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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Amazon to remove short shorts?

Jason Boog on GalleyCat reports that Amazon may be planning to remove books that are under 2,500 words

This was after a KDP writer reported receiving a letter from Amazon stating that books that are under that length should be augmented with additional relevant material, as otherwise they would be removed.

Here is the letter:

Hello,

During a quality assurance review of your KDP catalog we have found that the following book(s) are extremely short and may create a poor reading experience and do not meet our content quality expectations:

[Name of Short]

In the best interest of Kindle customers, we remove titles from sale that may create a poor customer experience. Content that is less than 2,500 words is often disappointing to our customers and does not provide an enjoyable reading experience.

We ask that you fix the above book(s), as well as all of your catalog’s affected books, with additional content that is both unique and related to your book. Once you have ensured your book(s) would create a good customer experience, re-submit them for publishing within 5 business days. If your books have not been corrected by that time, they will be removed from sale in the Kindle Store. If the updates require more time, please unpublish your books.

The author in question reported this on the KBoards forum, and received some interesting replies -- including the observation that the new ruling would eliminate a lot of erotica!

My personal view is that 2,500 words makes a very short story.  If I bought a story that length, it would be part of a collection, or in a magazine that is willing to publish short shorts.  (My latest story in the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, "The Bengal Tiger," is 4,800 words, which is the usual kind of length.)

And anything that Amazon does to improve the quality of the reading experience is fine by me.


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