Kindle Scout

» see kindlescout.amazon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed kindle scout entirely at the time. by 2014 my reading was split between paperbacks from d&r in ankara and pdfs on a battered thinkpad. i owned a kindle keyboard from about 2011 but the store side of the amazon ecosystem was english-only for me, and self-published romance and thriller titles were not what i was buying with dollar-loaded gift cards from a us friend.

kindle scout launched in october 2014 as amazon's answer to a question the wider publishing industry had also started asking. crowds could vote on which manuscripts got a contract. authors uploaded a full novel, a cover image, and a 5000-word excerpt. the excerpt sat on kindlescout.com for a thirty-day nomination window. readers who spent time on the site could nominate up to three books at a time. at the end of the window amazon's editors picked winners from the pile that had drawn the most nominations.

winners signed with a boutique imprint called kindle press. the terms were public: a 1500 dollar advance, a 50 percent ebook royalty, a five-year renewable term with easy rights reversion, and a small marketing push through the amazon store. readers who had nominated the book got a free kindle copy a week before public release. that was the whole contraption.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the program ran cleanly for its first two years. most winning titles were genre fiction: romance, thriller, mystery, sci-fi. a handful of authors used a scout contract as a bridge between self-publishing and a traditional deal. writer beware and other publishing blogs picked the model apart for good and ill. the terms were fair enough to sit in the middle range of small-press contracts, less generous than pure kdp but with a real marketing budget attached.

the reader side had a smaller audience than amazon had probably hoped for. nominations skewed toward established genre communities. cover art and blurb decided most of the vote, which is not obviously different from a bookstore shelf but produced a narrower catalog than the pitch implied.

~ the postmortem ~

on 2 april 2018 amazon emailed authors and readers with a wind-down notice. new submissions closed the next day, 3 april. the site stayed up for existing campaigns to finish, then went dark on 31 may. by that point 293 titles had cleared the reader vote and shipped through kindle press. amazon offered no public explanation. the announcement pointed authors toward kindle direct publishing as the ongoing option.

the trade-press read was that scout had never grown large enough to justify its editorial overhead. amazon was also visibly consolidating around plain kdp, which required no editor time on amazon's side. kindle worlds, the fan-fiction imprint, was shut in the same year, part of the same cull.

~ the legacy ~

the interesting piece is that a handful of scout titles kept selling long after the imprint closed. the kindle press books stayed available in the store, contracts stayed in force, royalties kept clearing. a few authors renegotiated back to self-published editions once the five-year term ran out. the wider crowd-vote publishing idea did not survive amazon dropping it. inkitt and a few smaller reader-driven platforms carried on, without the same catalog reach or advance money.

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