The Amazon Kindle Forum Shake-up

It's been a crazy week! Last Friday, with one day's notice, Amazon decided to start enforcing their no self-promotion policy. They have now relagated all author promo to a forum called "Meet the Authors". I'm not going to discuss the fairness or lack of it here. It's done, and there is no going back.

You are probably expecting a rant about the situation, and if I'd written this post a few days ago, I might have obliged, but despite the challenges, the new forum is starting to get legs and may have a chance of becoming something more than a bunch of billboards for indie authors. 

A big challenge is that Amazon is dumping tons of threads into the forum. For example,  if there was a thread started two years ago asking for authors to recommend their new thriller, that thread was tossed into the new forum even if the thread hadn't been active for months. However, new discussion threads are popping up and they have been very active.

What I am asking is that readers give us a chance to sort out everything. Someone has started master threads with urls to individual author threads and genre threads. I've been trying to start threads to include readers, for instance, The Shameless Reader's thread has been active all week. Someone else started one asking if readers are there, and many have posted that they are. 

In one way, it might be good as at least some of the readers from various genre forums, who might not have visited the Kindle forum, have been stopping by. Hopefully, some will stick around.

I would love for blog readers to share the link to the forum. I have a feeling Amazon intended for it to become a quagmire of shameless promotion, so how cool would it be to show them that we can have intelligent discussion?