This is a copy of the email our coordinator Tahlia Newland sent to Amazon via the KDP support team. Whether it gets to anyone who is interested or is moved to do something is yet to be seen, but the attempt has been made to make contact.
Hi KDP support team
Could you please pass this on to whoever is concerned about the plethora of poor quality books Amazon is offering its Kindle readers.
I’m the coordinator of Awesome Indies Books, our purpose is to identify and promote self-published and indie published books that meet the same or higher standards as mainstream published books. I’m pretty sure that someone in the Amazon organisation must be concerned about the lack of quality of a large number of the self-published books you offer your customers. I’ve heard Nook owners say, “Yes, Kindle offers more books, but most of them are crap.” I figure that’s not so great for business in the long term.
I’m sure you don’t want to institute any kind of quality control from your end. It is unnecessary and would be detrimental to do so. The answer, I think, lies not in preventing the publication of poor quality books, but in making the quality books more visible, so they are the ones readers are more likely to find and read.
Any system working on such an idea immediately raises the question of what constitutes quality and who is qualified to evaluate. Amazon star ratings are well known to be unreliable. Much as we would like to be able to work from customer reviews, we can’t. Even if we put aside the sock puppet accounts and 5 star review purchasing, most reader/reviewers don’t leave a review unless they have something good to say, so a lack of low starred reviews does not mean that a book is as good as its rating suggests. So where can you turn to get an idea of the quality of a book? Book awards should be a reliable source for quality books, but awards that are voted on by readers merely indicate which authors have the biggest social media network that he or she can mobilize to go and vote.
The Awesome Indies reviewers – those who assess books for approval – are editors, university lecturers, journalists, award-winning authors and others with degrees in English literature, creative writing or journalism. Such people are most able to evaluate quality in writing, and are those whose opinions are most likely to be respected. We also have a clear and relevant criteria against which to evaluate.
BRAG is another organisation who highlights quality independent books, but their criteria is very loose. The indiePendents is another organisation trying to do something similar, but their criteria only relates to copy editing, not the other forms of editing that are so vital for fiction. Even so, any initiatives you undertake to draw readers attention to quality indie books could include books that they have approved as well, depending on how high you want to draw the line for quality.
So the Awesome Indies have solved the ‘who decides what’s good’ issue. We can tell you which are the well crafted books (take a look at our criteria for approval), all you have to do is work out – assuming that you do want to direct your customers to the best of indie publishing – how you can get these books in front of your readers in such a way that they will be more likely to buy them than their less polished counterparts.
I’ll leave the ‘how’ up to you. The point is that we have a well-thought out and reliable system for identifying well-crafted books, and I think it would benefit Amazon to make some kind of commitment to support quality in indie publishing. Give your readers a reliable way to sort the wheat from the chaff and they will be very happy. It would also be very good for public perception of your company.
I hope that you can see that a system that makes quality books more visible would be good for the customer, good for you and good for the indie publishing business as a whole. Wouldn’t it be great if the authors who work hard to write well, and who pay thousands of dollars for editing and cover designs had more of a chance to get a return for their investment than those who didn’t make the same kind of investment? Higher visibility for quality products is the only way to do that. And you can provide it.
Let me know if you’re interested in talking further about this.
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