Friday, August 11, 2017

Amazon KDP survey: the improvements I suggested

So I received an email from Amazon's KDP program, asking me to take a short survey about the program. I've been using KDP for years, but in the past few months the Amazon self-publishing program has gotten a lot of grief from participants for rampant scams, ranging from ebook box set trickery to make money and establish "bestseller" status to bogus borrows and fishy promotions  gaming rank and revenue. The scams take money from readers as well as honest authors trying to play by the rules and publish good books.

But those aren't the only problems. When I was prompted with the following question, I had five specific suggestions:

Survey question: What would you like us to work on next that would improve your KDP experience?

My response:
  1. Get rid of transmission fees. This made sense when people downloaded books to their Kindles over 3G. Now that most downloads are wifi, it's a bogus charge that cheats authors and publishers.
  2. Stop using a misleading UI that tricks people into signing up for KDP Select.
  3. Please stop constant needling to lower prices.
  4. Please do a better job of screening out bogus authors using Wikipedia, Fiverr, or illegally copied sources to "write" books.
  5. Please find and punish people who are outright ripping off readers and other authors with scams and other tricks. It's not enough to remove their ranking. Kill their account and prevent them from opening up a new account tied to the same bank account. Money spent on these scams is not fair to readers or authors who are playing by the rules.
Did I miss anything?

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