Amazon Kindle Content Quality rules

[Sir Vivor]

I'm considering publishing a sci-fi text via Amazon Kindle, and I've just had my first read of their content rules. Is there anybody on the forum with prior experience of interacting with Amazon in the context of those rules? Are they fair, are they reasonable? Are they open to dialogue, or do they behave like robots..? Years ago I wrote a non-fiction text for Sybex, and remember how working with them went.. so I'm wondering how Amazon's system works.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Do you mean these rules?
Content Guidelines | Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

Considering the amount of violent and sexual content in books already published in general, I'd suggest they are basically looking at extremes.

In other words - unless you publish material that is explicitly pornographic or otherwise go out of your way to publish material you expect the majority of people to find offensive, you should be fine.

 

[Sir Vivor]

Yep, those rules. My sci-fi story won't need sex to sell (I hope), so I'm OK on that front. Do you have any idea how Amazon evaluates manuscripts? Do they have an army of human reviewers, or do they use automation at all? Or a combination?

 

[tinkerdan]

In some respects I think it's mostly to cover themselves and allow them a quick out when a violation is discovered in whatever way it's discovered.

In my instance when I republished my first novel that was originally published using Xlibris, they kept flagging copyright issues because they obviously had me on their catalog already. Even after I sent a certified signed copy of my copyrights they balked and I have to think that that may have been more automated than anything. It was only after emailing through another avenue that I was able to push through the copy of my document and finish the kindle process. (This is not discounting that they really had someone sitting somewhere who didn't know their own rules well enough to okay the document.)

My guess is that they try to catch things by an automated system and then perhaps after that they might have it checked by human eyes; though at this point the human eyes is a generous guess. It's just as likely they wait for complaints.

The only one of those that scares me is the Bad Customer experience because it leaves it open for interpretation. They could remove quite a number of books they have in their catalog for that very reason and that would be a good thing; however they could go too far or start looking at large numbers on one star reviews and arbitrarily start removing things without verifying that there is substance to the those and the same thing could happen with negative complaints. Point in case might be objections to overuse of commas and semi-colons. Such a complaint could be more than justified or it might be someone who was told the semi-colons were evil.

 

[Sir Vivor]

Thanks for the feedback. I happen to be a software engineer, and know too well how easy and cheap it is to write software to automatically check a host of "problems" in text. This is a symptom of our times: companies going for the world-wide mega markets (social media, the hundreds of millions of "users"), without having the people power to interact with their customers in a meaningful and human way.. so we end up with all kinds of algorithms filtering, complaining, banning, removing all kinds.. automatically, with no human feeling or recognition of nuances, exceptions. And when those companies try to install a bunch of people to catch and deal with the out of the ordinary use cases, those people are poorly trained, poorly paid, .. With the rise of AI, this will only get worse before it gets better.