Amazon may remove books under 2500 words

[Steerpike]

Not sure if any action has been taken, but they've raised the issue in letters. See link.

Amazon Cracks Down on Kindle Books Under 2,500 Words - GalleyCat

 

[Alexandra]

Good. 2,500 words does not a book make. An essay perhaps, or short story, but not a book.

 

[Chilari]

I've heard complaints that this will harm certain markets - short stories and poetry in particular. But in my opinion, works that short just aren't worth paying for. Anthologies that bring the wordcount over 2,500 words would be far more worthwhile.

Having said that, I suspect that the vast majority of works under 2,500 words are probably free - which I understand can only be done on Amazon by offering it free elsewhere and then teling Amazon so it does a price match (I may be wrong). Regardless of whether Amazon makes it easy for people to put things up for free, though, I suspect they're none too happy about using their server sapce for a zero profit "book", and are thus targeting books shorter than 2,500 words as a means to get rid of a lot of free content and leave behind longer content which is more likely to be priced above free.

If people are desperate to put their short stuff up there, then maybe they should get three or four together and call it an anthology. Otherwise, there are other means of distributing short stories for free.

So I don't really see this as a problem.

 

[Black Dragon]

I also don't see this as a problem.

One of the side effects of the self-publishing boom is that the Kindle Store is littered with "books" of very poor quality. This makes it harder for quality works to be discovered by readers.

While some of these shorter ebooks (less than 2,500 words) may be worthwhile, I've seen quite a few that are short on substance and merit. Weeding out that sort of filler will only make it easier for good books to find an audience.

What Amazon may want to consider doing is creating a different category for very short pieces such as these. That would be a win for the readers as well. When I'm searching Amazon for books on a specific topic, and dozens of 3 page articles show up in the results, it makes it harder to find what I'm really looking for.

 

[Telcontar]

From what I'm seeing, this is likely to be an isolated incident and not a new policy - in other words, the short books are safe.

Though I have a very short story up for free on Amazon, the various front and back matter (which includes a preview of another story) bring it up well over 2.5k and thus I wouldn't have been affected.

 

[Chilari]

I understand only a few authors have been messaged about this, and no action has so far been taken to remove the affected works. Perhaps this is Amazon testing the waters, seeing what responses people have to it, before deciding whether to go ahead. They don't want to alienate customers, so they want to see how popular this kind of a move will be before going through with it. It's a possibility.

But I agree with BD: removing short works will make it easier for readers to find what we're looking for.

 

[Devor]

Since Amazon has a minimum price of 0.99 for most writers, I would say 2,500 word stories don't fit the bill. Maybe if there was a way they could give you a better author page, and the option to list free short stories on the same page as your longer ones, there would definitely be a place for incorporating them as part of the service. But I see more harm than value in lumping extremely short works together with longer ones. It seems imbalanced to me.

 

[ALB2012]

I can see both sides - some authors use these short stories as a taster for their work but then again 4 or 5 pages is a really short book to pay for. That said maybe mandatory word counts are the way to go. Authors must state how many words and then it is up to the buyer to decide, or possibly even a separate category.

I occasionally buy such short books but I think a maximum price of 99c and it being stated they are short works for me. It is very annoying to spend 2.99 and then find a short book or a few pages. I read a short story recently, looked like it was a novella, actually story was about 8 pages and the rest was adverts for the author's other books. Fortunately that one was free but had I paid that would have been annoying.