As soon as the news came that Amazon will start paying a lot more attention to poorly edited books, panic ensued among the various forums. Thankfully, as John Doppler explains on Words on Words, things aren’t quite that bad.
It all started when Good E-Reader blog announced that “Kindle e-Books will have a warning message if they have spelling mistakes.”
Some authors took that headline at face value and assumed the worst: that Amazon will brand any books deemed to have typographic errors — no matter how minor — with a sinister warning label.
As is often the case, the reality is far less dramatic.
The Facts
First, only ebooks that have received specific complaints from readers will be examined. As it happens, I have received a few complaints about my books in the past, and the most frequent complaints turned out to be in relation to my choice of British English spelling. This was so frustrating, that in the end I dropped that in favor of American English (or should I say, in favour of it?)
Regardless, KDP’s new proofing initiative is designed to combat not British imperialism or the isolated typo that inevitably slips through the most diligent of editing, but gibberish and random characters in place of the headings, line breaks in the middle of sentences etc.
Also, it turns out that complaints are reviewed by screeners – actual people at Amazon. The process is not automated, and there will be an opportunity to contest or correct a problem if your book is determined to have issues.
The warning labels are referred to as CFQIs, Customer Facing Quality Indicators. The first CFQIs appeared on January 27, 2016. CFQIs read “Quality issues reported”. Hovering over this indicator will display a list of the types of defects reported by customers (and verified by Amazon). The CFQI also contains a message stating that the publisher has been notified of the issues.
What will Amazon look for?
According to Doppler, the errors Amazon will flag include:
- missing content
- duplicated content
- numbers inadvertently substituted for letters, or vice versa (“typ0gr4phic”, “the year 2o12”)
- punctuation used in place of letters (e.g., “I read bo%ks”)
- visible or malformed HTML code
- discretional hyphens (“bad hy-phenation”)
- missing letters (“m ghty pecul ar”)
- unsupported characters (e.g., emoticons)
- incorrect content (as when the publisher uploads the interior file for a different book)
- blurry or excessively compressed images
- body text rendered entirely as underlined, bold, or hyperlinked
- page numbers embedded in the text
- nonfunctional table of contents or internal links
As you can see from the list, these issues are largely due to formatting problems or OCR errors. I should note here that the latter are quite frequent with republications of older works, so it doesn’t look like it’s Indies that are somehow targeted, as some have alleged.
According to KDP, 10-15 typos will trigger a CFQI in a typical, full-length novel. More specifically, this is what they have to say:
Our Quality team uses a formula based on how many defects it contains out of the total allowable defects for a book of its length. Longer titles are allowed more defects than shorter ones because the overall impact is distributed. Note that “locations” below refers to the internal divisions of an ebook, not pages or chapters.
While we are not able to disclose this specific formula, please be informed that an average sized novel with around 3000 locations will trigger the quality warning with 10-15 typos.
Amazon will also remove works that violate Amazon rules or don’t meet basic standards, such as a book designed solely to advertise, or a poor translation obtained through Google Translate.
What will Amazon ignore?
According to Amazon, they will not flag:
- minor typographical errors (“What have you got to loose?”)
- regional spelling differences (e.g., “favourite” vs. “favorite”)
- dialogue, accents, or dialects (“I doan’ budge a step out’n dis place ‘dout a doctor”)
- foreign languages, archaic speech (“leet his sheep encombred in the myre”)
- proper names (“The Dothraki called that land Rhaesh Andahli”)
However, some authors are reporting flags for a small number of typos. This is inconsistent with what Amazon has said, and the enforcement appears to be erratic. It is possible that Amazon’s employees are confused about how strict they should be in cracking down on issues.
What are the consequences?
If Amazon’s screeners confirm that a book has issues, there are two possible actions.
For errors prominent or numerous enough to detract from the reader’s enjoyment, Amazon will place a warning banner on the product’s page alerting customers that the item is under review. Authors and publishers will then have an opportunity to correct the issue and promptly remove the warning banner. (Amazon has already been doing this for years; they’re just expanding the conditions that can trigger an alert.)
Errors that render the book unusable or incomplete or books that violate Amazon’s Terms of Service will be removed from sale.
The aim, then, is to offer an improvement to quality control that won’t affect any professionally edited and formatted book. Then again, you already know how important professional editing and proofreading is, right?
Thanks, Nicholas. A not entirely surprising explanation that should relieve most of us.
I’d hope so 🙂
Thanks Nicholas, that’s such a help and something of a relief! 🙂
Glad to hear it 🙂
As relevant as ever, Nicholas. And all achieved on sleepless nights. Well done
Thanks! Yes, I do miss my sleep… 🙂
I think this is important that Amazon wants to improve the quality of the books on their site. Too many self-pubbed books or even some indie pubbed books don’t meet good style standards, lack quality, and are amateurish. We authors know we must use professional editors for content development, copy editing and proofreading before we finalize our work. Same goes for book formatting and presentation. The Chicago Manual of Style is the bible for book publishing used by all the big publishing houses like Random or Simon&Schuster. And all authors should use it too. As self-pubbed or indie pubbed authors, we need to keep up to professional standards not only for the good of readers but also the good of the industry.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s one of the many things I admire about your books 🙂
Like others who comment here I totally agree that there should be a standard for all books concerning editing. As an independent writer it is so frustrating to pick up or buy an ebook that is filled with error after error. It makes us all look bad. Writing a novel is not slapping together a semi-coherent story without at least correcting spelling. Editing is a big part of what makes novels great and readable. I would like to see Amazon and other vendors allow a group of independent writer to set up a committee to judge all novels– not on their merit, but on their readability. The consensus with the majority of readers is that independent writers don’t stack up to the big publishing house writers and it’s mostly because of the quality of editing.
I completely agree. Given the sheer volume of published titles (6,000 daily), however, I think that Amazon is doing the next best thing: automated checking, that forwards suspect titles to actual humans.
I think its a great thing. They are trying to sort the wheat from the chaff and give their customers a better quality product. They’re being fair too; they’re giving the author the chance to correct the issue, not withdrawing it completely. No author needs to worry if they’ve done the best they can. And I suspect the books with the most issues are those churned out by people not serious about writing. I wonder if they’ll bother to correct their books? I suspect we will see further quality controls in the future. Amazon will not want to risk losing their subscribed customers through offering them poor quality products. Suddenly they’ve realised that their old policies have to change. I think that’s much better for serious authors.
Couldn’t agree more 🙂
Thanks for sharing this clarification Nicholas. I’ve noticed a few of the ‘classics’ that have been formatted for kindle and republished have had some poor reviews for the formatting. Maybe the trad publishers could take some lessons from us Indies, lol, when it comes to formatting ebooks. 🙂
Lol – Indies do seem to be held to a higher standard than trad-pubs 🙂
Interesting post, Nicholas. With your explanation, Amazon’s process seems more reasonable.
I look at it as a good thing 🙂
Thank you Nicholas! It’s good to have the voice of reason and facts. I think quality control is a good thing. I just have to be diligent in editing. I was a bit gobsmacked that someone actually complained that you used proper English instead of the dialect of my countrymen. I had this vision of that scene playing out in a Monty Python skit.
Ha ha – I now have to watch some Monties 😀
LOL! They always help me focus on the lighter side of things. 🙂
Even J.K. Rowling had to put away her Oxford dictionary and change her text to suit the US market.
Lol – didn’t know that, but I’m thrilled to find out I’m in such illustrious company 😀
Interesting reading. It’s always good to get the facts behind the headlines. It sounds like a good thing in practice. If it works in practice. I suppose time will tell.
I, too, look at it as a move in the right direction. We’ll see 🙂
Tweeted this – I think it’s a positive thing, even for indies, as there does need to be some benchmarking to ensure all things literary are of reasonable quality.
Couldn’t agree more. Indeed, I’d argue that Indies need to be even more careful about our quality.
Standards are a good thing, right? Why not have at them?
By now we all understand regional spelling (don’t we?), on the other hand, bad spelling and incorrect use of words (there, their, they’re and many others) give me a headache. Bravo for standards.
Another informative post. Thank you.
My feelings exactly 🙂
I think this is a good thing, Nicholas. A good formatting program and proofreader should do the trick 🙂
My thoughts exactly 🙂
It’s a shame Amazon’s “Quality issues reported” won’t cover the ever-so-poor way a lot of books on the website are actually written. I read (well part-read) some absolute horrors. Still, it’s nice to know that there is finally to be at least some kind of quality control over what has increasingly been a free-for-all of dodgy book publishing.
I know what you mean!
A very thorough and comprehensive post on an issue that set forums ablaze. Thanks!
Lol – yes, I thought about this post during our conversation the other day… 😀
Timely info for all authors – it will certainly have some positive outcomes for both readers and authors. Readers like me totally appreciate authors who go to great lengths to provide an enjoyable read by ensuring there are few formatting and other errors; bottom-line is: it’s about quality control and readers want to feel like they have brought a book that is worth the price paid and not just because the author writes brilliant stories 🙂
Absolutely, and thanks once again for providing the all-important reader’s point of view!
Happy to oblige 😀
There’s this thing around the interwebz that if there’s a question in the headline, the answer’s always, no … you’d be surprised how often that works! 🙂
As a rule Amazon isn’t out to punish the people who make them money, but there’s such a kerfuffle over this issue, the more peeps that put out the correct information, the better.
Lol – yes, the title is pure click-bait 😉
This has set the hairs running over my morning coffee…
Lol – sorry 😀