In the last 30 days alone, BookVillage has permanently banned around 70 users who were relying on low-quality external services. In most cases, this means virtual assistants using already flagged Amazon accounts. It was users who would have continued paying their subscriptions and generating revenue for the service. But those users were actively lowering the quality of reviews. It's the first case I know in the "author-helps-authors" review sector where a company actively prioritizes service quality over short-term profits. What do you think: should every paid customer be allowed to take a risk, or should a service limit the ability to use its services for users who endanger others?

As usual, it was an amazing meeting. Instead of one hour, we had to stop after two hours. I decided to cut the most interesting parts of the discussion into separate clips. So, enjoy.

Just wanted to warn you about scams going on in the publishing community. For instance, yesterday I received a dm from someone wanting to kindly gift me with his book bounty points because he was leaving KDP - of course, this smells scam all around, so I didn't even bother replying. However, I just wanted to make you aware of things like this. As always, there will be someone out there trying to get advantage, so use good judgement. And if you are aware of other kinds of scams going, please share, so we are all well aware.

Finally, ver. 2.1 of Royalty Guild Market Analyst is approved by Google, and now you can conduct niche research in one click. The review collection functionality of the extension remains intact. If you are on a book page, you can collect the reviews and paste them into an LLM with the readily available prompt. If you are on an Amazon search page, you will collect the books' titles, BSR, review count, and price to paste into an LLM with the research prompt. Also, if you need to, you can save reviews and/or niche data as .csv files. So, two major research processes are now fully automated. Please, share your experience with the extension. Would you like to tweak something? To add some functionality?

The last two weeks were unusually slow and silent in the Guild. I am not sure, but it feels like there was less activity in most of the communities I am involved in. Is it just my perception, or have you experienced the same? Anyway, the Guided Publishing System is now built and fully operational. I am in the process of creating the new book with the system, and it works exactly as it was supposed to - "blank page syndrome" gone. Every time I come back to the book, I know exactly what the next step is. The same thing applies to the Review Catalyst tracker - it removed a lot of hustle and ambiguity from the process. I used the Paperback 3D Mockup for the A+ content for a few of my books, and it totally changed the experience of creating marketing materials. I am not sure if it's interesting to anybody except @Yannick Di Mondo, @Sven Georgiev and me. Anyway, it's OK for me to continue developing the tools, even if only three of us will use them. Slowly, without a rush, providing functionality that publishers are interested in. So, what is on your mind? What are you doing now? What are you aiming for? P. S. @Ana-Rita Piirainen It's so nice to see you back!