Amazon's sending out emails (well, at least one confirmed, and presumably it's part of a form letter that'll be sent to many authors) saying that 2500 words is now the
cutoff length for Kindle Direct:
Quote:
In the best interest of Kindle customers, we remove titles from sale that may create a poor customer experience. Content that is less than 2,500 words is often disappointing to our customers and does not provide an enjoyable reading experience.
We ask that you fix the above book(s), as well as all of your catalog’s affected books, with additional content that is both unique and related to your book. Once you have ensured your book(s) would create a good customer experience, re-submit them for publishing within 5 business days. If your books have not been corrected by that time, they will be removed from sale in the Kindle Store.
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No word about whether this is a new official rule (I gather the TOS/instructions for KDP haven't been updated), nor whether it applies to all genres--it'd be ridiculous to apply this to children's books.
To forestall the inevitable "this will just help weed out the low-quality junk" claims:
1) Hemmingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" was 1140 words long;
2) Forcing authors to add 200-1200 words of baggage to their ebooks is not going to improve anyone's reading experience.
Amazon could fix the "poor customer experience" problem by putting a word count in their ebook listings. I gather they don't want to do that because readers will start noticing that print books don't have them... and they'll start comparing lengths and prices. Amazon could also sort stories by length, or by category (short story, novella, novel, epic-length); I gather they don't want to do that, for perhaps the same reasons.
No hint if this is a new global policy, related to specific complaints, only for some genres, or just whim-of-Amazon caprice, like the books that vanish from search for no reason anyone can get them to admit.
ETA: Apparently
debunked. This seems to have been a single incident, rather than a new policy.
I'm leaving this instead of asking the mods to remove it, because a policy of "when we get complaints about length, we tell the author to add more stuff to the book" seems really strange.