An Interesting Change On Amazon That Could Impact Book Discoverability

Take a look at these screens I just grabbed from Amazon moments ago. Let’s see if you notice the same thing I did…

Back now? Did you see it? Look closely.

As I begin to work up a post for next week on the 16th anniversary of my very first Kindle book purchase, I was looking through the various Kindle deal pages yesterday as I’d done countless times before over the years, but something stood out to me this time, though I’m unsure exactly how long it has been going on since I haven’t had to look to hard for new books these last few years with all of the Advance Reader Copy work I’ve been doing.

Did you spot it? It is there, though it isn’t common…

On nine separate screenshots here, somewhere around 50+ different books across three different Kindle Deals screens, including the main Kindle Deals page, the Bestsellers page, and my “For You” page…

… every single book listed as free was actually on Prime Reading and there was not a single genuinely free book listed on these pages.

Meaning if you’re an author doing a freebie deal… it doesn’t show up here. Seemingly at all.

If you’re a reader looking for legitimate free books… you won’t find them here. Seemingly at all.

On the world’s largest eBook marketplace.

Instead, you have to use other tools like the various Stuff Your Kindle events or BookBub’s Deals page to find these genuinely free books outside of the newly renamed Kindle+ or Prime Reading - if you even have either of those available to you.

It could also be that since I am a Prime member but not a K+ member (for reasons I’ll get into a bit next week), perhaps Amazon is steering me towards the programs I’m in. Maybe if I was neither on Prime nor K+, the genuinely free books would show up on these pages?

Maybe this is just a me thing?

Let me know what you see, I’ll be making both this post and next week’s rare everyone-is-welcome-to-comment posts.

Also, if you haven’t subscribed to me on Substack or followed me wherever you found this post, please consider doing so to ensure that you see next week’s post. While I’ve spoken about it’s topic several times across social media, this will be the first time in over four years I’ve written an actual post about it.

Until then! :)