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.
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.