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Originally Posted by koland
Amazon reserved the right to drop the price and pay authors less if they found them selling elsewhere for less.
Many took advantage of them never checking, giving books away on Smashwords or their own websites, but charging at Amazon (where sales were often 100 times the other stores).
So, Amazon started paying attention: indie authors then figured out they could get a free listing and try to get more sales for their other books, by dropping one book free at Smashwords or B&N (PubIT). Thus the flood of free books (and many indies either put in fake publisher names or the name of the publisher of their paper books, to make it harder to tell they are indie published).
Between this flood of free books and the flood of spam books (put together by automated tools, without any actual writing, they generally sell for 99 cents each and are the same giveaway titles you see on so many spammy web sites), the Kindle store is going to be more and more difficult to navigate, if we don't get better search tools.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by greencat
Equally, there have been a lot of self-published authors who wanted to make their works free on Amazon but haven't been allowed to. At least, they now have a route for doing so.
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So self-published authors have been trying to game the system and Amazon is fighting back for their promised share of the pie (from listing the books). Then if the author tries to "steal" that share, amazon takes the whole pie. Very interesting...
Is Amazon asking for too much? Because I'll tell you, I have downloaded and in some cases purchased books from them that I know I wouldn't have elsewhere.