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.
The rule change will “probably not” be a “gamechanger for managing the influx of AI-written content on Amazon’s platform,”
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.
if he didn’t care about quality control back in his cocaine days.
He kind of didn’t.
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.
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.
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.
Was thinking about that and decided to just shelve my books for now and decide later. Not in a hurry to publish.
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.
Well I’m an awful writer, so yes
But it’s more that I think the ai will very decent works in the search engines and listings on websites
Because the listings and search on websites are also generated content and not overly intelligent
Not if they are regulated to put an “In Full or in Part AI Generated” label on it.
Not even AI can detect AI-generated text though.
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.
I’ll just keep on doing what I’ve been doing. Can’t help it.
Which is?
Writing, of course. I’m in the middle of a new project, which will be a pretty long space opera series. Not worrying about publishing any of it anytime soon, though, and I’m still tackling parts of the backstory and the arcs of various characters while the first part of the first book is already drafted.
That’s an adventure. Where is the bad decision part? Hope to read it some day.
What do you mean by “the bad decision part”?
Never mind that. I was engaged on another thread while replying here and some wires got crossed.
But honestly I hope to read your work some day. As a wannabe author myself, it’s nice to meet other people wanting to write.
If at some point you need a soundboard to bounce ideas off, feel free to drop me a message.
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.
A backlog doesn’t give you 3 per day sustained. Limit publishing tone book per day still gives you 30 books per month. Even with a backlog that should be way more than even Stephen King would need.
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.
Make it 12 in a year then
Chuck Tingle was pumping out multiple a month before language models were a thing.
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.
Which again limits you to tops maybe 1-2 books a month, let.alone a day
Amazon restricts authors from self-publishing more than three books a day after AI concernsAmazon enables AI books to continue self-publishing
FTFYIf 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?
How do we stop AI books?
You don’t. There are plenty of legitimate cases for using AI (translation, spell check, summaries, etc.). The solution should be to use AI to categorize all the books and their content, something in the style of Steam-tags, but going even deeper into what is actually in the book and done by machine, as nobody has time to read all those books.
This is kind of the biggest surprise in this recent rise of AI: We got to generation before categorization took of. Even so a lot of the AI work in the last 10 years has been focused on categorizing, nobody has build anything with it, at least not user accessible. Everything is still running on human made categories. The only time you see categorization in action is in the recommendation algorithms of Youtube or TikTok, but the categories that drive them are hidden from the users.
I’m waiting for a self hosted organization ML that can find my desired data in the thousands of documents and pictures
I 110% guarantee that this issue was brought to the attention of several people with the ability to rapidly implement a fix, but the subject was dropped when cost to develop was mentioned. Amazon is the glass and steel incarnation of human malice.
And the AIs probably run in AWS, so it generates them money while it generates them money.
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.
What kind of an author is publishing more than 3 books a day??? Who is mad about this?
Chuck Tingle may have to slow down a bit but that’s ok, he deserves evenings off
Dr. Chuck Tingle is the only buckaroo I could think of who might hit this volume. Don’t forget to SHOW LOVE!
Pounded in the Butt by Amazon’s Less Than 3 Self-Published Books a Day Restriction
Brandon Sanderson comes to mind.
Considering he’s already sworn off Amazon, I dont think that’s an issue.
I was going to say this is a devastating blow to James Patterson’s team of ghostwriters
Chuck tingle, stephen king, good thing Asimov died or we’d have chaos on our hands
deleted by creator
Oh no, now the AI will have to think up new author names as well!
Not defending Amazon, but… despite allowing unlimited pen names, they all have to be under the same account. Multiple publishing accounts can get you banned, and good luck explaining why multiple accounts have the same financial information when you go to withdraw your $5.
Just a reminder that if you’re using ai to write your book, your book has less worth than your last dump.
I’m not a writer, but ai is a fantastic tool to brainstorm ideas. Just never ever trust it.
As an author, this doesn’t hurt me at all. I write fast, but not that fast.
Sad they have to do this, but I can’t see what actual person this hurts. If you’ve somehow hoarded a backlog of dozens of titles, it might take several days to publish them. That’s advantageous if you’re legit, anyhow.
What worries me is this won’t hinder AI at all.
That isn’t a limit even Stephen King probably would struggle to release one book a month, let alone three books a day.
I want to meet an author who is genuinely inconvenienced by this.
3 per Day, really? Lol
This is not a solution.
We need some real, serious limits on AI use and development. This is only going to get worse from here. Anyone got ideas on how we can limit AI effectively?
Anyone got ideas on how we can limit AI effectively?
Teach your children to value artists and content creators
Yes!
Use it to replace the jobs of your bosses and CEO’s. Convince enough people at the top that it is a threat to them, and we will have laws overnight.
Three books a day is completely plausible, but four? Nobody can type that fast. /s
George R. R. Martin: ok.
