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What the fuck kind of human author is publishing 3 BOOKS A DAY? (files.mastodon.social)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Image description: The image shows a Kindle e-reader displaying a page of text, likely from a book, with a portion of the text visible in a non-English language. Overlaid on the image are two text boxes with stylized red backgrounds and white lettering. The top text box says, "To combat chatGPT generated books on the kindle store, Amazon only allows users to publish 3 books ~per day." The second text box sarcastically says, "You know, a totally normal human output," accompanied by a rolling eyes emoji. There is also a graphic of a skeletal hand with a pink hue pointing towards the text boxes, adding emphasis to the message being conveyed about the volume of publication and questioning its normalcy.

(Originally published on mastodon.social: 2024-02-23)

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Just to play devils advocate, maybe there is a author out there who has a stockpile of unpublished books that he’s publishing all at once. I mean it could happen.

What gets me though is that if they set the amount that high there had to have been people spamming AI “books” at a rate much greater than that.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Fair-ish, but at the same time I’m hard pressed to imagine how the still insane but also still more reasonable 1 a day would meaningfully put someone in a bind. It’s going to take me a whole month to publish these 30 books I’ve been sitting on, my career as an author is ruined.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

It’s not uncommon for people who got their start on Wattpad and Royal Road to have 3+ novels of material to publish by the time they feel it’s worth it. I suspect this is exactly why the limit was 3 per day tbh, so you can drop a trilogy all together.

That said, there should be daily, weekly, and monthly limits as well. Do something like 3/6/9 and 99% of people will be satisfied.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Publishing houses, maybe?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Makes sense, but I’d say that it’d be reasonable to make publishing houses verify their identity somehow to get higher limits. If your Amazon account is just a standard personal account, you don’t need to publish that often.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Just playing devil’s advocate, but that would require human interaction and support, and probably wouldn’t be too hard to fake given there’s little barrier to becoming a ‘publishing house’. Also for little gain, since I don’t see much difference between once a day and 3 times a day

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

If you are a large publisher like Random or Penguin, you not only get human interaction but you probably have a dedicated team of reps for support and contact. Of course they get exceptions, it makes Amazon money. (And I’m not even mad, that’s not even scummy from a business perspective)

Little unknowns dont get this treatment until they prove themselves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah this is exactly the reason. A fake publishing house using AI would be trying to publish under their one name anyway.

If they made fake accounts as fake authors then they could be identified by their banking info anyway.

It would be so costly and risky to set up enough bank accounts under assumed names in order to collect a profit from spraying junk across Amazon that it probably wouldn’t be attempted more than a handful of times.

Major, reputable publishers will, of course, have “enterprise” accounts with exceptions to the rule applied.

I thought people who read books were smart, where the hell was the two seconds of critical thinking it would have taken to realize this? Was this meme a desperate attempt to sway public opinion against Amazon’s supposedly unreasonable and oppressive policy?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

What gets me though is that if they set the amount that high there had to have been people spamming AI “books” at a rate much greater than that.

I wonder how long it would take for the total number of books written by AI to be bigger than the total number of books ever written by humans.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You could outwrite all of humanity with a laptop pretty easily. Getting published is the trick.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

How to Make $10m in Three Weeks: Cute Bedtime Story for Kids and Adults

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Like twelve hours if we put enough computers on it

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

Maybe Brandon Sanderson publishing short stories?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Chuck tingle.

Legit though, if I was a better typist, didn’t care about editing, and was willing to put out utter shit, I could crank out a book a week.

I have done the rough outline of a novel in a day. One.

That being said, if I were to use amazon to sell them, I have three complete novels and a novella. So I would likely have to split them up over two days, and that would be horrible.

No human is going to be submitting three a day every day for long, unless they’ve been writing for decades.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Garth Marenghi writes faster

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@[email protected] Plenty of professional authors who get the rights to their work back from a former publisher like to push them out simultaneously/as fast as possible. And a back-list reversion from a long publishing career can easily run to dozens of books.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@[email protected] that’s an edge case. The vast majority of the “3 books a day” publishers will be chat GPT crap

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@[email protected] @[email protected] You could probably bring it down to 1 book/week and handle more than that with a human review, if you where interested in quality. But I doubt Amazon cares. Many bad books might make for more sales short-term.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

@[email protected] @[email protected] Amazon is a grocery store, not a bookstore. Books haven't been their main focus for more than 20 years now. Under Bezos they took some residual care to avoid reputational damage, but the new CEO doesn't give a shit, he's all about the quarterly bottom line.