I'm starting a thread where you can post messages to Amazon you wish they would read. No guarantee they will, but this thread will be indexed into google, so google alerts will likely happen.
Just make sure you only post what you want to be totally public.
Dear Amazon,
When a new LLC starts uploading books, are you checking the registered address to make sure it is a bricks and mortar location which does rent out out office space? Just wondered. All addresses for authors should be verifiable buildings.
Also on the subject of verifiable authors, why not include a tax number on each book uploaded, so that the personal tax number of the actual author is recorded for each book, enabling you to cross-check easily if the author is banned or not. Likewise bans should be done at the author level, not the publisher level. Plenty of authors pretending to be publishers these days, so whenever a publisher is banned, they create a new LLC to publish from again. You dont appear to be able to identify these, so why not make the tax number of the author on each book the way to tell? Even if an author is with a publisher of any kind, they still have their own tax number. And this is the common base, no matter how a book is published. Anyone can get as many LLC tax numbers as they want to create LLC's for. But everyone only has a single personal tax number. For an author, their personal tax number should be their identifier.
I also still advocate creating a third ranking chart solely for KU. Free books have a chart, sales should have a chart for only sales, and KU should have a chart solely for KU borrows. You show both ranks sets on the product page for books in KU. This will also highlight books with high borrows, but low sales. The incentive of rank bonus for KU books should be remove, as KU is so entrenched now, I dont believe its a factor in people joining KU anymore. Move KU into its own rank structure, and you remove a lot of the incentive for scammers to scam KU. And in the process, you return the sales ranks to some semblance of rationality, instead of the scammer controlled wasteland it currently is.
There is a demonstrable correlation between sales on a day also-boughts are on the top of the product page, and when they are either at the bottom, or not there at all. Also-boughts are the best way of getting more sales. AMS ads are a very expensive joke at the author level. They keep costing more and more and more, and keep delivering less and less. And when the also-bought slider is missing, all the books being advertised are of no interest to people looking for a book other people read before or after reading the one they are on at the time.
Also-boughts promote sales, especially for authors with zero advertising budget. AMS has totally distorted the Kindle store on the basis of who can throw the most money at ads. The result is the top ranks are full of advertised books, and not books which made it there on their merit. I guess you dont care the Kindle store ranking system is now a total joke, when it used to be the best way to find your next book.
At the moment, AMS is a discrimination tool. Those with advertising funds get an advantage, those without do not. It turns the book market into a who can spend the most for visibility circus, and buggers up the ability for people to find the book they want to read next. And it makes it much harder for a new author to get a start.