Yes, I shit you not. Here, don't believe me? Read it for yourself: [link]

I blame 50 shades of shit, personally...not that this isn't going to be HI-FUCKING-LARIOUS because upon closer inspection when digging in the Amazon page detailing it, you find little gems like this:

Content Guidelines for Kindle Worlds:

• Pornography: We don't accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts.

• Offensive Content: We don't accept offensive content, including but not limited to racial slurs, excessively graphic or violent material, or excessive use of foul language.

• Illegal and Infringing Content: We take violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously. It is the authors' responsibility to ensure that their content doesn't violate laws or copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights.

• Poor Customer Experience: We don't accept books that provide a poor customer experience. Examples include poorly formatted books and books with misleading titles, cover art, or product descriptions. We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience.

• Excessive Use of Brands: We don't accept the excessive use of brand names or the inclusion of brand names for paid advertising or promotion.

• Crossover: No crossovers from other Worlds are permitted, meaning your work may not include elements of any copyright-protected book, movie, or other property outside of the elements of this World.

So...pretty much...ALL NORMAL FANFIC STUFF IS OUT THEN. You can't swear, put in porn OR violence, they can't use anything branded, you can't mention anything or anyone that might cusp a trademark, no mentioning a celebrity or any news stories, god help you if you attempt anything like an AU or a crossover AND Amazon has to give you the nod before you can even ATTEMPT publishing. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

BUT WAIT, because it gets BETTER! This is a quote from one of the authors asked to take part in the pilot (from here [link] ):
"There's probably not an author/fangirl alive who hasn't fantasized about being able to write about her favorite show. The fact that you can earn royalties doing so makes it even better." —Trish Milburn, writing in The Vampire Diaries"

...BLESS. Yes, that 35% of overall price you get in royalties if you bash out more than 10k of Amazon friendly content that someone is actually willing to PAY FOR and then read on their kindle makes it ALL SO WORTHWHILE. Oh wait, what's this you say Amazon? "Most will be priced from $0.99 through $3.99."? Which then earns the poor saps willing to hand over full publication rights of their 10k worth of fanfic to you a VAST and all entirely worthwhile $0.34 to $1.39 per sold work! WELL! CALL ME SOLD AND SLAP A RED STICKER ON ME, PEOPLE! For that kind've money who WOULDN'T want to slave over a carefully crafted bit of work for a day or so?! Well, I SAY a day, if we assume that the $3.99 price tag will be for the heftier fics, say, 50k and up, and then take into account that the last time I wrote a 50K+ fic it took me 6 weeks of intermittent work around other things and my readership expressed some surprise at how quickly I'd managed that...yessss.

Ohhh hang on, that's only for 10K stories tho isn't it, ok, so let's see about less than that, shall we...hmm, so there's a PILOT scheme for shorter works where the minimum is 5k, well that's interesting! Maybe shorter works are where the money's at? What, pray tell, in this monetary based incentive scheme for providing kindle with next to free content with no copyright problems are you going to get paid for a work of between 5-10k? Ahh...20% per sale, so that means $0.20 to $0.80....OH EXPLOIT ME AMAZON...EXPLOIT ME HARDER...*browraise*

I'm now starting to think that this week has just been a BET between Amazon and Yahoo to see who can do the most DUMB FUCK things and leave the general populus UTTERLY lost for words! *boggled* Have to say tho, I think Yahoo wins this round, Amazon, cos while yours IS RIDICULOUSLY dumb (hello...Ao3 remains FREE and people there can write what they want?!), Yahoo destroying Flickr and paying frankly obscene money to turn Tumblr into the new Geocities takes the cake. Headpats to you both for trying tho, you certainly managed to put the wind up all those animated gif loving little tweenies out there.