Amazon.com has just very quietly launched a new section on its US site. Thanks to 40k Books for the Tweet pointing to Brendan Gannon’s blog post making a louder announcement than Jeff Bezos seems to have done.
Image via CrunchBase
Can it be that the fabulous level playing field been tipped up at one end, sending all the poor wee self-published authors into a boggy pit known as “Kindle Indie Books”?
It hasn’t happened on the UK site yet, but we are notoriously slow on the uptake, Kindle-wise, on this side of the Atlantic. I dare say it’ll come to these shores soon.
Bugger.
Just when I was thinking the revolution was truly taking hold, Amazon throws its weight around. I’m not sure what this will mean longer term – at the moment indie authors are still appearing in the main Kindle Books listings (Rick Murcer is No 1 at the time of writing with Caribbean Moon).
Fingers crossed they won’t carry out some sort of unpleasant cleansing exercise and consign indies to their own enclosure.
Watch that space.
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I’ve been meaning to blog on this for months! On the US side the ghetto-ization starting months ago when even signature links to books in forums were banned. Indie authors are relegated to a “meet the authors” forum. Sales of Indie are way down. In addition, Amazon has started a “look inside” feature for Kindle indies in which there is virtually NO FORMATTING making the books look truly awful. There is no opt out for this, and it actually looks like a way NOT to sell books. I’ve been saying for a while it’s as though Kindle was a lousy neighborhood, then a few indies moved in and spiced things up. Real estate prices went up and the landlord kicked out the old timers. It’s not ghetto-ization as much as gentrification.
I’ve really been enjoying the level playing field. Oh well.
Yikes – it’s worse than I could have imagined! I’ve been assuming the picture was rosy, given all the great stuff happening to the likes of Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath – maybe I need to reassess…
Thanks for the info