back to article Amazon wants YOU to LOOK OVER its BOOKS – its slush pile, that is

Amazon wants you to help it figure out what books it should publish and sell on its e-book store. The company said on Monday that its Kindle Scout platform will enlist readers to review excerpts of unpublished books and vote for which ones should be published by Amazon's Kindle Press division. According to the company, any US …

  1. Graham Marsden
    Trollface

    We see no way in which this could possibly go wrong...

    So go ahead and suggest lots of books published by Hatchette...

    1. foxyshadis

      Re: We see no way in which this could possibly go wrong...

      Amazon's obviously not going to publish a title already under contract to another publisher.

      I look forward to this, it'll be a good way to filter out the dreck that fills up 99+% of the ebook store. I was so excited by it until I started buying and actually reading that crap.

      1. DaddyHoggy

        Re: We see no way in which this could possibly go wrong...

        Actually, I suspect what will happen is that those authors with the best marketing campaigns via social media will garner the most votes once/if selected. If a few genuinely well written books also get published that will be a bonus.

        Amazon don't care what actually gets published - only that it sells - and if a good self-promoter has already drummed up some potential business/sales (even for a dreadful book (i.e. 50 Shades...)) so much the better.

        And only US Amazon account holders get to vote too (according to the article) - so that will skew what are seen as 'good' books too.

        Finally, it's possible to polish an excerpt until it positively glows (I've seen it done) - even if the rest of the book lacks plot, story arc, character development, etc...

    2. Tom 13
      Paris Hilton

      Re: We see no way in which this could possibly go wrong...

      Exactly. There's absolutely no way some story from a fan slash fic site could ever win one of those contests.

  2. T. F. M. Reader

    Wouldn't it be easier...

    ...to check what books people buy as dead trees on Amazon? What are the titles that generate the most profits and have not been e-published yet seems a direct question to ask (and a simple enough DB query?). Letting the public review excerpts looks a really inefficient and error-prone approach in comparison.

    I did manual backtesting on my own Amazon purchase history a couple of times. So far, at most 25% of the books I actually bought had a Kindle edition. I can't remember a single case where the price of a Kindle edition was more than a penny lower than that of a dead tree. So I concluded, more than once, that getting a Kindle would not be worthwhile on those grounds only (there are other reasons).

    Of course, my reading preferences may be totally weird...

    1. DaddyHoggy

      Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

      I have a Kindle for all those times where an author offers a book for free and/or very cheap. If it's a new author it's a chance to see if they're any good - and if they are - I will seek out dead-tree variants of their work wherever possible.

      Even "proper" authors do it sometimes - in last last couple of months I have downloaded free/cheap copies of books by Neil Gaiman and Robert Rankin, some of which I already have as physical books, others which I know I will eventually own as dead-tree variants too.

  3. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Does it really matter anyway?

    Their epub books don't require any upfront commission to be paid. They could publish the lot.

    They wouldn't just be trying to drum up word-of-mouth publicity would they?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Does it really matter anyway?

      They could also be trying to see what authors people want to have in Kindle format so that they can approach them directly and propose to buy out their contract with an offer that's difficult to refuse. Then presto! They have a rota of authors working as indentured slaves who'll have to write whatever dross Amazon thinks will shift Kindle units. This way they also hit competing publishers' future earnings as well as creating another tax write-off for the next financial report.

    2. Tom 13

      Re: Does it really matter anyway?

      Yes.

      Just because the book has already been published in dead tree format doesn't mean you can publish the ebook at zero cost. So you have to prioritize. Especially when you keep losing money at the rate Amazon does.

  4. James 51

    Well, look how many years Simon Cowell has been doing it for. I wouldn't trust Amazon as far as I could throw them however.

    1. LucreLout

      @James 51

      Girls Aloud are hot. There ends Simon Cowells positive contribution to the music industry.

      Amazon, on the otherhand, rocks and sucks in equal measure. They rock because I was able to buy all the course texts for a course I'm taking for 1p each, plus a few pounds delivery (real books - not kindle editions) from 3rd party sellers. They suck because for a weird 6 month window, they simply couldn't find my house and kept trying to deliver several counties away, and customer services couldn't cope with resolving that.

      My kindle is great for holidays, because I never run out of books to read. I also don't need to keep filling the loft with old technical manuals I'm unlikely ever to need again, but won't throw out until retirement when I can be sure I won't need to refer to them.

  5. Petrea Mitchell
    Go

    Something missing

    As a fan of MST3K and Thog's Masterclass, the feature I'm looking for is a way to nominate especially entertaining bits of bad prose for the delectation of my fellow readers.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Something missing

      You have that capability, if you have a Kindle. That's what underlining and public comments are for. In fact, that sort of public commenting by readers was a major design goal of the original Kindle - it's where the name comes from (as in "kindling discussion"), and why the original Kindle has a physical keyboard. Amazon, recognizing the marketing power of book clubs, wanted to create online clubs tied to their store.

      It never really took off, but the capability is still there.

  6. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

    Slush pile

    Amazon's slush pile is pretty interesting, actually, from an academic point of view. We know people are writing more now than ever before in history; the slush pile captures an interesting cross-section of that (just as things like fan-fic sites and other venues do). With high-profile suddenly-successful authors (Rowling, E L James, etc) in the news and institutions like NaNoWriMo raising interest in substantial, non-occasional writing, we're seeing lots of folks dabbling in novel-authoring who never would have considered it a decade ago. Yes, little of their output is of much interest as literature, but as a phenomenon it raises all sorts of questions for research.

    It's also pedagogically useful. My wife taught a university course in developmental editing a couple of years back that used the Amazon slush - students had to select some manuscripts from the pile and contact authors until they found one willing to sign up for free DE, then work with that manuscript and author. It's a great real-world exercise for learning DE and something concrete to put on the CV.

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