We all need a lot of different photos of our books for A+ content – different angles and different book positions. We all want to be able to create video ads for our books, using different angles or showing a page being flipped. We need green screens to fit them into custom backgrounds in our video editors. It requires a lot of shoots and a lot of work. But what do you do if the book is not published yet and you do not have a physical copy in your hand? There is likely a solution. See you today at 15:00 UTC at the meeting. It will be: 7:00 (PST) in Los Angeles 8:00 (MST) in Denver 10:00 (EST) in New York 16:00 (CET) in Berlin 23:00 in Singapore

Imagine you are creating a book about decluttering. If you hired two cover designers and gave them a task: Create a cover for a book about decluttering with the title: "Decluttering Made Simple. Subtitle: Practical Strategies to Organize Your Home and Achieve Peace from Clutter in Less than 10 Minutes a Day. By Kate Hansen." Designers returned with their concepts. What offer would you prefer as a prototype to continue with? Your ideas about the quality of designs? Cast your vote for the set you like better. ----- ⚠️ If you recognized some designs, NO SPOILERS please.

I've been sitting on this post for a while because I wanted to make sure I wasn't just being dramatic. After months of watching the space closely, I'm convinced this isn't fear-mongering — it's pattern recognition. Here's my honest breakdown of where Amazon KDP is headed — for all of us. The Ground is Already Shifting Under Our Feet KDP is currently the frontline of AI disruption. The market isn't just "getting competitive" — it's being flooded with synthetic content at a scale we've never seen before. Amazon knows it. That's why they're actively rewriting the rules: algorithm changes, royalty structure tweaks, review policy updates. The A10 algorithm shift wasn't accidental. They're trying to manage a glut they didn't anticipate, and they're doing it in real time. If we've noticed our organic rankings slipping over the past year, we're not imagining it. The playbook that worked in 2022 is now actively working against us. The Next 1–2 Years: We're No Longer Authors. We're Media Buyers. Here's the hard pill: writing a well-structured, 30,000-word book is no longer a differentiator. We can produce it in a day. Execution — the thing we used to compete on — has been commoditized overnight. And before anyone says, "just write better, more human content," readers can't actually tell the difference anymore. That ship has sailed. Competing on the quality of the text itself is a losing game, regardless of how it's produced. So what actually wins now? External attention. Amazon's new algorithm heavily rewards books that arrive with an audience already attached. That means the winners over the next two years won't be the best writers. They'll be the best digital marketers — the ones building newsletters, growing YouTube followings, nurturing Skool communities, and then pointing that audience toward their books. Our identity in this business has to evolve. We need to think of ourselves less as authors and more as media brands that happen to publish books. The second piece of this is what I'm calling the trust premium. Readers are already experiencing AI fatigue, even if they can't name it. They can feel when a person is behind something — not because the writing is better, but because the marketing is authentic, the niche is specific, and the face behind the brand is real and present. Verifiable human presence and transparent, specific marketing will convert dramatically better than anonymous, optimized content. Our humanity isn't in the text anymore. It's in how we show up off the page.

Me to Kevin at BB -I am concerned i will have lots points but not be able to safely use them in my next book launch Hi Pamela, Happy to talk. I like the guy from BookVillage. It's nice to know there is someone else who is building a platform and is a publisher themselves and knows what we go through, which is one of the reasons I built Book Bounty. It's obvious he does not like any other platform other than his, which is cool. I, too, used Pubby when I started publishing. I never had a real problem with Pubby, except that I thought their site was not too user-friendly. I did hear bookvilliage's scare tactics to convince people his way is the best way, which I'm sure will work on getting him some customers, and he makes good points that a lot of people might not know or have forgotten. We do check Amazon guidelines to make sure we're inline with them, and if needed, we will and do make changes to stay inline. Platforms like BookBlaze, Getbookreviews, Pubby have all have been around using points for years and years, much longer than Book Bounty, and they're still around. All the platforms are adapting to Amazon, too, as we all want to keep our platforms alive and helping publishers succeed, which I believe all the platforms are trying to accomplish. All platforms, even Amazon, get bad actors that we're all constantly building protections, kicking out and blocking them when we find them. Bookvillage will get them too once they've been around long enough, and they will (like us) keep finding them and improving ways to stop them. It's the bad actors that make it hard on everyone else. He is right that Amazon watches behavior and patterns of users more than even the reviews, how they purchase, how much and often they purcahse, how much they read, how much they review, how fast they read, how often they review and not just with books it's for all products and Amazon looks for how everything connects to everything else all to sell more and make more money. And when things don't look right, their bots take notice and don't care when they take action based on what they perceive. Even if someone who is doing everything right and makes a mistake, they might not know they made their bots don't care. Accounts that get blocked are usually ones that are doing things they're not supposed to, or trying to beat the system, which can affect everyone. Like when he mentions that VAs are part of the problem, but instead of recommending as a publisher himself do not to use VAs when publishing, he blamed the platforms for publishers using VAs. It's always the goal and challenge to catch and stop bad things before it becomes a problem. The recent book ban we've been hearing about seems to be mostly around the free promotion days. Looking over the data, it seems that velocity and quantity is now a factor. I remember a while back, the goal was to get as many reviews during free promo days I would stock up on points and put out as many assignments as I had points for on Pubby. Now, with the recent changes, Amazon is not liking this so much. Looking at the behavior and history of a book it's probably safe to assume that if it's always getting a sale and always gets a review and barely any other enguagement only sales and reviews, this could look unnatural. And a new book with no prior history sales or review history stands out. If this is done quickly and a good quantity to a bot this would look suspicious. And all the different book clubs out there can cause a free promo sale, get a sale and review just about every time. If someone is using more than one book club, they could really ramp up the spike like this unknowingly. We can't tell what someone is doing on other platforms, but we'll do what we can with Book Bounty. This is why we paused the free promotion bounties for a moment, so we can build more protection limits to how many and how fast these can be created and more. We hope to get this work completed and free promotion bounties back going again soon after we roll out our browser extension confirmation tool, which we've been working on and mentioned in our newsletter, which should launch next week. It's in the final testing phase currently. Then we're rolling into adding more pricing tiers to go above $4.99 bounties. Then we're going to be rolling into the work with some exciting community features that I don't want to unveil just yet, but the goal is to help grow a stronger and more helpful community. I hope some of this helps, if I missed a point or question you might have, please let me know.

Gathering feedback from Facebook groups and through Facebook ads, compensating readers for your book purchase, and, hopefully, converting that into Amazon reviews is a good strategy. But even the previous sentence sounds a bit complicated. Not to mention actually building a system for corresponding with potential readers, tracking who is at what stage, and tracking compensation (both to prove to Amazon that the reader received only compensation and not a reward, and for tax accounting purposes). What are your thoughts on the topic? Do you use such a system? If yes, how do you organize it?