Amazon is not for self-publishers
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All for the readers
I have written at length about KDP Select, Amazon's offer to self-publishers to include themselves in the Kindle Owners' Library for Amazon Prime members. There is a rich diversity of opinion about the offer but there are also some basic misconceptions circulating.
One thing I've heard several times is that it is "unfair" that Amazon will count "loans"* of books towards their ranking in the bestseller charts.
It is not unfair.
Amazon's thinking is easiest to understand when you remind yourself what Amazon's mission is:
To provide the best possible store to readers (thereby becoming the place readers choose to shop and making Amazon the most possible money)
Amazon's priority is not authors or self-publishers, it is readers.
By counting "loans" of books alongside sales of books they are being true to purpose of these charts:
The purpose of Amazon rankings is to alert readers to what their peers are choosing to read.
It is irrelevant to this whether their peers are buying the books or "borrowing" them. It is relevant only that they've chosen to read this book rather than that book.
When a friend recommends a book they've read, do you care whether they bought it or borrowed it?
Certainly this is unfortunate for those of us who self-publish and aren't embracing KDP Select but Amazon is not for us, it's for our readers. And ultimately this is good for us because the better the service readers receive from Amazon, the more likely they are to use Amazon.
* I might eventually stop putting "loan", "borrow" and "library" in quotation marks when talking about KDP Select but I think it is important for the moment to draw attention to the fact that these are Amazon's choice of terminology and I think they are misleading.
Read more great content at the Taleist self-publishing blog.
See this post on the site at: Amazon is not for self-publishers
