Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
Amazon is not a gatekeeper. Anyone can publish a book on Amazon. They may not advertise the book or feature it in anyway but anyone can publish a book on Amazon.
There are only 4 things that Amazon keeps out and 2 ways to get your author account pulled.
The 4 things are daddy/child, rape, beastiality and necropolia as titillating.
The two things that will endanger your account are copyright violations and the faster way is trademark violations. Otherwise anything goes.
Hope this unconfuses you.
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Yeah, I wish they did have some gatekeeping. But there is none. So when browsing for books one has to sift through everything. And I mean everything.
Only filters for use are genre, subgenre and that is all. Not helpful.
I just wonder how many folks have just stopped browsing the store like I used to do. I used to spend some time each week going through all the new releases, or stuff coming up in the next week. Found some great stuff that way in the past. I also miss the best seller list that goes past the top 100. It used to be a infinity list. I used to love going in the 500's, 1000's to start looking for reads. I don't care about popularity, or featured. I liked seeing what was a best seller in the 500's-1000's. No clue why they took that away.
Purchasing shifts when browsing patters shift. Lots of folks seemed to have wanted a free for all market. But most readers eventually drift back to "gatekeepers". Most of us don't have time to sift through 1000 of crap to find one book that might be decent. Those gatekeepers are other readers, bigger blogs, lists, etc. And if many of those blogs and readers tend to lean towards trade published stuff and not so much towards indy/SP, then those are the results.
Add to that the sheer numbers of new SP authors, the number of books being pumped out. A while back it was put out at least 4 books a year, then it was every 2 months. Then the rallying cry was one must pump out a book every 30 days of fall of some cliff. Now I keep reading more and more pumping out of books every 2 weeks. More and more books written in shorter and shorter time. Unless the readers multiply in the same rate, there is just way more stuff out there to ever be read. Its overwhelming. Like going to the store and there is a 20 foot section on beans. or a isle full of cereal. I now do most of my shopping at a Trader's Joe. 2 feet of beans and pre-selected quality. I spend less time and less stress shopping. And I eat good. So maybe readers are getting to be like that too. Or I should say again as we had the gatekeepers in the past already.