Amid their typical public feeding-frenzy, Amazon has given birth to their newest egg in the self-publishing platform – Kindle Scout.
In the company's latest bid to garner the crowdsourcing market of consumers, customers are given access to unreleased, unpublished book excerpts for free, and then asked to vote on the excerpts from those titles they've enjoyed reading the most and would like to see published in full.
Readers can choose no more than three books at one time for publication, and the voting period lasts 30 days for each excerpt. With new selections added every day there is substantial potential here to become an overwhelmed reader/editor.
Although the votes do not determine the outcome for each book, they are given substantial weight by Amazon's Kindle Scout team. The team will determine which books have the most votes, and then use that information as part of the criteria for their final decision. Although not the sole criteria that Amazon uses for selecting books for publication, the votes do carry some weight in the team's decision-making process for those books that will be published by Amazon.
For those lucky enough to vote for the winning books, Amazon will give you a free full-length Kindle edition of the book for one week before the official release date.
What budding authors will have to decide is whether having their book on Amazon is ultimately going to prove financially rewarding enough to warrant the 50-50 royalty split; which is part of their compensation package, or if they would feel more secure with a smaller, but more traditional, book publishing experience.
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