Big news for midweek. And it's also very succinct news. Amazon has made another adjustment to the number of permitted titles you can upload through KDP. As Jane Friedman helpfully reminded in the latest edition of The Bottom Line, the first such limiting move came as far back as 2023. The previous limit of ten titles came into effect just last year.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
From Monday, September 21, that limit is now two titles per format per week. So if you have two titles to publish, you can do so in e-book, paperback, and hardback.
To quote the very short announcement from Amazon, “Your weekly limit resets every Sunday at 12:00 AM UTC.” The only other piece of information in the announcement is that this applies to new titles only and doesn't affect anything you have already published.
The AI Connection
All we have apart from that is a statement of intent “to help maintain a positive publishing experience for all authors.”
It has always been clear that the reason for such limits is the proliferation of AI-generated titles. So while that statement sounds rather gnomic, and certainly won't feel like the epitome of positivity for anyone with more than three titles to publish in a week or a large backlist to start getting out there, it is very much in line with what Michael Tamblyn from Rakuten Kobo said about his company's decision to turn down 45 percent of titles that people attempted to upload.
Tamblyn stated explicitly that he had made a commitment to a “writer first” rather than a “reader first” approach to AI. He cited not only the potential or perceived threat from AI but also the time his team could devote to human authors by saying no to many titles. That's kind of the same vibe KDP is trying to give.
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