Dogs Now Fight in Slightly Cleaner Pit (Thanks, Amazon)

Amazon is going to change the allocation formula for its KDP Select program.

I've talked about KDP Select before and I'm not impressed with it. Its fundamental problem is that it's a giant pile of authors competing for a fixed amount of money. Amazon decides how big that pile is and how many authors get to compete for it.

I'm tempted to make some Hunger Games reference here, because I think there's already a natural mechanism for pitting authors against each other - it's called "the marketplace." Whether it's a store shelf, a quick-hit rack in the airport, or an electronic catalog every author is already in competition with every other. Some wag once quipped that Isaac Asimov's biggest competitor was Isaac Asimov because he'd been so prolific and his books stayed in print. The result was several shelf-feet (back when that was a meaningful measure) of Asimov books. So be it - that's the system we like in this country.

But that existing marketplace doesn't place any caps on the size of the buying pool. If I want to splurge and spend $100 or hunt for a $10 bargain that's my choice. If I'm enticed to make more or bigger purchases then that expands the amount of money that can flow to authors. The intermediaries (booksellers, publishers, etc.) may take their cut but they don't impose arbitrary caps.

Enter Amazon, everyone else move over and give this gorilla some room. I've railed about Amazon's policies enough in the past - I'm not going to repeat that. This particular move has the effect of rewarding one kind of book-writing over all others and gods help us we do not need more worthless bloat in our literature. That itself would be reason enough to dislike this move.

Finally, I want to pull-quote the end of Peter Wayner's piece:

It’s easy for writers to feel powerless as the one dominant company shifts gears on short notice—and, ultimately, it seems like they are.

Nobody says you have to participate in KDP Select, but if you do you should understand the deal you're making with this particular devil

(ETA: as I was writing this, someone sent me a link to John Scalzi's blog entry on the topic and what he says mirrors a lot of what I planned to write. But I wrote my piece anyway because a blog entry that just says "What he said" is kind of dull.)