The Quicksand that Amazon's KDP has become

Perhaps self-publishing authors should consider abandoning it rather than getting sucked in any further.

By all accounts — or at the very least as something of a new ‘urban myth’ — individuals are flooding Amazon KDP/Kindle with AI-generated books. The assessment of such ‘creators’ from the disgruntled ‘all-human’ writer might easily be as follows:

• the individuals concerned have no creative talent other than the ability to craft a decent instruction for ChatGBT;

• they have no morals, no scruples, no integrity;

• they are generating their ‘trash’ for financial gain and are unconcerned about the reader or anyone fool enough to buy their ‘work’.

Perhaps these ‘authors’ also operate on the principle that, if you throw enough darts at a dartboard, sooner or later you’ll hit the bullseye.

But writing — and reading — doesn’t work like that, does it? “Never mind the quality, feel the width”? One likes to hope that quality still has a part to play.

Of course, the important thing about my opening statement is the word individuals. People are choosing to flood Amazon Kindle with crap; AI is not doing so of its own volition — at least not yet…

So, should the all-human KDP writers be worried? Well, as with most things, it depends.

You could, for example, choose to despair and give up writing altogether, recognising that with tens of thousands more ebooks competing on Kindle every week, what was once monumentally difficult — being ‘found’ and then being read — has just become cosmically impossible.

Or you might take the moral high-ground, mentally tell these AI-jockeys to go fuck themselves, and just keep plugging away.

Or — and one has to say this — you could jump ship, get a ChatGBT account, and see what all the fuss is about.

“Eight-part Sci-Fi epic ‘written’ in a week, anyone?”

Context is everything. The all-human writers most impacted by the AI torrent will be those who only put their work out on Amazon Kindle; those who are wedded to the KDP offering because it’s easy, cheap, and offers a worldwide presence which — if you already have some text handy — you can engineer in minutes, if you’re so inclined. Which is why it’s attractive for AI compilers.

Having already been traditionally published, I flirted with KDP around 12 years ago — then abandoned it less than two years later. Being tied to a single channel and with bookshops unable to stock/sell my work was too much of a constraint. Allied to this, the quality of the physical product was pretty poor (and the physical book was always my priority).

Maybe more than ever, Amazon probably doesn’t actually care about your work. They add storage and processing power to their massive servers and keep the gates wide open; they probably don’t even watch what’s being put out. As long as they get their cut… Your book sells five copies or five thousand? Makes no difference. 50 cents on twenty copies of each of 10 million ebooks is serious dosh. Jeff’s happy.

But for the all-human writer of Kindle ebooks, in addition to competing with hundreds of thousands of like-minded individuals, you now have Big Bad AI to contend with. You spend a year working on your novel and finally launch it — and in the same timeframe ‘Ivor Keyboard’ has used ChatGBT to create a hundred-and-fifty competing volumes.

Think about it. Amazon’s new limit of three new books per day per KDP account is an admission that producing more than three ebooks in a 24-hour period is entirely possible — and has been done. It’s also a confession that currently they’ve no control at all over what they host. If they could proactively identify AI material — and thereby exclude it — they wouldn’t need the limit…

Maybe they’ll find a way to get AI to ‘sniff out’ AI…

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon clearly has an important role as a sales channel. How can you ignore it when the vast majority of people begin their search for ‘stuff’ there? Fine. But as your only route to market? Really? And in the new AI climate too?

Isn’t there a better answer than solely using KDP/Amazon Kindle?

I confess my understanding of the situation may be a) second-hand, and b) tainted with a degree of negative bias — and feel free to disagree (politely, of course!) — but I can’t help but feel I’m not that wide of the mark.

If you are a KDP-only author, what harm would it do for you to consider other service providers, most of whom also feed their end-product through to Amazon’s sales channel? Having an authentic ISBN gives you much more flexibility. Yes, other service providers are out to earn their buck too, but who isn’t?

Or if you and KDP are joined at the hip, at the very least produce paperback editions as well as ebooks, because the AI jockeys almost certainly won’t be doing that — and even if they do, they won’t take as much care over them as you will.

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