' of going into the store is going to catch a TON of other people, too, which is the *actual* cost I find too high to pay.
xo!
Cassie Alexander