# I'm in tears. Amazon has cut my numbers for May.



## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

I guess I should have expected it to hit me, but I wasn't prepared.  I was going through my pages read totals today and noticed that many of my books were zeroed out in pages read. Some only show 2 to 4 pages being read. I keep a strict record of my pages read and sales and I've calculated that my pages read for the month went from a total of 94,000 to 38,000.  That's a huge drop. My numbers are small potatoes but they're great numbers for me. I had two new releases that month and I didn't have huge sudden spikes in pages read for either release. It gradually went up. Here's the kicker. I don't advertise other than to my fans. I posted that the books were available on my Facebook page, my blog, and website, that's all. And even then maybe 60 people see my posts at the most. So how can Amazon say that scammers drove up my numbers? Why would they even notice me for that matter?  It's utter bull and I feel so helpless. I honestly don't know who to contact to clarify what happened or even if it would be worth it. Amazon has lost all my respect. I haven't had an issue with them until now and this is unforgivable. Why should we, the honest writers, suffer because of the scammers? How can they even prove that those numbers were from scammers to begin with? Ugh, I'm just so frustrated and angry. I can't decide whether to cry or scream.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

I'm so sorry. The news is now spreading around FB groups. Lot's of people hit.


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## Avery342 (Aug 23, 2016)

I'm so very sorry this has hit you too. You aren't alone. But it does seem to really focus on people who have new releases. You would think Amazon would realize that would mean higher page reads, but their scambots must not be that smart.


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

Yup, got hit for May too. At first they took 1/2 of my page reads from Book 2 (my new release), then a few minutes ago they took 1/2 from my Book 1. Got hit for April, notified by Amazon on the 10th of May, pulled out of KU on the 13th. I expect another threatening email in the next two days. And for anyone that is curious, there's no way exactly 1/2 of my page reads were illicit. Amazon is just straight up hitting people with a flat 50% penalty, even for a few dozen or few hundred page reads.

Amazon is really jacking up their response to this. First off, you have 2 strikes against you before you are even aware of the problem. Secondly, there's nothing you can do about it except leave KU, and even that doesn't help because you can't control who borrowed your books over the past 3 months. You could get "illicit" page reads 6 months from now. Thirdly, there is no appeal process or anything.

Authors are being attacked, plain and simple. Amazon's response is to toss them into the street without a shred of sympathy or assistance.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

I haven't gotten any threatening emails from Amazon but I'm not going to tempt the beast. I have unchecked those boxes to re-enroll my books in KU. By August all of my books will be out. I just can't remain exclusively with a company who chooses to treat writers this way. It's going to hurt since I made more with KU than actual sales but I can't stand here and allow them to continue to throw punches that I don't deserve.


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

I got hit with 65% of my pages in March + the threatening letter on Apr 10th. I immediately unchecked everything in KU; I thought it wasn't worth the risk, so I know how you feel. And I do even less advertising than you do. I still have two books in -- coming out on the 20th, and have 176 pages read thus far this month.

Got a couple of my Amazon-exclusive novels wide now, and a couple more in the process. It's a pain, but what can you do? Amazon isn't a trustworthy partner.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

The scam bots would only be targeting innocent authors to camouflage their "page reads" of stuffed books, say, reading 100 pages of an innocent author's title, then 1000 pages of a stuffer's "bonus" content, and so on. 

So, Amazon is addressing stuffers with a bonus content limitation. What they have to do next is eliminate boxed-sets, collections, and compilations from KU. (Those can be retail-priced to match their KU value.) This would disincentivize the scam bots, but not eliminate them as they can work on any scale.

So I get it, Amazon is dealing with the scam bots and book stuffers, which I support. But their treatment of innocent authors is inexcusable. Amends must be made to all innocent authors threatened with account suspension and their good standing must be restored.


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## Pandorra (Aug 22, 2017)

Not sure why they would care who they do it to, it doesn't hurt them at all...In fact, it increases the amount they make off of KU  .. as if they didn't already rob us blind for those payouts.


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## Sam Rivers (May 22, 2011)

> I guess I should have expected it to hit me, but I wasn't prepared.  I was going through my pages read totals today and noticed that many of my books were zeroed out in pages read. Some only show 2 to 4 pages being read. I keep a strict record of my pages read and sales and I've calculated that my pages read for the month went from a total of 94,000 to 38,000.  That's a huge drop. My numbers are small potatoes but they're great numbers for me. I had two new releases that month and I didn't have huge sudden spikes in pages read for either release. It gradually went up.


I stopped publishing since new books seems to attract trouble. I lost a lot of page reads after publishing a book in April. I think eventually everyone will get hit by page read reductions. It is just part of the new reality.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

Pandorra said:


> Not sure why they would care who they do it to, it doesn't hurt them at all...In fact, it increases the amount they make off of KU .. as if they didn't already rob us blind for those payouts.


Sadly they don't care who they hurt, but what makes me angry the most is that it wouldn't hurt them at all if they left our pages read numbers alone. Take from the scammers and leave the rest of our numbers as they are. I agree, they do rob us blind and for the longest time I turned a blind eye to it. I should be thankful that they've opened my eyes to this madness because now I can take action to leave KU in the past where it belongs.


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## Cactus Lady (Jun 4, 2014)

Raven K. Asher said:


> I haven't gotten any threatening emails from Amazon but I'm not going to tempt the beast. I have unchecked those boxes to re-enroll my books in KU. By August all of my books will be out. I just can't remain exclusively with a company who chooses to treat writers this way. It's going to hurt since I made more with KU than actual sales but I can't stand here and allow them to continue to throw punches that I don't deserve.


I've only experimented with Select/KU briefly a couple of times, but my heart aches and I'm so angry and upset on behalf of the innocent authors being hit by this. I don't trust Amazon either, and while I've been almost completely wide the whole time I've been publishing, I'm working on more ways to Amazon-proof my career. Anyway, that's where I'm coming from, and I've been following this closely, and my advice to you would be, don't wait. email KDP right now and tell them to take your books out of KU. I've seen a lot of authors successfully get them to do this. You don't have to tackle going wide all at once, but do what you can to reduce your vulnerability asap.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Pandorra said:


> Not sure why they would care who they do it to, it doesn't hurt them at all...In fact, it increases the amount they make off of KU .. as if they didn't already rob us blind for those payouts.


I don't think they're willfully screwing anyone. They've got some programmers standing by their algos. Until we make enough noise, their managers will continue to trust them.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

I'm so sorry for people caught up in this.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

I still had some romance novels in KU but I've just unchecked the boxes even though I haven't been hit by this yet. It's not worth risking my paperback and ebook sales revenue for the $200/month I was earning in KU revenue. It would be one thing if they just kicked people out of the program when this happened but the 1-2 punch of account suspension when you don't even know you're caught up in it until a week into the second month is just too big a risk for me to take.


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

Dpock said:


> I don't think they're willfully screwing anyone. They've got some programmers standing by their algos. Until we make enough noise, their managers will continue to trust them.


They need to step back from their algos and look at the big picture. Does it makes sense for me to risk my account over a few hundred or thousand page reads, when I'm getting 10x that in sales and legit page reads?

Now, I don't know who is doing this kind of stuff. People who try to get millions of page reads before folding then somehow starting up a new account and starting the process over? I'm not a criminal, so I don't know their criminal ways, but I doubt those people set up author websites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, blogs, Amazon accounts, newsletters and then risk all of that over $50 worth of page reads when they are making far more than that each month. It's not logical. Amazon needs to pay attention to who they are accusing. Legit authors should be readily apparent vs the page stuffers/scammers/click farm people. 10 minutes of research should show certain people are gaming the system, and others aren't.

But they state it's not up for discussion, they don't want to hear from you, they don't want any contact. They simply want whatever it is you are doing to stop, even though you aren't doing anything.


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## GoneToWriterSanctum (Sep 13, 2014)

I don't consent


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

T. M. Bilderback said:


> Raven, come on out into the wide water...
> 
> Seriously, you can email KDP and ask to have your books released now, not August. Explain to them why you're leaving, and they'll likely do it.
> 
> One more reason to be giving thought to leaving Amazon alone. With the exception of print books through Ingram, I'm seriously giving thought to bailing on Amazon completely.


They are really pushing me to pull everything sooner than August. My numbers were just cut again. As of right now my new releases look as if they were never read at all. Thank goodness they can't take away my actual sales for those books. Then again, I better not give them any ideas. I was hoping to slowly pull out because I have more than 30 books that I'll need to upload to other sites and I have no idea where to start to go wide. I've been in KU so long I am out of date with where to sell. I've got a lot of work and research to do ahead of me. It's such a shame because I enjoyed being in KU and my readers seemed to like it too. Amazon isn't just hurting us they are hurting our readers.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

4,000 more pages read lost. Will it ever end? At this point they might as well take them all. I am so disgusted. I'm also beginning to worry about my account being banned. I really hope that doesn't happen.


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## GoneToWriterSanctum (Sep 13, 2014)

I don't consent


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

Raven K. Asher said:


> I guess I should have expected it to hit me, but I wasn't prepared.  I was going through my pages read totals today and noticed that many of my books were zeroed out in pages read. Some only show 2 to 4 pages being read. I keep a strict record of my pages read and sales and I've calculated that my pages read for the month went from a total of 94,000 to 38,000.  That's a huge drop. My numbers are small potatoes but they're great numbers for me. I had two new releases that month and I didn't have huge sudden spikes in pages read for either release. It gradually went up. Here's the kicker. I don't advertise other than to my fans. I posted that the books were available on my Facebook page, my blog, and website, that's all. And even then maybe 60 people see my posts at the most. So how can Amazon say that scammers drove up my numbers? Why would they even notice me for that matter?  It's utter bull and I feel so helpless. I honestly don't know who to contact to clarify what happened or even if it would be worth it. Amazon has lost all my respect. I haven't had an issue with them until now and this is unforgivable. Why should we, the honest writers, suffer because of the scammers? How can they even prove that those numbers were from scammers to begin with? Ugh, I'm just so frustrated and angry. I can't decide whether to cry or scream.


That is horrible. I'm so sorry they did that to you. It's not right and, unfortunately, I have no words of wisdom for you. I wish I did.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

T. M. Bilderback said:


> Begin your research with Draft2Digital. They distribute to Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, and several others. They're great, and they generate terrific epubs and mobis.
> 
> I recommend going direct with all booksellers that you can - B & N, Kobo, and Apple(if you have a Mac, or access to a Mac).
> 
> ...


Thank you,

I will look into those. I used Barnes&Noble and Smashwords before I went exclusive with Amazon. Like I said previously I have a lot to learn, and quickly. Right now I'm trying to figure out what to write to Amazon to have them release my books from KU early. As of right now I can't seem to type anything that doesn't use a few choice words. I'm trying to be as polite as possible but they make it nearly impossible to be.


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## Cactus Lady (Jun 4, 2014)

Yeah, start with D2D. Also, Kobo is really easy to go direct to, and they have a promotions tab you can ask to have activated on your dashboard. Those are the easiest things to start with. And with so many books, you don't have to do them all at once. Just get yourself out of KU asap, then worry about the rest of it.


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

Raven K. Asher said:


> Thank you,
> 
> I will look into those. I used Barnes&Noble and Smashwords before I went exclusive with Amazon. Like I said previously I have a lot to learn, and quickly. Right now I'm trying to figure out what to write to Amazon to have them release my books from KU early. As of right now I can't seem to type anything that doesn't use a few choice words. I'm trying to be as polite as possible but they make it nearly impossible to be.


I'm not so sure I could restrain myself.


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## Ryan W. Mueller (Jul 14, 2017)

I was hoping Amazon wouldn't continue doing this stuff.

I have now unchecked the box for all my books, and I cancelled my KU subscription as a reader.

I'm debating whether I should have them pull everything all at once. As it is, everything will be out in early August.

As a writer, KU did well for me at first, but things have really died in recent months. As a reader, it's not really a great value for me because I don't read enough KU books to justify the subscription.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

Sent an email to Amazon to remove my titles from KU. I tried my best to be as polite as possible. I'm crossing my fingers that this happens without any issues popping up. I don't think my poor heart could take anymore stress today. My anxiety has been at an all time high since I checked my Amazon reports.

I am beyond grateful for everyone's support. I desperately needed it today.


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## 77820 (Jun 19, 2014)

Raven K. Asher said:


> Thank you,
> 
> I will look into those. I used Barnes&Noble and Smashwords before I went exclusive with Amazon. Like I said previously I have a lot to learn, and quickly. Right now I'm trying to figure out what to write to Amazon to have them release my books from KU early. As of right now I can't seem to type anything that doesn't use a few choice words. I'm trying to be as polite as possible but they make it nearly impossible to be.


In April, after turning off auto-renewal for all my books, I e-mailed customer service and asked a simple question: "How do I remove my books from KDP Select?" I planned on starting simple, then adding details if necessary.

A human (I assume she was a human) answered quickly with a simple set of instructions. I was out within 48-hours.

I wish you the best of luck.


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## BellaJames (Sep 8, 2016)

This is crazy. There are book stuffers right in the top 100 main chart right now. Scammers get away for months. I reported a guy who was bragging on youtube and his book remained on sale. 

Why is Amazon targeting the wrong authors.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Raven K. Asher said:


> They are really pushing me to pull everything sooner than August. My numbers were just cut again. As of right now my new releases look as if they were never read at all. Thank goodness they can't take away my actual sales for those books. Then again, I better not give them any ideas. I was hoping to slowly pull out because I have more than 30 books that I'll need to upload to other sites and I have no idea where to start to go wide. I've been in KU so long I am out of date with where to sell. I've got a lot of work and research to do ahead of me. It's such a shame because I enjoyed being in KU and my readers seemed to like it too. Amazon isn't just hurting us they are hurting our readers.


I'm going to go against the advice others gave up thread. If you do use a distributor I do second the advice on D2D. But you really need to be direct with Kobo at least so you can get access to their promo tab. And I've seen increased sales by being direct with Nook as well. And have heard the same happens with Apple. Yes, it's more effort but if your goal is to maximize sales wide, it's worth doing.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

Is this just happening in one specific genre, or several?

I agree you should go to Kobo direct. You can run your books through D2D's free formatter to make them look pretty and then upload the epub at Kobo. Works great. Kobo's platform is really easy to use. Sign up for their subscription program too. It's in beta, and I don't make much, but why not?
Marti


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## SalomeGolding (Apr 25, 2018)

Raven K. Asher said:


> Sent an email to Amazon to remove my titles from KU. I tried my best to be as polite as possible. I'm crossing my fingers that this happens without any issues popping up. I don't think my poor heart could take anymore stress today. My anxiety has been at an all time high since I checked my Amazon reports.


I am not highly experienced at this, but why are you taking this lying down? This is theft. You put a product to sell in a store, people bought it, and now the store is fiddling with your numbers and telling you customers didn't buy it, and so they will pay you less money. I would be stark, raving mad. I would email everybody at amazon and I wouldn't choose my words.


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## SalomeGolding (Apr 25, 2018)

BellaJames said:


> This is crazy. There are book stuffers right in the top 100 main chart right now. Scammers get away for months. I reported a guy who was bragging on youtube and his book remained on sale.


Have these book stuffers in the top 100 been reported? Please DM me so that I can report them.


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## Desert Rose (Jun 2, 2015)

SalomeGolding said:


> I am not highly experienced at this, but why are you taking this lying down? This is theft. You put a product to sell in a store, people bought it, and now the store is fiddling with your numbers and telling you customers didn't buy it, and so they will pay you less money. I would be stark, raving mad. I would email everybody at amazon and I wouldn't choose my words.


Unfortunately, when it comes to deciding what constitutes a page read, Amazon holds all the cards. They won't reveal any information about the so-called illicit activity, so all a person can do is remove their books from KU.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

Dragovian said:


> Unfortunately, when it comes to deciding what constitutes a page read, Amazon holds all the cards. They won't reveal any information about the so-called illicit activity, so all a person can do is remove their books from KU.


This. It's basically my word against theirs. I would have had proof but I waited a day too long to print out my reports. Then again, they probably would have come up with some excuse to justify their actions even if I had proof. Luckily my actually sales haven't been affected.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

Martitalbott said:


> Is this just happening in one specific genre, or several?
> 
> I agree you should go to Kobo direct. You can run your books through D2D's free formatter to make them look pretty and then upload the epub at Kobo. Works great. Kobo's platform is really easy to use. Sign up for their subscription program too. It's in beta, and I don't make much, but why not?
> Marti


I write in many different genres and it's hitting me clear across the board. Every single number is down even to the point that they completely wiped out pages read for some of the books. I could understand if it was from one book but when it's across nearly all 30-some of my books it makes me suspicious. Yet again, there isn't anything I can do but leave KU.


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

Okay, I got this month's email about taking away page reads. They've changed their language. Maybe they are updating their policy, or maybe this is the boilerplate email for after you pull out of KU, or maybe this is just the standard second email. First, the first email, received last month on 5/9. One thing to note is that some of the people being hit have used no outside marketing or promotions, or have used only AMS, so don't take the, "You are doing illegal marketing" too seriously.

Hello, 
We are reaching out to you because we detected reading or borrow activity for your books originating from accounts attempting to manipulate Kindle services. You will receive royalties associated with legitimate or paid sales; however, we will not pay for reading activity related to illegitimate activity. These accounts might be related to a third-party marketing service.
We fully support the efforts of our publishers to promote their books. However, please be aware you are also responsible for ensuring that the strategies used to promote your books comply with our Terms and Conditions. We encourage you to thoroughly review any marketing services employed for promotional purposes.
We take activities that jeopardize the experience of our readers and other authors seriously. Please know any additional violation of our Terms and Conditions – including a violation caused by any marketing services you, or others on your behalf, may have used – could result in account-level actions, up to and including termination of your KDP account. 
Please email us at [email protected] if you have any questions. 
Regards,
Amazon KDP

Now for this month's email, received on 6/8. Notice the threat of account termination is not there, and the language changed from "stop doing illegal things or else" to "no action is required on your part". I'm out of KU now, so there's really nothing else I could do about it either way. I don't intend on going back into KU, as it's all still too mysterious for me as to what it all means, and they made it very clear from the suspensions/bans of authors over the past few months and from the language in email above that you are risking your Amazon account by utilizing Kindle Unlimited if you are targeted by "shady" readers or accounts. 

Hello, 
We are reaching out to you because we detected accounts attempting to manipulate Kindle services by simulating reading or borrowing activity on your titles. You do not need to take any action, however, we will block the activities of these malicious accounts and their effects on payments. This means that you will still receive royalties associated with legitimate reading activities, but you will not receive royalties associated with activities related to these accounts.
Please note that this notice does not represent a change to your account status but is sent to make you aware of how our security countermeasures will affect your previously reporting page count and your royalty payments. 
We understand you might have questions regarding the nature of how we detect these activities, however, please be aware that we cannot provide details that might compromise the integrity of our security systems.  
If you have any other questions, please feel free to email us at [email protected] 
Regards,
Amazon KDP


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## Justawriter (Jul 24, 2012)

Raven K. Asher said:


> I guess I should have expected it to hit me, but I wasn't prepared.  I was going through my pages read totals today and noticed that many of my books were zeroed out in pages read. Some only show 2 to 4 pages being read. I keep a strict record of my pages read and sales and I've calculated that my pages read for the month went from a total of 94,000 to 38,000.  That's a huge drop. My numbers are small potatoes but they're great numbers for me. I had two new releases that month and I didn't have huge sudden spikes in pages read for either release. It gradually went up. Here's the kicker. I don't advertise other than to my fans. I posted that the books were available on my Facebook page, my blog, and website, that's all. And even then maybe 60 people see my posts at the most. So how can Amazon say that scammers drove up my numbers? Why would they even notice me for that matter?  It's utter bull and I feel so helpless. I honestly don't know who to contact to clarify what happened or even if it would be worth it. Amazon has lost all my respect. I haven't had an issue with them until now and this is unforgivable. Why should we, the honest writers, suffer because of the scammers? How can they even prove that those numbers were from scammers to begin with? Ugh, I'm just so frustrated and angry. I can't decide whether to cry or scream.


Before you pull out, have you tried questioning them? And showing your data and asking WTF? Asking them why they cut your page reads? Maybe it's an error? And maybe it will be fixed? I'd give them a chance to fix first.


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

PamelaKelley said:


> Before you pull out, have you tried questioning them? And showing your data and asking WTF? Asking them why they cut your page reads? Maybe it's an error? And maybe it will be fixed? I'd give them a chance to fix first.


Not sure about the OP, but I've sent them graphs, charts, sales ratios, theories, explanations, every promotion I've used, and tons of info. I attempted to contact them about what was going on several times, but never got a response. After several attempts, they did remove my books from KU, finally. Then I did one last ditch mega massive email that was probably several thousand words, including the mentioned screenshots, raw data, etc. That's when they said they aren't interested and their decision is final, and they won't be providing any further information on the subject.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Saboth said:


> Not sure about the OP, but I've sent them graphs, charts, sales ratios, theories, explanations, every promotion I've used, and tons of info. I attempted to contact them about what was going on several times, but never got a response. After several attempts, they did remove my books from KU, finally. Then I did one last ditch mega massive email that was probably several thousand words, including the mentioned screenshots, raw data, etc. That's when they said they aren't interested and their decision is final, and they won't be providing any further information on the subject.


That's unacceptable. I haven't been affected yet but I would be glad to sign and spread a petition throughout the indie community addressing this issue. Why KB hasn't taken this initiative is beyond me.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

All of this makes me wonder if Kindle Unlimited has a Twitter-type problem: Maybe a large portion of all page read activity, even half or more, comes from bot accounts.

I wouldn't have thought so early on, when reports of people getting nasty Zon messages were relatively rare. But lately, it's starting to seem like getting large reductions in page-reads after the fact has become the _norm_ for books enrolled in KU. I don't for a second think that the majority of authors this is happening to are using bots, even unintentionally.

At the same time, I also have my doubts that Amazon's bot-activity detection is just wildly off base. It's not that I particularly trust Amazon's good intentions, of course. The company just doesn't have much to gain from bilking its authors for pennies (or what to Amazon amounts to pennies). And even if Amazon did want to engage in such a foolish fraud, there are _far better_ ways to achieve it.. like simply not recording half of an author's page reads to begin with, rather than taking them away retroactively in a grand spectacle that is sure to create drama.

_Maybe I'm wrong_, sure. But I think the signs are starting to point this direction pretty clearly. Most everyone seems to agree that Amazon has been suffering from a bot problem, to some extent, for quite some time - and has been incredibly lax about dealing with it. If I had a little bot farm, and it was clear that Amazon either couldn't or wouldn't do anything to crack down on my activity, then it would make sense to begin multiplying like an unchecked virus.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

I heard back from Amazon. I got the same second message that Saboth did.

At any rate I'm taking this as a push to take the plunge back into the wide world. I am still with Amazon and I like their store, I even have a prime membership, but there are some changes that need to be done to make it a better experience all around. I wouldn't have been so upset if I would have gotten a heads up or some kind of warning email from Amazon that my pages read were being manipulated. I would have gladly helped in any way possible but it's difficult to remain calm when you're blindsided.

Now that my frustration and anger has faded I'm looking at the brighter side of this whole situation, and on a better note my fans seem to be excited that I'll be venturing into other areas to sell my stories.

KU worked well for me for a long time, I am grateful for the exposure that I was able to gather while using it, and I'm sure it will work for others but I've decided that it's no longer for me. I had been on the edge of making a decision to go wide for a few months. This just made it a little easier.  Maybe once they get these scammers under control I'll return but I am growing excited to see what the future has in store with going wide. 

Again, I want to thank everyone for your support and advice for going wide. I appreciate everyone's replies.


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## notenoughcoffee (May 5, 2018)

I wonder if Amazon's bots can't analyze page reads until after a book has been returned. Maybe they do some big analyzing at the beginning of each month.


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

Saboth said:


> Hello,
> We are reaching out to you because we detected accounts attempting to manipulate Kindle services by simulating reading or borrowing activity on your titles. You do not need to take any action, however, we will block the activities of these malicious accounts and their effects on payments. This means that you will still receive royalties associated with legitimate reading activities, but you will not receive royalties associated with activities related to these accounts.
> Please note that this notice does not represent a change to your account status but is sent to make you aware of how our security countermeasures will affect your previously reporting page count and your royalty payments.
> We understand you might have questions regarding the nature of how we detect these activities, however, please be aware that we cannot provide details that might compromise the integrity of our security systems.
> ...


I'm guessing they've noticed how many of us are taking our books out of KU (in my case - slowly and as they drop out, but some of us have been in from the beginning.) So, it sounds like they are treading a little more carefully with their language to avoid further backlash??

But, here's the thing - they can't just expect authors to accept that they are going to steal/take back page reads from authors without a proper explanation. You've been botted is not a good enough explanation in my book. Whatever next? It's a Monday so we're scrapping page read payouts today.

Amazon have some sort of duty of care in respect of preventing this from happening to the extent it is - it's their system that's faulty, not ours, and they should be carrying the cost of that 'problem.' We didn't invite scammers, stuffers and botters into their store, that's like Walmart saying that they aren't going to pay a supplier because someone shoplifted the product.

I wonder how many of these fake reads are down to stuffers getting their 'readers' to flip pages and then that reader actually reads a real book and that book gets tagged.

Amazon needs to get its house in order and stop hurting honest authors and rewarding shady ones in the process.


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## BellaJames (Sep 8, 2016)

SalomeGolding said:


> Have these book stuffers in the top 100 been reported? Please DM me so that I can report them.


I've sent you a PM


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Saboth said:


> Notice the threat of account termination is not there,


I have to think that's retroactive as well and you no longer have that threat hanging over your head.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

It's long been suspected that the click farms turned to "reading" books from innocent authors. Now that Amazon has finally caught on -- or been shamed enough into doing something about it -- they're going through and checking known bot accounts and removing all pages read. Whether those pages were read from the accounts of innocent authors matters not one whit, they're going to be removed. Unfortunately, they still don't seem to be able to tell the guilty from the innocent, so those who have done nothing wrong will suffer. I think it's a big pile of steaming crap myself, because if you can't write programs smart enough to tell the difference, then you don't need software, you need human beings who can actually be trained to know what the frack is going on. Heck, there's probably a lot of authors like me, who don't make much money, who might like a job trawling through these books to find the evil doers. It would be a great work from home job, set your own hours, get paid.


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## chrisanthemum7 (May 8, 2018)

This is a very scary thread. I have a promotion starting the 18th, I have half a mind to send them a letter like, "just to let you guys know, I'm running a promotion, my book is real, don't bot me!" for posterity


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

ParkerAvrile said:


> I used to do that before every BookBub although I finally got tired and haven't been doing it in 2018 but it does no harm to be high touch & let them know you're going to get a lot of clicks/sales/reads in a short period of time & it's legit.


There is zero point to doing this.

Julie's post about losing (and regaining) her account proved beyond all doubt that all our correspondence with KDP is only read by bots. All their responses are computer-generated. They just manufacture few hours delay so it looks like the email was answered by a real person.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Raven K. Asher said:


> I keep a strict record of my pages read and sales


Would you share the last totals before the cuts happened? Sales and reads.
Likewise anyone else who has recorded figures, and was hit.


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## NS (Jul 8, 2011)

My 90000+ pages were zeroed for May (I lost a lot of borrows because they pulled my books out in May). I thought it was because they terminated my account. Wrong.

Does anyone know any other contact for Jeff Besoz besides [email protected]?

I used this address but it goes to his team for obvious reasons. I'm thinking about taking legal actions.


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

TimothyEllis said:


> Would you share the last totals before the cuts happened?
> Likewise anyone else who has recorded figures, and was hit.


I have 3 books. 2 were hit for page reads. Now, this is last month's totals. I pulled out of KU by the 13th, so my page reads died fast. By the end of the month, I had many 0 page read days.
35,609 Book 1 became - 16,827
46,049 Book 2 became - 23,275
Book 3 was not hit, but only had 503 page reads.

I do not believe only illicit page reads were removed, because I traditionally have a 35% to 65% sales to borrows ratio. So for every 1 sale, I usually have 2 borrows. If 1/2 of my page reads were illicit, that means 1/2 of my borrows were illicit, and my sales would actually be equal to or greater than my borrows, which would be very strange for that genre, where most authors say 70% of their income is through borrows.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Saboth said:


> I have 3 books. 2 were hit for page reads. Now, this is last month's totals. I pulled out of KU by the 13th, so my page reads died fast. By the end of the month, I had many 0 page read days.
> 35,609 Book 1 became - 16,827
> 46,049 Book 2 became - 23,275
> Book 3 was not hit, but only had 503 page reads.


What were your sales?


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

TimothyEllis said:


> What were your sales?


297 (I'd just released book 2 on 4/2. So I probably would have had about 200,000 page reads for the month (one book 355 KENP, one 500 KENP). Sales probably would have been higher too, because rank and visibility really dropped after pulling out of KU.


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## 39416 (Mar 18, 2011)

Natasha A. Salnikova said:


> I'm thinking about taking legal actions.


Your legal option is spelled out in the KDP contract:

10 General Legal Provisions.

10.1 Disputes. Any dispute or claim relating in any way to this Agreement or KDP will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court, except that you may assert claims in small claims court if your claims qualify. The United States Federal Arbitration Act and federal arbitration law apply to this Agreement. There is no judge or jury in arbitration, and court review of an arbitration award is limited. However, an arbitrator can award on an individual basis the same damages and relief as a court (including injunctive and declaratory relief or statutory damages), and must follow the terms of this Agreement as a court would. To begin an arbitration proceeding, you must send a letter requesting arbitration and describing your claim to our registered agent Corporation Service Company, 300 Deschutes Way SW, Suite 304, Tumwater, WA 98051, USA. The arbitration will be conducted by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its rules, including the AAA's Supplementary Procedures for Consumer-Related Disputes. The AAA's rules are available at www.adr.org or by calling 1-800-778-7879 (in the United States). Payment of all filing, administration and arbitrator fees will be governed by the AAA's rules. We will reimburse those fees for claims totaling less than $10,000 unless the arbitrator determines the claims are frivolous. Likewise, Amazon will not to seek attorneys' fees and costs in arbitration unless the arbitrator determines the claims are frivolous. You may choose to have the arbitration conducted by telephone, based on written submissions, or in person in the United States county where you live or at another mutually agreed location. You and we each agree that any dispute resolution proceedings will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class, consolidated or representative action. If for any reason a claim proceeds in court rather than in arbitration you and we each waive any right to a jury trial. You or we may bring suit in court on an individual basis only, and not in a class, consolidated or representative action, to apply for injunctive remedies. You may bring any such suit for injunctive remedies only in the courts of the State of Washington, USA.

10.2 Applicable Law. The United States Federal Arbitration Act, applicable United States federal law, and the laws of the state of Washington, USA, without regard to principles of conflict of laws, will govern this Agreement and any dispute of any sort that might arise between you and Amazon relating to this Agreement or the Program.


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## NS (Jul 8, 2011)

loraininflorida said:


> Your legal option is spelled out in the KDP contract:
> 
> 10 General Legal Provisions.
> 
> ...


Ok


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## Acrocanthosaurus (Oct 6, 2016)

Dpock said:


> The scam bots would only be targeting innocent authors to camouflage their "page reads" of stuffed books, say, reading 100 pages of an innocent author's title, then 1000 pages of a stuffer's "bonus" content, and so on.
> 
> So, Amazon is addressing stuffers with a bonus content limitation. What they have to do next is eliminate boxed-sets, collections, and compilations from KU. (Those can be retail-priced to match their KU value.) This would disincentivize the scam bots, but not eliminate them as they can work on any scale.
> 
> So I get it, Amazon is dealing with the scam bots and book stuffers, which I support. But their treatment of innocent authors is inexcusable. Amends must be made to all innocent authors threatened with account suspension and their good standing must be restored.


This is what they need to do:

*Ban box sets and compilations from KU.* Box sets are a discount for purchasing readers. They make no sense in the context of an unlimited reading/borrowing program where the notion of a "discount" does not apply.

Putting a boxed set in Kindle Unlimited accomplishes two things and two things only:

1. It puts more of the publisher's content directly in front of the reader without additional clicks. Anyone with a basic grasp of marketing would tell you that if you put a book in KU and want the maximum possible number of readers to read the sequel, you'd put them in one volume. If you have them separate, a user has to navigate out of your first book, navigate to your second book, download it, and then open it. Every one of those steps will shed potential readers. If you have the next volume of your series in with the first, you no longer have to worry about the reader having to navigate to the store page, click download, etc. It's also less likely that they'll download your book but not open it or return it unread.

Basically, being able to put a bundle or compilation in KU gives the books an advantage over other books. If Publisher A puts Bookone, Booktwo: The Bookening, and Book Three: The Final Chapter? in _one volume_, those three books then have an advantage over Publisher B, who published each entry in their saga as a separate volume in the store enrolled in KU. Publisher A's readers are more likely to have their content right there the next time the reader opens their kindle or app, they don't have to worry about losing people who forget/decide not to download, and it's less likely that their books will go unopened.

Box sets inherently have an unfair advantage in KU, scamming aside.

This confers no advantage to readers. It's purely a competition tactic to exclude other books as much as possible an keep the end user in the same file for as long as possible.

Also, all box sets of previously published content where the box set/compilation is in Kindle Unlimited and the individual volumes are in Kindle Unlimited double dip. It doesn't matter if you're a book stuffer putting remixed lists of ghostwritten romance or if you are a legitimate author who published a series and a few months later publishes a collection of the series. The scammy stuffer repeatedly dips into the pool if they have the same content in all the volumes in different orders, but the legit author is double dipping, which is unfair and contrary to the intent of the system. The best thing for us is a level playing field. The only thing we can't really fix is that Amazon is always going to encourage either short or long books, but double dipping in KU is unfair no matter who's doing it or their intent.

Box sets and compilations of previously published books have a place in KDP publishing: Outside of KU, where they can entice budget-conscious readers who are not part of the program with a discounted price on a lot of reading material.

However, it does make sense for a short story collection to be listed in KU. There are ways to mitigate this: One, require the book be listed as a compilation with an accurate table of contents and metadata.

Two, cap the size of a file.

The current cap for page size is 3000 KENPC. 3000 KENPC is about *600,000 words. The Lord of the Rings is approximately 485,000 words.*_

The cap on KENPC that counts towards reads for calculating a share of the Unlimited Fund is drastically two high. It can be radically cut without negatively impacting or penalizing authors of longer works. Almost no one is publishing single volume novels that are longer than either The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit combined, or the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire, or the first three books of The Wheel of Time, or the Bible.

If you are, you can do what publishers have done since time immemorial, due to the limitations of printing physical books: Cut them into volumes.

*Cap the number of new books a user can publish and enroll in Kindle Unlimited each month.*

I'm not suggesting capping KU catalog size. If you've written a hundred books and published them at a normal rate, you should be able to have 100 books in your catalog.

What you should *not* be able to do, is have 100 books in Kindle Unlimited in May, and 200 books in June, and 300 in August. Nor should a brand new account be able to upload 100 books and enroll them into KU in the same month. The only use for this is to upload "pump and dump" spam books- books that are stuffed to the 3000 KENPC cap and read by bot accounts in large batches.

Again, the current system allows publishers to put out 600,000 word books. It also lets users put an unlimited number of them in Kindle Unlimited per month.

This is a recipe for disaster and a grossly exploited system.

No one needs to publish a hundred, or ten, or even five 600,000 word books a month.

Yet, the system allows this, and the scammers take advantage of it. Bad actors in KU, mostly overseas, upload 3000 KENPC books by the dozens, put them in unpopular categories, leave them unlinked in Author Central to avoid earning a bonus and attract attention, and rake in millions of page reads without their books ranking highly enough for users to notice and report them. When they do occasionally appear, it's unintentional.

We've seen these books accidentally hit the charts and expose the scammers. We know they do this. We also know, now, that they target innocent authors with removal of these reads, and they are aware that the malicious reads are coming from sources other than the authors who have been affected here.

Again:

1. The maximum KENPC needs to be capped at a reasonable number- perhaps 1000 KENPC, roughly 200,000 words.
2. The number of books a user can publish or enroll in KU needs to be limited.

The scammers that are breaking the store and have moved Amazon to take away reads from users here will not stop until the core of their method is taken away from them: If they are limited to one or even five books enrolled in KU per month they cannot "pump and dump" page reads with unlinked books that are published and pulled in a short time frame to avoid being caught in KDP audits. If they are limited to a reasonable length book file, they're caught from both directions.

That won't stop them- they'll innovate, but it will stop this and make the ecosystem fair. It won't be permanent, but no fix will. Kindle Unlimited is always going to be a red queen scenario, with the scammers and Amazon racing each other to uncover exploits and close them. Unfortunately, right now, with its present actions, Amazon isn't moving very far or fast. They expect us to carry them.

Be sure: This change and changes like it are a pay cut. If reads are reduced, pay is cut. Nothing Amazon does is going to increase the per page rate beyond what Amazon believes is a level that most authors will accept. It's important to understand how unlikely it is that Amazon is going to pay more to offset this. They really can't. They can pay more if it's necessary to maintain the system and prevent KU from dying off, but they can't raise the rate just to be nice. That would be violating their fiduciary duty to their shareholders. So we're clear, yes, Amazon just sets the per page rate on a monthly basis. They imply that some mysterious process decides to increase the fund (and brag about it like it's a meaningful number) and that they don't know what it's going to be, but they know that the rate needs to be between .0044 and .0050 roughly, and they will keep it there.

I urge everyone who publishes on Amazon and in KU to contact them and relate these points.

If you have other ideas, fine, but understand that Amazon is not going to devote time, work hours from engineers, consultation time from the legal department, etc. to implement a more complex fix. They are going to do the bare minimum and their objective is going to be to control their costs, not help you.

However, they've lowered the KENPC cap before, and it should be relatively trivial to limit the number of books enrolled in KU per month. These are relatively simple fixes, and it's possible that the community could convince Amazon to make them.

Edit 1: Fixing formatting

Edit 2:

One more point:

Changing the guidelines and asking the community to police *clearly* shows that Amazon's intention in dealing with these issues is to use the minimum man power and design resources possible. We know this because their first attempt, before rolling out this detection system, amount to changing words on a webpage and not even sending out an email.

The solution to this problem is not authors reporting other authors or even egregious scammers. The system is going to be less and less fair and productive for legitimate authors if Amazon does not take stronger action than editing one of their guideline pages under the assumption that authors will do their job for them._


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## ........ (May 4, 2013)

Natasha A. Salnikova said:


> My 900000+ pages were zeroed for May (I lost a lot of borrows because they pulled my books out in May). I thought it was because they terminated my account. Wrong.
> 
> Does anyone know any other contact for Jeff Besoz besides [email protected]?
> 
> I used this address but it goes to his team for obvious reasons. I'm thinking about taking legal actions.


Wow, that's a roughly $4K+ loss. How horrible.

I just went wide because of Amazon page read problems. I'm full time and amazon decides to terminate my account it would be crippling. I just cannot accept that level of risk so now I'm working hard to build readership on other platforms. Even if I'm overall $15K a year poorer I'll take it rather than being 90% dependent on a retailer who continues hurt authors and has hurt me in the past.


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## Sam Rivers (May 22, 2011)

The people that leave KU are those that have had page reads removed. Most other people just stay and believe it will not happen to them. Amazon knows this so doesn't have to react. Losing a few authors is not a big deal.


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## Acrocanthosaurus (Oct 6, 2016)

Sam Rivers said:


> Losing a few authors is not a big deal.


This is wisdom.


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## NS (Jul 8, 2011)

........ said:


> Wow, that's a roughly $4K+ loss. How horrible.
> 
> I just went wide because of Amazon page read problems. I'm full time and amazon decides to terminate my account it would be crippling. I just cannot accept that level of risk so now I'm working hard to build readership on other platforms. Even if I'm overall $15K a year poorer I'll take it rather than being 90% dependent on a retailer who continues hurt authors and has hurt me in the past.


Shoot, I should count my zeros. It may be Universe call.) But $400+ (just pages read) for half of a month was still pretty good for May and it is horrible for me anyway.

And I always thought nothing bad could happen to me because - I'm so honest, I'm doing everything rite, I'm not trying to scam the system... Right. How about account termination for a reality check?


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## FelissaEly (Jan 15, 2017)

Sam Rivers said:


> The people that leave KU are those that have had page reads removed. Most other people just stay and believe it will not happen to them. Amazon knows this so doesn't have to react. Losing a few authors is not a big deal.


That isn't 100% true - my husband's reads were not affected and we decided to withdraw his Continue Online series from KU because of everything happening to innocent authors (some of our author friends were affected also).


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Acrocanthosaurus said:


> *Cap the number of books a user can publish in Kindle Unlimited each month.*


No.

For 2 reasons.

At the author level, KU readers being able to read ALL your books, is where the real money is, not in the recent ones. The ability to attract a new reader with the current book, and have them progressively read all your books, is what gives long tails to new releases, and keeps an author visible between releases.

At the reader level, you're advocating denying parts of series, or whole backstory series to readers, after they find an author. This in itself will generate huge numbers of "Why isn't this book in KU?" reviews, which will backlash against the author, not Amazon. Not to mention "Why was this book removed from KU just before I was about to get it?".
Amazon wont wear this because its a gross violation of "reader experience".

They also wont wear it because it reduces the number of books available for readers.

I agree with get the box sets out of KU, and limit the KENPC to 1000. Those with longer books will simply have to separate them into 2 parts. Once you remove box sets from KU, enforce 10% bonus material, and limit the KENPC to 1000, the problem is basically solved.


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## Acrocanthosaurus (Oct 6, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> No.
> 
> For 2 reasons.
> 
> ...


Let's clarify something here:

I am not suggesting limiting an account's total KU catalog size.

I'm saying that authors should not be allowed to publish an unlimited number of _new_ books in KU and enroll them each month.

I agree you should have your whole catalog in KU if you choose, but you don't need to be able to publish 500 books a month.

To sum up:

If you wrote 100 books over the course of several years and uploaded them at the rate that even the most prolific author could write them, fine. You should be able to have a catalog of 100 books in KU.

What you should not be able to do, is have a catalog that grows like this:

May: 100 books
June: 200 books
July: 300 books

Nor should a _new account_ be able to publish an unlimited number of books and enroll them in KU.

There's no reason to open an account and upload a large number of never before published books and enroll them all at once. KDP limits accounts to one per individual, so there's no reason to be migrating them all to a new account at once- if they're from a closed account, it's a TOS violation. The only real reason to do that is to get around a closed account, or to upload a huge batch of max length KU books, bot them, and pull them hoping that Amazon doesn't notice and cancel the payment.

Allowing a publishing company that uses KU to upload all at once makes no sense, either. That's more of a problem for Amazon to solve, but having the ability to publish and enroll an unlimited number of new books per month is only useful for an edge case I haven't thought of, or for scamming. Whatever those edge cases they may be they don't justify allowing rampant scamming.


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## inconsequential (May 4, 2016)

I left not because anything had happened, but because I was done with putting myself at risk of something happening.

Some of the page-reads and sales seemed wrong at times, but nothing I could prove beyond doubt. But all the authors coming forward, sharing horror stories? Nope, sorry. Something is very wrong over at Amazon, and until they do some fixing, I'm minimizing the risk as much as possible.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Acrocanthosaurus said:


> Let's clarify something here:
> I'm saying that authors should not be allowed to publish an unlimited number of _new_ books in KU and enroll them each month.


Ah. I missed that.

Yes, a limit might be a good idea. But the problem is, how do you tell the difference between an author and a publisher?


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## Acrocanthosaurus (Oct 6, 2016)

Have separate publisher accounts that require extra vetting.


Monitor publishing activity and trigger a manual review for unusually high volume publishing activity. If it's legit, the account holder can confirm it with Amazon.

This is what the scammers do:

1. Upload a batch of books with 3000 KENPC of text. (They're actually probably longer, since the KENPC cap only applies to page reads and the file size limit would allow for vast amounts of text)
2. Refrain from linking them on Author Central to keep them from generating an author bonus
3. Use the minimum number of categories and no keywords
4. Bot each book, but not enough to generate a title bonus
5. Pull the books at the end of the month, wait for the check, hope they don't notice
6. Open a new account with overseas credentials, repeat.

This _only works_ if they can upload 1. big files 2. in unlimited quantities.

If you take the big files away it hurts them, but they'll just upload more individual volumes. If you limit how many volumes they can publish and enroll and make them be reasonably sized, you kill it dead.

Hell, you know what?

They don't even have to limit the number of books you can publish or have publisher accounts.

They can just set a soft limit and subject books and accounts that exceed it to a manual review. It shouldn't be hard to see that an account is full of 5000 page books with titles like "The Song of My Ice Empire" and content consisting entirely of phone books or the same copy/pasted paragraph.

All they have to do is have someone look if you publish really fast. They have someone look at books from an automated review looking for copyright issues (that is, if it detects duplicate content across multiple accounts) or possible obscenity (probably again based on keywords)

If someone actually has a valid need to publish 100 new volumes in KU a month, it should be easy for Amazon to confirm that with an individual check. Hell, they should be reaching out to people using the platform at that level anyway.


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> Ah. I missed that.
> 
> Yes, a limit might be a good idea. But the problem is, how do you tell the difference between an author and a publisher?


Define publisher, some of these so-called publishers are just marketeers spewing out from their content mills. There should be a cap. Otherwise, these stuffers are just going to become publishers and work it that way.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

TimothyEllis said:


> I agree with get the box sets out of KU, and limit the KENPC to 1000. Those with longer books will simply have to separate them into 2 parts. Once you remove box sets from KU, enforce 10% bonus material, and limit the KENPC to 1000, the problem is basically solved.


Assuming that the problem we're talking about here is bots, and botted page-reads, these suggestions aren't likely to have any real effect. A bot can 'read' one 3000 KENPC book, or ten 300 KENPC books, or 100 books at 30 KENPC. Bot got no life, he don't care.

The best way to deal with bots is.. well, to deal with the bots. If it's still reasonably easy to use bots to yield fake page reads, botters are going to keep doing it one way or another, no matter what other rules may change. Much better for Amazon to render botting ineffective.

It sounds like Amazon is - finally - actually starting to deal with the bot problem. It's truly unfortunate that Amazon seem to have realized only recently that people receiving bot reads are not necessarily (or even usually!) the ones behind the cheating. Hopefully now Amazon is just going to continue undermining bot activity without threatening authors who didn't do anything.

I can only imagine how difficult it must be for authors who are retroactively losing previously reported page reads. My guess is that Amazon is analysing the behaviour of potential bot accounts over time, which is why the page reads have to be removed retroactively rather than being blocked in the first place. But I do suspect that Amazon may be _getting it right_ in the sense that the removed page reads are in fact from bots. If this results in numbers that seem unusual to authors, that may just show how pervasive bot activity has become, and for how long it has gone on. That is, perhaps a significant portion (maybe even half) of KU page reads for _most books_ has been illegitimate for quite a long time. Maybe that's totally wrong, of course - but then, look at Twitter.


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## drsparkles (Jun 9, 2018)

loraininflorida said:


> Your legal option is spelled out in the KDP contract:
> 
> 10 General Legal Provisions.
> 
> ...


Depending on your state, it may be super cheap and super easy to sue them in small claims court. And you can actually win - I know at least two instances of people doing this successfully in regards to the affiliate program and Amazon not paying out what was due.

The sad truth is that they will likely continue doing this to authors if they continue to get away with it.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Atlantisatheart said:


> Define publisher, some of these so-called publishers are just marketeers spewing out from their content mills. There should be a cap.


We have a number of them here. They publish their own books, but the also do the publishing for other authors. You dont need to look far to find them here. And making them justify themselves to Amazon as a Publisher, is just wrong.



Acrocanthosaurus said:


> If you take the big files away it hurts them, but they'll just upload more individual volumes. If you limit how many volumes they can publish and enroll and make them be reasonably sized, you kill it dead.
> 
> They can just set a soft limit and subject books and accounts that exceed it to a manual review.


If you limit them to one book + 10%, the problem is solved. If they can still get the reads on single books, they are just doing it like the rest of us.

You wont get Amazon doing manual reviews. They are bot driven, and not about to change while Bezos is in charge. Wishing it wont change anything.

Yes, Amazon should be doing manual reviews based on bot recommendations. But they dont.

The best way would be for Amazon to limit KU to single books, with a small amount of bonus. And police it. And limit the KENPC so anything which gets missed doesn't become an issue. Will they? Probably not, since readers like box sets, because it gives them more books in their 10.



boba1823 said:


> Assuming that the problem we're talking about here is bots, and botted page-reads, these suggestions aren't likely to have any real effect. A bot can 'read' one 3000 KENPC book, or ten 300 KENPC books, or 100 books at 30 KENPC. Bot got no life, he don't care.


Yes, but lets at least make it real work for them. Putting out 10 books instead of 1 makes it a lot more work to do. For those doing a new set every month, seriously increasing the time taken to get them listed is going to impact them.


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## Acrocanthosaurus (Oct 6, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> We have a number of them here. They publish their own books, but the also do the publishing for other authors. You dont need to look far to find them here. And making them justify themselves to Amazon as a Publisher, is just wrong.
> 
> If you limit them to one book + 10%, the problem is solved. If they can still get the reads on single books, they are just doing it like the rest of us.
> 
> ...


Something like a 10% bonus book limit has no effect on the method I explained above. The scammers I'm talking about aren't limited by what they have ghostwritten, they publish gibberish and have it read by bots.

The only thing you can do is limit the number of the books the can put in the program and the size of the files.

Limiting the number fairly is easy, just have odd publishing activity trigger a review. They already have automated reviews trigger a manual review for obscenity and copyright issues. Manually deciding is something they do, but it's triggered by automated systems.

Adding a trigger that publishing 50 books in a month = account review isn't some huge technical undertaking. It's a minimal expansion of something they already do.

Also, the 10% guideline for bonus content is a joke so long as KU allows any duplicate material at all. Stuffing with ghostwritten books doesn't stop until duplicate content is automatically blocked from KU.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Saboth said:


> 297 (I'd just released book 2 on 4/2. So I probably would have had about 200,000 page reads for the month (one book 355 KENP, one 500 KENP). Sales probably would have been higher too, because rank and visibility really dropped after pulling out of KU.


None of that makes any sense.
Can you list each book just before the removal, listing sales, reads, and KENPC? Not interested in monthly projections or last month. Just the 7 or 8 days for this month.


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## johannesrexx (Mar 30, 2015)

After reading through this thread I received a vision of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker and the robots overlooking the Mos Eisly Space port. He says "It is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious."


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

The issue with banning collections from KU is that authors use that as a marketing strategy to appeal to buyers who want a discount or a means to quickly catch up in a series. And if the individual stories are in Select, then the collection has to be in Select, as well as the reverse. This means even honest authors are double dipping if they use this very typical strategy. 

If you ban all bundles and authors remain in Select, then readers who like to purchase books will never get bundled discounts from those authors. 
If you ban all bundles and authors exit Select in order to do bundle deals, then you hurt the KU subscribers because they lost access to those books in KU.

I don't see a way to do this without a loss for someone unless Amazon makes a tool for Select bundles where you can set a bundle price and they do the combining. And they can turn off royalties for any pages the reader has already read from either the single books or the bundle.


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## Ryan W. Mueller (Jul 14, 2017)

Saboth said:


> Hello,
> We are reaching out to you because we detected accounts attempting to manipulate Kindle services by simulating reading or borrowing activity on your titles. You do not need to take any action, however, we will block the activities of these malicious accounts and their effects on payments. This means that you will still receive royalties associated with legitimate reading activities, but you will not receive royalties associated with activities related to these accounts.
> Please note that this notice does not represent a change to your account status but is sent to make you aware of how our security countermeasures will affect your previously reporting page count and your royalty payments.
> We understand you might have questions regarding the nature of how we detect these activities, however, please be aware that we cannot provide details that might compromise the integrity of our security systems.
> ...


That gives me hope. Maybe I will stay in KU now.

Going forward, I wonder if we'll just have to go in with the idea that we may lose up to half our page reads. Perhaps this will be resolved at some point.


----------



## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

C. Gold said:


> The issue with banning collections from KU is that authors use that as a marketing strategy to appeal to buyers who want a discount or a means to quickly catch up in a series. And if the individual stories are in Select, then the collection has to be in Select, as well as the reverse. This means even honest authors are double dipping if they use this very typical strategy.
> 
> If you ban all bundles and authors remain in Select, then readers who like to purchase books will never get bundled discounts from those authors.
> If you ban all bundles and authors exit Select in order to do bundle deals, then you hurt the KU subscribers because they lost access to those books in KU.
> ...


Not my experience.

When I had box sets, people still mainly read the individual books in KU. Removing the box sets had no impact on my total reads.

There is no reason why box sets cannot be done just for sale, and the individual books continue in KU. Its not a one or the other thing. You enter the individual books into KU, and have the box sets there discounted for buyers. Best of both worlds.


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

C. Gold said:


> The issue with banning collections from KU is that authors use that as a marketing strategy to appeal to buyers who want a discount or a means to quickly catch up in a series. *And if the individual stories are in Select, then the collection has to be in Select, as well as the reverse.* This means even honest authors are double dipping if they use this very typical strategy.
> 
> If you ban all bundles and authors remain in Select, then readers who like to purchase books will never get bundled discounts from those authors.
> If you ban all bundles and authors exit Select in order to do bundle deals, then you hurt the KU subscribers because they lost access to those books in KU.
> ...


Not correct. You don't need to put the collection in Select even if you have all -- or any number of the individual stories there. Neither do you need to put any of the individual stories in Select if you put the collection in. HOWEVER, you can't go wide with the collection if ANY of the individual stories are in Select, NOR can you go wide with any of the individual stories if the collection is in select. That's where the exclusivity clause takes effect.


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## Acrocanthosaurus (Oct 6, 2016)

C. Gold said:


> The issue with banning collections from KU is that authors use that as a marketing strategy to appeal to buyers who want a discount or a means to quickly catch up in a series. And if the individual stories are in Select, then the collection has to be in Select, as well as the reverse. This means even honest authors are double dipping if they use this very typical strategy.
> 
> If you ban all bundles and authors remain in Select, then readers who like to purchase books will never get bundled discounts from those authors.
> If you ban all bundles and authors exit Select in order to do bundle deals, then you hurt the KU subscribers because they lost access to those books in KU.
> ...


You don't have to have a bundle in Select if the contents are in Select.

You can't publish them on other outlets.

KU readers don't care about discounts. Discounts matter for purchasing readers.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

TimothyEllis said:



> Not my experience.
> 
> When I had box sets, people still mainly read the individual books in KU. Removing the box sets had no impact on my total reads.
> 
> There is no reason why box sets cannot be done just for sale, and the individual books continue in KU. Its not a one or the other thing. You enter the individual books into KU, and have the box sets there discounted for buyers. Best of both worlds.


I was assuming box sets were more for paying readers. I also assumed Amazon would never let go of their Select exclusivity. That would be wonderful, but unlikely.


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## chrisanthemum7 (May 8, 2018)

wow, you guys are pretty effing smart. I wonder if there's something that makes certain books a good target for bots then, if they're causing fraudulent page reads on legitimate accounts. Are they targeting other non-keyword/non-categorized books? Would a best-seller give them away or could they hide in daily big numbers like those


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## Guest (Jun 9, 2018)

What is this nonsense about limiting the number of books we can publish?
The Queen of Romance Barbara Cartland could write a book a day by dictating to a secretary.
A pulp writer could fill a whole magazine each month by using six pen names.
Do we try to limit how much music a composer can write?
What nonsense. Trying to put a meter on creativity.
We're going crazy over a problem CREATED by Amazon, a company that works very hard to avoid payng U.S. taxes.
The problem, CREATED by Amazon, can only be FiXED by Amazon when indie writers, who aren't working by negotiated contracts, finally throw up hands and say "we're out of here" unless you HOLD OUR FUNDS IN TRUST and TREAT US WITH RESPECT.
Amen


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## Goulburn (May 21, 2014)

I'm sorry that happened to you.


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## Lisa5 (Oct 23, 2012)

Raven K. Asher said:


> I guess I should have expected it to hit me, but I wasn't prepared.  I was going through my pages read totals today and noticed that many of my books were zeroed out in pages read. Some only show 2 to 4 pages being read. I keep a strict record of my pages read and sales and I've calculated that my pages read for the month went from a total of 94,000 to 38,000.  That's a huge drop. My numbers are small potatoes but they're great numbers for me. I had two new releases that month and I didn't have huge sudden spikes in pages read for either release. It gradually went up. Here's the kicker. I don't advertise other than to my fans. I posted that the books were available on my Facebook page, my blog, and website, that's all. And even then maybe 60 people see my posts at the most. So how can Amazon say that scammers drove up my numbers? Why would they even notice me for that matter?  It's utter bull and I feel so helpless. I honestly don't know who to contact to clarify what happened or even if it would be worth it. Amazon has lost all my respect. I haven't had an issue with them until now and this is unforgivable. Why should we, the honest writers, suffer because of the scammers? How can they even prove that those numbers were from scammers to begin with? Ugh, I'm just so frustrated and angry. I can't decide whether to cry or scream.


The news I heard on this issue is that apparently scammers are trying to cover themselves by putting bots on innocent authors to confuse Amazon?


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

Lisa5 said:


> The news I heard on this issue is that apparently scammers are trying to cover themselves by putting bots on innocent authors to confuse Amazon?


I think that let's amazon off the hook. If people have been losing 50% of their page reads for the last three months because amazon can detect botted pages now then why haven't the scammers lost 50% pages? If they had then they would have stopped botting because they'd taken a 50% hit.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Thought out of left field....

Has anyone asked Amazon to give their book a whole new ASIN?

Seems to me the problem is the ASIN is given to a bot for reading. If the book is taken down completely, you get no new reads on it, where taking it out of KU and it still gets reads. The reads are the problem. So if the book is taken down completely, and relaunched exactly the same, getting a new ASIN, the bot is not going to be able to find it. 


Now instead of doing that, why not ask KDP to change the ASIN themselves, and transfer all the reviews and history to the new ASIN? This removes the book from being botted, and incidentally demonstrates by no more reads from the bot, that it wasn't the author's fault. Amazon might even be able to detect the bot attempting to find the old version, and follow that to the bot itself.

Anyone tried this?


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

> And if the individual stories are in Select, then the collection has to be in Select, as well as the reverse.


Not true. The works not in KU only need to be exclusive on Amazon and not published on other platforms.

Like with capping the KENPC limit hurting the long book writer, only allowing a certain number of books to be enrolled in Select/KU would certainly hurt the rare person who is writing that fast. But come on, really? How many people are writing and publishing a book a day? Or five a month, even? Not a lot. Not someone who is really writing their own books, but possibly someone doing the ghostwriting thing.

Still, if it would help with the issues we're seeing, then I'm okay with it. Something has to be done, and until Amazon hires people to review every book submitted to Select -- which I've said before needs to be done -- then it has to be some automated program sniffing around.

I'm okay with collections, compilations, bundles or box sets not being in KU. If that's what it takes to reduce the worry I have every damn month, then let 'er rip. I'm okay with a 1K KENPC limit. I've advocated for both of these things. Limiting the payout to equal the sales price of the book, up to the 9.99 limit Amazon thinks is the optimal highest price for a book would work for me, but I'd rather see it be half that. Many of the gargantuan uploads are bringing in about $14, so lowering it only a little wouldn't stop anyone.


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## Book Cat (Jan 3, 2016)

AS some of you wanted data, here is mine. This is in Australian dollars using Book Report. There is a USD total loss down the bottom. AUD is worth about $0.72 USD

Costs
Book 1
$342.50 pre launch
$355.79 ads (includes UK)
Total
$698.29

Revenue
Was before page read hit $1,126.56

NOW AFTER HIT! $890.11

Lost revenue
$236.45 (I want to cry)

PROFIT BOOK 1
Was before hit $440.24 
NOW AFTER HIT: $191.82

And the book 1 disappeared for 33 hours the days leading up to hit in the other Amazon drama of the week.

*book 1 data before JUNE hit (I was also hit back in early May and lost 50k page reads)*

Sales	Pages Borrows*
353 94,675 363

*book 1 data after hit*
Sales	Pages Borrows*
359 53,045 203

Book 2

COST BOOK 2
$237.98 (have not included ad costs)

Revenue THREE QUARTERS PAGES GONE!!!!! 
$285.50 (remember this is down from $376.34)

PROFIT BOOK 2
$47.52

BEFORE HIT
Sales	Pages Borrows*
117 22945 92

*book 2 data AFTER HIT*
Sales	Pages Borrows*
118 7,113 28

PROFIT SERIES
$239.34

Lost profits $331.94  $252.41USD loss


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## 77820 (Jun 19, 2014)

Acheknia said:


> _t's the closing of people's accounts that spurred me on to leave.
> _


_

That's exactly why my wife and I left in April after getting the "Strip and Threaten" e-mail. It wasn't the "Strip" that drove us out, it was the "Threat."_


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## 41419 (Apr 4, 2011)

One thing we are currently pushing hard for with Amazon is due process. I believe that everyone is entitled to due process, not just all the innocents swept up in this mess, but even the black hats deserve due process - i.e. the right to see the evidence against them and then mount a defence/appeal. At the moment Amazon is just asserting guilt and applying sanction and authors have zero participation in that process and no recourse whatsoever. 

It violates all basic principles of justice and fairness and we are hoping to get that changed. Even those who commit the most heinous crimes are entitled to due process.

Right now Amazon is claiming that these reads were illicitly earned or never real in the first place and that the authors are essentially losing nothing by having them reduced. I'm not so sure we can 100% believe that, given Amazon's history, which is another reason why it is so essential that we have due process. 

I'm sorry for anyone swept up in this - it has happened to several friends of mine and it SUCKS.


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

I haven't been hit - yet, and I've been in KU since the beginning, but I'm slowly taking my books wide because I'm not prepared to have reads stripped for no good reason (50% - yeah right, amazon) if amazon decided today was the day. Why? Because my earnings dictate my ad spend.

I've haven't trusted amazon since it came out that they couldn't count pages, what makes anyone think they can actually detect botting? Surely, they would have closed this down by now and a lot more authors would have been tossed out the store. 

Nope, I'm of the firm belief that they are lying ... again, but trying to make it look like they're doing something, and we know amazon like to break eggs.


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

TimothyEllis said:


> None of that makes any sense.
> Can you list each book just before the removal, listing sales, reads, and KENPC? Not interested in monthly projections or last month. Just the 7 or 8 days for this month.


Well, this month hasn't been hit by Amazon yet, plus I've been out of KU for almost 4 weeks now, so I barely have any page reads this month. They always hit the previous month about 10 days into the month.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Book Cat said:


> *book 1 data before JUNE hit (I was also hit back in early May and lost 50k page reads)*
> 
> Sales Pages Borrows*
> 353 94,675 363
> ...


This makes no sense at all.

This is less than what I'd call normal reads for the number of sales.

I was expecting read values way in excess of sales, not less.

There is nothing here in the stats to suggest anything untoward is happening. If bots were illicitly reading these books, the reads value should be an order of magnitude higher.

Which makes me wonder, what else is going on here we dont know about, and Amazon wont tell us?


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

TimothyEllis said:


> This makes no sense at all.
> 
> This is less than what I'd call normal reads for the number of sales.
> 
> ...


Yeah, doesn't really make sense. Now, if I saw I had 20K page reads one day, I'd say "damn bots", but for April, I'd have 100 one day, 500 one day, 900 one day, 200 next day (I hadn't released in about 5 months). When I released, that changed to 4,000 one day, 5,000, 6,000, but I was also getting 25-30 sales a day. In the end, April would have been 50K page reads. For comparison, previous months were 70K, 60K, 50K. So April probably would have been around 40K, except for a new release, that bumped it up to about 50K. Instead, April ended up being 25K, because Amazon said 1/2 of my page reads were elicit. So my range would have looked like: 70, 60, 50...25k? Why a 50% drop in borrows in one month?

Plus, how are spammers giving me exactly 50% (or close to it) page reads each month? So April they give me 25K page reads (supposedly), but in May they gave me 40K? Two explanations: Amazon is using some kind of formula to punish someone for page reads and isn't actually removing only illicit page reads, or since September of last year, scammers have been giving me 50K page reads one month, 45K the next month, 35K the next month, 25K the next month and Amazon didn't catch on until April (personally I believe they are just using a formula and subtracting page reads even if they aren't illicit in order to really slam some fear into authors). Nothing else adds up.


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## GoneToWriterSanctum (Sep 13, 2014)

I don't consent


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## Avery342 (Aug 23, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> This makes no sense at all.
> 
> This is less than what I'd call normal reads for the number of sales.
> 
> ...


Something else is definitely going on. This is part of a post I made on an earlier thread here in KB about my page reads being stripped:

Full disclosure. To reiterate my story very briefly to set the stage for the numbers: In mid March, I released the third book in my series (not yet shown in my sig--need to get that done). During release week, I set the first book to free and ran a Kindle Countdown deal on the second to 99 cents. While it worked well (for me, anyway, as I'm just gaining momentum), to be truthful, I still thought the page reads were a bit on the low side.

Silly me.

In April, my page reads for March were reduced greatly. So even though there were no spikes (just a gradual increase due to the above), for some reason Amazon thought my reads were fake. I still don't believe it. Sorry.

Anyway, here is what you wanted. Cold, hard numbers.

All About Zane (book one) 1617 free downloads, 39 sales (after switching to a 99 cent loss-leader price point), page reads were at 19,189.
With a KENP of 283, if I did my calculations right, that means roughly 68 full reads. (Just for the record, seems pretty legit to me.) Promos while free: BookDoggy and BKNights.

Until Proven (book two) 158 sales (some at 99 cents), 11,488 page reads. KENP is at 265, so 44 full page reads? See why I was thinking my page reads were a bit on the low side? Absolutely no promo done on this book at all.

Separation Anxiety (new release) 262 sales, 25,368 page reads. KENP is at 202, so 126 full reads. The only promo was LGBT-Romance Deals newsletter, which is highly recommended and honest in their dealings.

When I published my first book, I got well over 100K page reads for the month on that book. In March, with the free run and Kindle Countdown Deal, I got a grand total of just over 56,000. Like I said, it seemed low to me, but hey, I was going to hit $1000 within 30 days, so I was ecstatic!

Then Amazon decided that a great portion of those lowly 56,000 page reads were fake--I truly must be the worst scammer ever born to see such poor results from such hard work. I ended up with 28,167 page reads from all three books combined.

Someone earlier in this thread came up with the theory that Amazon's scam-buster algo was going on percentage of growth. That's the only thing that makes one iota of sense to me.

Unless my math is wrong? If so, I'd love to know where I went wrong. (On so many levels)

(End Quote)

Note that in April, after all the lowly little promos, free run, and KCD had well and truly ended, my page reads continued to do well. (At least until I hit the 30 day cliff) I ended up with just over 117,000 page reads. And Amazon let me keep every single one of them--no nasty gram. When I saw others that weren't so lucky getting their accounts suspended, I opted out of KU. What choice did I really have? I could get hit again with my next release, after all.

Tell me this is right.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Saboth said:


> Amazon is using some kind of formula to punish someone for page reads and isn't actually removing only illicit page reads, or since September of last year, scammers have been giving me 50K page reads one month, 45K the next month, 35K the next month, 25K the next month and Amazon didn't catch on until April (personally I believe they are just using a formula and subtracting page reads even if they aren't illicit in order to really slam some fear into authors). Nothing else adds up.


Or, Amazon are punishing for a completely different reason they dont actually want to identify.

Have you had an email from them? If so, can you post it?



Avery342 said:


> Tell me this is right.


I've no idea whats right, but something stinks.

I really dont understand how less than normal sales to reads ratios can be bots. It makes no sense at all.

Which leave punishment for something else.

Or trying to drive certain authors or books out of KU?


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## Avery342 (Aug 23, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> I really dont understand how less than normal sales to reads ratios can be bots. It makes no sense at all.
> 
> Which leave punishment for something else.
> 
> Or trying to drive certain authors or books out of KU?


The funny thing is, I'm one of the most honest authors you'd ever care to meet. I don't stuff, bot, or scam. I play by Amazon's rules 100%--and this is what I get in return. And the only emails I received (and I'm sure the same is true of Saboth and the others) are the same canned ones everyone is getting about illegit page reads.

Amazon is WRONG on this, and there is no way that they'll ever admit it. But at least they've changed their email to take out the account threats. So I guess we should bow down and be grateful, huh?


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## 39416 (Mar 18, 2011)

Frankly it all just sounds to me that they are simply balancing the books in terms of how much they choose to pay out in KU.


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## NS (Jul 8, 2011)

Avery342 said:


> The funny thing is, I'm one of the most honest authors you'd ever care to meet. I don't stuff, bot, or scam. I play by Amazon's rules 100%--and this is what I get in return. And the only emails I received (and I'm sure the same is true of Saboth and the others) are the same canned ones everyone is getting about illegit page reads.


The same. Got my account terminated.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

loraininflorida said:


> Frankly it all just sounds to me that they are simply balancing the books in terms of how much they choose to pay out in KU.


Cant be. This is nickle and dime stuff to Amazon.

The scammers are doing tens of millions of pages, and Amazon are bashing authors for a few thousand.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

Here's one possibility that seems to be pretty consistent with how Amazon tends to do things:

Amazon finally recognizes that bots are going crazy on KU, lining the pockets of botters through lots of illegitimate page reads. Amazon says, "Uhoh, better fix this! But how?" The bright minds over there respond - wait for it... wait for it... - "Let's use an _algorithm_!" (Didn't see that one coming, eh? )

So after messing around for a while, identifying some actual (probably) bot accounts, the brilliant engineers over there come up with some kind of algorithm that identifies bot accounts according to behaviour. Well.. really they probably run it through their _super_ intelligent machine learning wizardry and end up with a really complicated black box algorithm that looks at 357 different factors, and no one truly understands how it works. But it provides an automated way for them to say "Oh yeah, that KU account is a bot, and that one, and that one."

And surprise, surprise, but the algorithm actually yields a ton of false positives. But no one knows how it works, and it has minimal human oversight, so this isn't obvious to Amazon. It just looks like KU has a whole lot of bot accounts - but really, a bunch of regular KU readers are being mislabelled.

(Just another possibility - though personally, I'm still leaning toward the view that KU is just _for reals_ half bot activity.)


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

You want numbers? Here are my numbers for March. See if you think they make sense. This is for one book. It had 763 KENP.

I recorded the totals on a daily basis, and thus could match pre-cut with post-cut. In case my columns turn out all wacky, the first column is the date, the second the number of pages read that I recorded on a daily basis, the third column the number of pages left after the cut, the fourth column is the number of pages cut, and the fifth column is the number of actual sales I had for the day.

Pre cut total: 20,268
Post cut Total: 6,436
Pages Cut Tot: 13,832
Percentage of Pages cut: 68.24 %
Total Sales: 19



 Pre Post Cut Sales
1 0 0 0 0
2 195 91 104 2
3 268 0 268 0
4 1086 0 1086 1
5 1772	107 1655 0
6 286	209 77 1
7 538	538 0 0
8 233	233 0 1
9 1199	471 728 1
10 3605 0 3605 1
11 286	135 151 0
12 1112	787 325 0
13 1612 96 1516 1
14 938	185 753 1
15 511	506 5 0
16 318	318 0 0
17 0 0 0 0
18 47 47 0 1
19 0 0 0 0
20 173	173 0 1
21 277 65 212 2
22 1822	426 1396 1
23 314	314 0 0
24 817 0 817 1
25 366 0 366 1
26 552	522 0 1
27 40 40 0 0
28 0 0 0 0 
29 244	234 10 0
30 512 343 179 0
31 1165 596 596 2


This totally doesn't make sense to me. I had days with 10 illegal pages read? 5 illegal pages read? You'd think that botted pages would be multiples of the total pages ... but, apparently, not.


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## Acrocanthosaurus (Oct 6, 2016)

dgaughran said:


> One thing we are currently pushing hard for with Amazon is due process. I believe that everyone is entitled to due process, not just all the innocents swept up in this mess, but even the black hats deserve due process - i.e. the right to see the evidence against them and then mount a defence/appeal. At the moment Amazon is just asserting guilt and applying sanction and authors have zero participation in that process and no recourse whatsoever.
> 
> It violates all basic principles of justice and fairness and we are hoping to get that changed. Even those who commit the most heinous crimes are entitled to due process.
> 
> ...


Due process means man-hours from Amazon employees. It's not happening. Rather than push for them to have us do the work of policing the store for them we should press for policy changes that are black and white and universally applied.



okey dokey said:


> What is this nonsense about limiting the number of books we can publish?
> The Queen of Romance Barbara Cartland could write a book a day by dictating to a secretary.
> A pulp writer could fill a whole magazine each month by using six pen names.
> Do we try to limit how much music a composer can write?
> ...


This argument is absurd. One in a milllion authors could or would write a novel a day and the vast, vast majority don't write fast enough to craft a novel, revise it and have it edited, get cover art, coordinating marketing, write blurb, etc multiple times per month.

Having the program enable scamming to prevent inconveniencing an exceptionally rare edge case is bad for everyone.

Besides, if they impose a limit that triggers a review rather than a mere hard maximum. Barbara Cartland would be fine.

Even then I'm only talking about limits to enrollment in KU, not publishing. If another Cartland comes along or someone else can vomit a novel a day to a transcriptionisf they could still publish them all.

Saying the scammers should be enabled by a broken system just in case someone wants to write that fast is absurd.

We're running businesses here. Leave the "meters on creativity" stuff at the writing desk..


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

D.A. Boulter said:


> Pre cut total: 20,268
> Total Sales: 19


1 sale to 1,000 pages is what I call very very normal.

WTF are Amazon on about? This is like quibbling over the 10th decimal point for them.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Acrocanthosaurus said:


> Saying the scammers should be enabled by a broken system just in case someone wants to write that fast is absurd.


What about someone with a catalogue of 100 books, who decides one day to go into KU?

Are you suggesting only 1 book a day can be put in? Completely ridiculous.

A few months back, I returned to KU after 6 months wide. I put 40 books back in on the same day. This happens all the time as authors decide to try KU for the first time, or return to it after an absence.

And since Amazon want more books in KU, they will never even consider a limit on submissions.


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## Acrocanthosaurus (Oct 6, 2016)

If we assume that these fraudulent reads are coming from bot accounts that spread their activity over legit books in an attempt to conceal what they're doing (bots hat read only the scammers own read farming books would be easier to spot) then these numbers don't make much sense. The percentages are very high for that.

This is probably automated and whatever system they use to detect fraudulent reads gives back a lot of false positives. I question if they can even determine the account of origin for page reads.



TimothyEllis said:


> What about someone with a catalogue of 100 books, who decides one day to go into KU?
> 
> Are you suggesting only 1 book a day can be put in? Completely ridiculous.
> 
> ...


I'm suggesting that if someone should publish and enroll 100 books, it should alert Amazon and they should review the activity to see if it's legitimate, the same way that they review content that's flagged for appearing in multiple accounts for copyright, or books flagged by a keyword scan for obscenity.

We have speed limits on roads. We don't get rid of the speed limit because of people driving their pregnant wives to the hospital. We limit everyone's speed for safety and if someone is speeding because they passenger is in labor, a police officer can give them an escort.

Saying they shouldn't have a reasonable policy to prevent batch uploads that are breaking the store because someone in rare circumstances might need to upload a lot of books at once is like saying we should let anyone drive at any speed on any road because someone once in a while needs to drive really fast for a legitimate emergency. We don't do that, we have a reasonable limit and make exceptions.

How is a handful of people having to have their activity reviewed worse than trying to run a business where my revenue can drop by 68% at any time without warning at any time?


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## inconsequential (May 4, 2016)

ParkerAvrile said:


> That's how American corporations work. They nickel and dime aggressively. The Waltons became billionaires by squeezing suppliers & workers alike. When you're the size of a Walmart or an Amazon, every penny you pinch has the potential to add up to millions if not billions over the years. They are not quibbling just over your decimal point but over everyone's decimal points.


This is what I said in another thread but was told I was wrong. That Amazon doesn't care about a MILLION dollars because they have billions. I disagree. Every billion earned starts at ONE dollar.

I think they care about every dime they can keep for themselves, and I think they're screwing over innocent authors to get those dimes.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

inconsequential said:


> I think they care about every dime they can keep for themselves, and I think they're screwing over innocent authors to get those dimes.


This is why I dont understand Amazon.

They screw innocent authors for dimes. But they let scammers screw Amazon for millions.

Makes no sense at all.


----------



## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

Suppose we look at this a different way.

Book is stuffed with nonsense pages, hires someone to create fake reads = grand theft.
Amazon follows where the reads are coming from. Person/bot has to have a KU subscription, right?
Amazon allows that book to stay active in order to catch the subscriber(s). 
Subscriber is caught, account blocked, but just opens a new account.
By now, Amazon has billing information, and can press charges, right?
They removed all the page reads attributed to that subscriber, and moves on to the next one. 
Amazon cannot get into the personal accounts to see who hired them, so it is a delete across the board.
Indie Authors "assume" they've been targeted by scammers, but can't prove it, nor can Amazon prove they weren't.
Meanwhile it just keeps happening, new accounts, new page reads, no way to stop it until they can figure out who's hiring the fake subscribers?

Maybe it's not personal after all. Just my thoughts. Marti


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## Guest (Jun 9, 2018)

If Amazon think its okay to go into money authors have earned from borrows and just take whatever they want without any evidence to justify it, I think KU's days are numbered. As bad as Wide might be, it certainly can't be THAT bad...


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

C Winters said:


> As bad as Wide might be, it certainly can't be THAT bad...


Yes, it is.

Unless you can get a Bookbub deal in the first month, work on it taking either thousands in BB and FB ads to get traction, or more than a year without major spending. And you can spend the thousands, and still not get any traction.


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## raminar_dixon (Aug 26, 2013)

Someone is making lots and lots of money off this scheme and it isn't legit authors. This will continue as long as the current subscription model of Kindle Unlimited exists, because I certainly can't see any way for Amazon to police it effectively with how easy it is to create fake Amazon accounts, obtain stolen or create fraudulent bank and credit card accounts, spoof your location, etc.

I can only imagine it is a matter of time before someone who had pagereads stripped because of this brings a lawsuit against Amazon, too. Many authors are out thousands and thousands of dollars.

In the meanwhile, many authors will leave KU. What sense does it make to stick around if you don't know from one month to the next how much of the money you _think_ you earned will just be stripped away with nothing more than an email telling you nothing more than the pagereads were not legit? How long will it take for Amazon to just stop reporting those pagereads to you so maybe you don't even realize they were taken in the first place?


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## RedAlert (May 15, 2015)

Dpock said:


> I don't think they're willfully screwing anyone. They've got some programmers standing by their algos. Until we make enough noise, their managers will continue to trust them.


LOL, the evidence is not looking good! I have always loved Amazon, but I don't think I'll publish in KU. This, to me, is a lot of unnecessary pain. I'd rather bop my way through the jungle than to go through what I read other authors are going through.


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## RedAlert (May 15, 2015)

ParkerAvrile said:


> Where there are no consequences, businesses cheat because otherwise they're doing a disservice to their shareholders.


It's a disservice not to cheat? Businesses should have some kind of honor to them, not allegiance to money. Bottom line is always money, I get it, but my goodness, it should not be the goal of businesses to cheat other people.


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## Crime fighters (Nov 27, 2013)

I used to be Amazon's biggest fan. They can kiss my ass at this point. I'm sorry this is happening to you while the true scammers rake in millions.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> Yes, it is.
> 
> Unless you can get a Bookbub deal in the first month, work on it taking either thousands in BB and FB ads to get traction, or more than a year without major spending. And you can spend the thousands, and still not get any traction.


This is true. But the big picture is, "that bad" is not that bad.

Every business should expect setbacks and (hopefully temporary) reductions in income. Few businesses grow consistently and certainly.

It took me a year AND BBs and ads and promos and new releases to get back to my "normal" KU level of income. But my income level didn't dip too much (25% or so) because I rolled out to wide gradually, book by book in each series. That avoided a big drop and gave me breathing room. It gradually cut risk from my portfolio while limiting volatility.

Also, I have all my books in print and audio, which provided a cushion against ebook volatility unaffected by Select/KU.

Bottom line, it's never too early to start rolling your backlist wide, to reduce your exposure.


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## Bella Breen (May 24, 2015)

My 6th book was released in May, and I just had 50% of my page reads for May stripped for 'manipulating page reads'. Of course the only promotion I did was AMS ads, posting in FB reader groups and a blog blitz tour.  Could it be that my book organically took off because readers were recommending it to other in FB genre groups and I spend over $400 on AMS ads for it?

Is there any way to get Amazon to prove 50% of those page reads were illegitimate? I highly doubt any were manipulated page reads, let alone 50%. Would suing them in small claims court do anything? Or would that only get my KDP account terminated?


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

monamorabooks said:


> My 6th book was released in May, and I just had 50% of my page reads for May stripped for 'manipulating page reads'. Of course the only promotion I did was AMS ads, posting in FB reader groups and a blog blitz tour. Could it be that my book organically took off because readers were recommending it to other in FB genre groups and I spend over $400 on AMS ads for it?
> 
> Is there any way to get Amazon to prove 50% of those page reads were illegitimate? I highly doubt any were manipulated page reads, let alone 50%. Would suing them in small claims court do anything? Or would that only get my KDP account terminated?


They'll refuse to offer evidence (because they probably don't have anything but a math formula to show for it). Suing would almost certainly mean the end of your KDP account, since the terms we agreed to only allow for arbitration.

I really wish there'd be a huge swell of authors and their lawyers demanding some kind of audit of the evidence they're claiming to have, though. They should have to justify what they're doing. It's hard to imagine another situation where something like this would fly.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

boba1823 said:


> So after messing around for a while, identifying some actual (probably) bot accounts, the brilliant engineers over there come up with some kind of algorithm that identifies bot accounts according to behaviour. Well.. really they probably run it through their _super_ intelligent machine learning wizardry and end up with a really complicated black box algorithm that looks at 357 different factors, and no one truly understands how it works. But it provides an automated way for them to say "Oh yeah, that KU account is a bot, and that one, and that one."
> 
> And surprise, surprise, but the algorithm actually yields a ton of false positives. But no one knows how it works, and it has minimal human oversight, so this isn't obvious to Amazon. It just looks like KU has a whole lot of bot accounts - but really, a bunch of regular KU readers are being mislabelled.


The above scenario rings true to me. I'll toss out the caveat that I'm not a computer person _at all_, so what rings true to me might not, in fact, be true in any way, shape, or form. But given the fact that KDP's supposedly sophisticated page-counting mechanism turned out to be "the page you stopped at this time, minus the page you stopped at last time," I wouldn't be at all surprised if the page-botting algorithm turned out to be something like "accounts that read more than three books a week are bots."


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

The problem with bots:

http://norman-ai.mit.edu/

takeaway line: "when people talk about AI algorithms being biased and unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it. The same method can see very different things in an image, even sick things, if trained on the wrong (or, the right!) data set."


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## drsparkles (Jun 9, 2018)

Shelley K said:


> ....Suing would almost certainly mean the end of your KDP account, since the terms we agreed to only allow for arbitration....


That's not true. You can take them to small claims court as spelled out in the terms.


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## drsparkles (Jun 9, 2018)

ParkerAvrile said:


> That's how American corporations work. They nickel and dime aggressively. The Waltons became billionaires by squeezing suppliers & workers alike. When you're the size of a Walmart or an Amazon, every penny you pinch has the potential to add up to millions if not billions over the years. They are not quibbling just over your decimal point but over everyone's decimal points.


Yes, this!!! Before they were sued for it by at least two different people (I was in the court room for one of these cases, though not as a plaintiff), Amazon would close the accounts of Amazon Associates (affiliates) and withhold the money (and send vague emails where they refused to correspond back with you and offer proof of supposed violations). This $$ amount withheld could be anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand.

In court, their representative stated that (at the time) they closed over 100 affiliate accounts each day. EACH DAY. They also have been sued for doing the same to FBA sellers. This pattern, even if only a few dollars from each person, adds up to a LOT of dollars over the years across these programs.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

I queried two big authors, one high-six and one seven-figure, both all-in with KU. They get hundreds of K page reads per day. Both said they can't identify that they've lost any page reads. They certainly haven't gotten any nastygrams.

One would think they'd be big targets of botters with camoflage reads. But Amazon apparently hasn't stripped them at all. 

To me, that suggests that the botters are botting a certain number of pages against innocent authors (camo reads). Let's say the number was 10K per day. That would get lost in a "big" author's number, but in a "smaller" author, would trigger an algorithm programmed to look for a percentage jump or percentage from a known botter account.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

ParkerAvrile said:


> That's how American corporations work. They nickel and dime aggressively. The Waltons became billionaires by squeezing suppliers & workers alike. When you're the size of a Walmart or an Amazon, every penny you pinch has the potential to add up to millions if not billions over the years. They are not quibbling just over your decimal point but over everyone's decimal points.


https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/09/human-cost-kindle-amazon-china-foxconn-jeff-bezos


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

David VanDyke said:


> I queried two big authors, one high-six and one seven-figure, both all-in with KU. They get hundreds of K page reads per day. Both said they can't identify that they've lost any page reads. They certainly haven't gotten any nastygrams.
> 
> One would think they'd be big targets of botters with camoflage reads. But Amazon apparently hasn't stripped them at all.
> 
> To me, that suggests that the botters are botting a certain number of pages against innocent authors (camo reads). Let's say the number was 10K per day. That would get lost in a "big" author's number, but in a "smaller" author, would trigger an algorithm programmed to look for a percentage jump or percentage from a known botter account.


I've thought about it too, why higher sellers are not getting hit and that it's because the percentage of fake page reads would probably be much lower than a smaller seller, so the smaller seller would more likely get flagged.

However, also, if they were really finding fraudulent accounts that were doing the fake page reads you would think they would find fake reads from popular books in those fraudulent accounts since they are everywhere and many are heavily advertised. So it makes me think they really aren't finding actual fraudulent accounts and they are mostly using algorithms to look for "unusual" activity. I could be wrong but it doesn't make sense to me that they aren't detecting fake page reads from bigger sellers books. Not that I want them to get hit of course, but it really doesn't make sense to me.


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## Book Cat (Jan 3, 2016)

David VanDyke said:


> I queried two big authors, one high-six and one seven-figure, both all-in with KU. They get hundreds of K page reads per day. Both said they can't identify that they've lost any page reads. They certainly haven't gotten any nastygrams.
> 
> One would think they'd be big targets of botters with camoflage reads. But Amazon apparently hasn't stripped them at all.
> 
> To me, that suggests that the botters are botting a certain number of pages against innocent authors (camo reads). Let's say the number was 10K per day. That would get lost in a "big" author's number, but in a "smaller" author, would trigger an algorithm programmed to look for a percentage jump or percentage from a known botter account.


Well, if my page reads were well below expectations to begin with (115 sales to 22k page reads or thereabouts), all in the span of 5 weeks (book released April 26th), then the bots are being really, really lazy in botting my books. Man, if I were the bots, or someone paying for bots to read my book, You can bet I would be paying them to read more than 550 pages a day.

Plus, with so few borrows, if they are trying to make their actions harder for Amazon to detect, then why not just borrow big name author books? Like, they could blend into the unwashed hordes who borrow a Miceal Scott Earl book. They could have 3000 bots borrow his big and be a 1000x harder to detect than my crappy books no one ever reads.

If I want to blend into a crowd because I have the Eye of Sauron hunting for me, I go into the room with 10000 other people, not the room with 10.

Everything I have heard says authors make around 50-60% of their income from KU. Not 20% like I was.

Anyway, I wanted to go wide one day. But not in my first 6 months of publishing, with a tiny audience and fandom who are in KU. It's hard enough to gain traction wide even with an audiance. But without it... and without the money for much in the way of promotion... Yea, chances are slim I am getting anywhere.

The wide stores care less about you as an indy than Amazon does. Hell, most don't even care about trying to compete with Amazon in any way either, not alone each other.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Yeah Book Cat, that's a good point too. If you were doing illegal page reads wouldn't you want to blend in and read the popular books.  If you read author's books that don't get huge amounts of page reads it's just going to stick out more.  It seems like it is Amazon Algos gone amok to me.


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## Linn (Feb 2, 2016)

JulesWright said:


> Yeah Book Cat, that's a good point too. If you were doing illegal page reads wouldn't you want to blend in and read the popular books. If you read author's books that don't get huge amounts of page reads it's just going to stick out more. It seems like it is Amazon Algos gone amok to me.


Well, if a scammer's bots read the more popular books, that might help those authors earn the bonus payouts the scammer was hoping to earn him/herself.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Linn said:


> Well, if a scammer's bots read the more popular books, that might help those authors earn the bonus payouts the scammer was hoping to earn him/herself.


Yeah that is a point. Still, doesn't add up to me. Doesn't seem like they are really detecting fraud to me, and if so many false positives.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

kw3000 said:


> And when your Roomba starts eating your rug instead of the legit dirt on your floor, if it could send you an email telling you it's done this, you wouldn't expect that cold, lifeless robot to be anything but vague and terse in its communication. Same goes for the Amazon profit maximizing machine. When it's eating the proverbial rug instead of the pet dander, don't expect much feeling nor forthcomingness in its messages to you.


And this is why I would fire the entire Amazon IT staff all the way up to the manager.

Those lousy emails come from programmers with no social skills, and no oversight by PR people. Left hand no knowing what the right hand is doing. And those at the top either not knowing or not caring their emails behave like the school bully at best, or a pirate at worst.

You dont let programmers decide what message to put in emails. Period.

And lets get rid of this AI rubbish. As much as Bezos wants to think they're writing an AI, its nothing but code written by people who dont know and dont care about how to interact with people. In spite of all the hype about AI, I dont expect us to have a genuine one until at least next century. In the meantime, they will just keep adding code to code, and calling it intelligent. Which is stupid, because the people doing the coding are basically stupid. (And any AI that develops from Bezos' idea of how to build an AI, will go Skynet on us!)

What come out of the bots should be vetted by the highest regions of Amazon's PR department, and the Legal department, before any chunk of code goes live. None of it is, which is why the whole organization functions like 10 Roomba's in the same room.


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## 39416 (Mar 18, 2011)

Or, Amazon is accomplishing exactly what it wants to.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

loraininflorida said:


> Or, Amazon is accomplishing exactly what it wants to.


There is that too.

But one has to question the logic of nuking the little people for a tenth decimal place. Then again, logic and Amazon are 2 words you shouldn't be using together.


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

JulesWright said:


> Yeah that is a point. Still, doesn't add up to me. Doesn't seem like they are really detecting fraud to me, and if so many false positives.


Look at my figures. I got dinged for 10 pages one day. Ten lousy pages. Ten pages in one day isn't fraud, it's someone reading. Maybe reading, not liking and giving up, but reading. You don't try to hide your tracks (so to speak) by flipping through ten pages in a book.


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## OnlyTheGrotesqueKnow (Jun 10, 2018)

First time post so take anything I say with a grain of salt ... after all I could be a devil bot.

Losing projected money is never a small thing, not in this world of pay check to pay check. Hell, most people are only one missed paycheck away from homelessness. My sympathy goes out to everyone that suddenly thought they had money only to find out someone had decided 'naw we keeping that.'

I don't think Amazon's trying to clean up the market for writers. The people hurt are just collateral damage to them. As unknown and faceless as casualties of war. They don't care because they have other goals in mind. They might pay attention if you file a lawsuit or bug someone enough but only as much as you do the bug that bites you in the night. Basically for as long as it takes to kill it.

Amazon only cares about one thing, readers. They've made that clear through every post they've made and business model they've implemented. If they're trying to clean up the market it's because of reader complaints, not writers. The makers don't get a vote, only the consumers do. In the end its the buyers that are giving them money. If you don't publish, those buyers will just buy another book. People don't stop reading just because their favorite author quits publishing.

In this case everyone that is using KU is joining a dictatorship. It might be benevolent or malevolent but they call the shots. They made the platform, they created this monster, and they're the ones that are making and breaking people with casual ease. The KU has made many people a lot of money but at the cost of being subjugated to a power beyond their control. It's a gamble, the monster might make you wealthy or it might eat you.

This mirrors the problem of YouTube stars being demonetized without warning. Suddenly their career, family, future, and dreams are gone. The problem with KU and YouTube is that they are false market places. We think they function like real world markets but they're more like Third World Countries with fixed winners and losers. They decide how much to pay you, what to pay you off of, when you can publish, what you can publish, who see's your book, when they see it, etc. That's not a free world market.

I'm happy for anyone making their money on KU or YouTube. But don't get comfortable, it's not a stable platform. Use it as a stepping stone to get into more mature markets with less risk. The people making six and seven figures off Amazon who shrug and say everything will be fine could be right. But then how many Third World economies are stable for long?

If you lost money to the monster then I say use that anger as motivation to start pushing into other markets. I don't think KU is worth leaving completely, frankly that's unrealistic for most authors trying to make a living out of writing. What I do think is that setting up a second string of books going wide, or only putting the first book in KU might be a good idea. 

Let me say in closing that this will not get better. No dictator lets power out of it's hands and Amazon is no different. This pattern is as old as time and false markets like this always undergo these radical shifts. They could end the KU project tomorrow or cut your income to nothing and there would be precious little you could do. This is not a market that you can make a career out of, it's stepping stone to the real markets.

Again my sincere sympathy to anyone that was caught in this recent purge. I hope you all make it through this with your futures intact. But I fear this will break a great many writers.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Book Cat said:


> Plus, with so few borrows, if they are trying to make their actions harder for Amazon to detect, then why not just borrow big name author books? Like, they could blend into the unwashed hordes who borrow a Miceal Scott Earl book. They could have 3000 bots borrow his big and be a 1000x harder to detect than my crappy books no one ever reads.


I bet the botters are just as lazy and algo-driven as Amazon. The program the bots to cruise for authors and automatically do some camo reads. Maybe they mistakenly think botting smaller authors is less noticeable--or that doing so will cause more chaos.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

OnlyTheGrotesqueKnow said:


> In this case everyone that is using KU is joining a dictatorship. It might be benevolent or malevolent but they call the shots. They made the platform, they created this monster, and they're the ones that are making and breaking people with casual ease. The KU has made many people a lot of money but at the cost of being subjugated to a power beyond their control. It's a gamble, the monster might make you wealthy or it might eat you.
> 
> This mirrors the problem of YouTube stars being demonetized without warning. Suddenly their career, family, future, and dreams are gone. The problem with KU and YouTube is that they are false market places. We think they function like real world markets but they're more like Third World Countries with fixed winners and losers. They decide how much to pay you, what to pay you off of, when you can publish, what you can publish, who see's your book, when they see it, etc. That's not a free world market.
> 
> ...


Preach it, brother (or sister, or whatever).

This should be chiseled on every author's brains.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

David VanDyke said:


> I bet the botters are just as lazy and algo-driven as Amazon. The program the bots to cruise for authors and automatically do some camo reads. Maybe they mistakenly think botting smaller authors is less noticeable--or that doing so will cause more chaos.


I'm not so sure they do.

Being lazy in this context is giving a bot a list of asins. It would explain why the same books get hit month after month. Even if Amazon are removing the accounts, the bots get reloaded for another account. Same list of asins, just the account number changes.

If the bots were seeking books themselves, we wouldn't be seeing the same authors and books hit by Amazon each month. They would be different books, different authors. Same books and authors is being lazy.


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## Guest (Jun 10, 2018)

Once we accepted the concept of page reads, with Amazon doing the counting, I think we started down this long road:
Amazon bot picks up that we described a colorful sunset in the first chapter
Yet our characters in chapter 3, hold hands and snuggle as they admire ANOTHER sunset, this time over a golden beach.
The Amazon bot screams: you're padding to increase the page count. One sunset is enough. SCAM! SCAM! SCAM!

And we thought we were free of gatekeepers.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

Becca Mills said:


> The above scenario rings true to me. I'll toss out the caveat that I'm not a computer person _at all_, so what rings true to me might not, in fact, be true in any way, shape, or form. But given the fact that KDP's supposedly sophisticated page-counting mechanism turned out to be "the page you stopped at this time, minus the page you stopped at last time," I wouldn't be at all surprised if the page-botting algorithm turned out to be something like "*accounts that read more than three books a week are bots*."


Oh damn. I guess I should apologize to everyone for reading your books since I definitely read more than three a week.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

C. Gold said:


> Oh damn. I guess I should apologize to everyone for reading your books since I definitely read more than three a week.


Hey everyone, we found a bot!


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

What we need is somebody who is a friend of a friend who actually works for Amazon and can give us a hint of what is going on  .
Better still - a writer who can infiltrate Amazon by applying for a job there  .


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## Patrick-Stew (Jun 10, 2018)

This happened to me for the month of May. I lost 390K page reads... they basically slashed it in half, then emailed me to let me know. I sort of got over it, because, what else are you going to do? I have since emailed them to ask if my current page reads for the month of June are accurate or if they too will change negatively. I sort of want to know which books were read by fraudulent accounts. I can't really afford to leave KU because at the moment I'm averaging about 80K page reads per day. Even if they slash that in half, it's still a fair amount... It does suck though. Didn't really sleep very well Friday night - the night I saw them slashed in half... As you can imagine, I had no idea what on earth was going on...


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

Patrick-Stew said:


> This happened to me for the month of May. I lost 390K page reads... they basically slashed it in half, then emailed me to let me know. I sort of got over it, because, what else are you going to do? I have since emailed them to ask if my current page reads for the month of June are accurate or if they too will change negatively. I sort of want to know which books were read by fraudulent accounts. I can't really afford to leave KU because at the moment I'm averaging about 80K page reads per day. Even if they slash that in half, it's still a fair amount... It does suck though. Didn't really sleep very well Friday night - the night I saw them slashed in half... As you can imagine, I had no idea what on earth was going on...


Yeah, I was talking to a friend about this (we were both affected). It sounds like maybe Amazon isn't going to suspend authors anymore, but rather just steal 1/2 of their page reads going forward. Why do I say "steal"? Because I don't believe for one second that 1/2 of all of our page reads are illicit. So scammers gave me 25K illicit page reads in April, then 40K in May? Exactly 1/2 each month? No. And I seriously doubt 390K page reads of 780K were illicit in your case. It's not always 50%. Some people are losing more like 75% or 25%. It's obviously based on some kind of formula rather than them actually taking only illicit reads.

So if you have a 100K word book, Amazon pays about $2.25 for a full read (already low). But if they take 1/2 your page reads every month, the profit for each book is cut in half, that pretty much means you now make $1.12 for a 100K book or 56 cents for a 50K book. I guess better than nothing, but devastating for profit.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

TimothyEllis said:


> Those lousy emails come from programmers with no social skills, and no oversight by PR people.


This is very likely the case. It's something I have encountered quite often in the IT sphere with SLE speakers. Which would be in line with how high or low I'd expect the managerial level to be for this kind of thing.


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## GoneToWriterSanctum (Sep 13, 2014)

I don't consent


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced it is just another test on amazon's part.

Authors didn't bail in droves when the PPP was dropped - next test.
Authors didn't rally and bail when we stole a shed load of pages from a group of authors last year - next test.
Authors didn't bail when we cut KENP - next test.

They know that breaking a few eggs will get noticed and get authors talking - let's see which authors bail if we do this. Will the big names start pulling their books or will they stay? How many middle ranked authors will we lose? 

They started with the smaller authors and used the (perfect) scapegoat - the ones that are a hot topic - (would authors rally or suspect the smaller authors of botting - would people care?
They took varying levels of page reads at first then pushed up to fifty percent pages.
They banned people (that got peoples attention and they started leaving - so they backed off.)

What's the end game? What's coming in KU4? 

Trust ye not, amazon - you've got form on this kind of ****.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

Sam Rivers said:


> I stopped publishing since new books seems to attract trouble. I lost a lot of page reads after publishing a book in April. I think eventually everyone will get hit by page read reductions. It is just part of the new reality.


Not me. My new reality is going wide. I unchecked the renew box on everything and if I thought they'd let me out sooner I'd ask, but since I haven't been hit I don't really think they would.


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## GoneToWriterSanctum (Sep 13, 2014)

I don't consent


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

T. M. Bilderback said:


> I would ask anyway, Katrina46, and I'd tell them exactly why.
> 
> I bet they'll turn you loose.


The magic words are "reader experience", as in it's bad when books come out in the wrong order, leaving people stranded. Better they all come out at once.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

T. M. Bilderback said:


> I would ask anyway, Katrina46, and I'd tell them exactly why.
> 
> I bet they'll turn you loose.


It would be nice if they did. I was doing okay wide before when I had the not so brilliant idea of going all into KU to see what would happen. I've published quite a few books since then and I have to wonder if I might be doing just as well wide if I'd just left it alone. I'd really like to find out as soon as possible.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> The magic words are "reader experience", as in it's bad when books come out in the wrong order, leaving people stranded. Better they all come out at once.


They are series that will come out in the wrong order, so I might try that.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

Puddleduck said:


> This actually makes a lot of sense. It sounds like maybe they've decided that (for now, at least) authors are too likely to bail if they cut the payout too much below what it currently is. So they just take a bunch of pages reads under "mumble mumble botters" and there's nothing authors can do about, and tons of authors (including ones posting in this thread) just shrug and say, "What can you do?"


I can hardly imagine this making _less_ sense. Maybe that's just me. But let's say that Amazon has in fact decided "LOL, let's steal back like half the KU money we've been giving out to authors, that would be awesome!" Okay.. now, what's the best way to achieve that?

*Plan A*: Go ahead and report all of the page reads fairly. But then, after a month, go back and cut the page reads for a bunch of authors. Some by half, some by much more, and some by just a little bit. Just to make _absolutely sure_ that these authors actually notice, send out an email to alert them. Blame.. botters, that sounds good. Now sure, this plan has a few downsides. Like it sort of requires admitting that KU is chock full of bot activity, which maybe isn't that great for Amazon's reputation. And it's going to really upset a bunch of authors. Some of them will probably drop out of KU, and some will loudly complain and say Amazon is cheating them. But on the plus side.. hey, it's going to really upset a bunch of authors, which is _hilarious_!

... or *Plan B*: Just change a bit of the reporting code to silently cut off 50% or so of page reads. Authors will never know; they'll just think they are getting fewer reads. They won't get all upset at Amazon, contemplate leaving KU, raise a big public fuss, etc. But _big_ negative: those rats at Amazon won't get the joy that goes along with upsetting a bunch of authors.

_Cough_. I have no great faith in Amazon. But it's really a stretch to try to believe that not only is Amazon going to blatantly defraud authors, but that it will choose what may be the dumbest approach possible.


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## levolal (Apr 13, 2018)

kw3000 said:


> I find this chilling. Why wouldn't the big authors with the predominant numbers of page reads in KU find that they've had page reads docked as well? The fact that that isn't happening is strange. There has to be a reason.


I'm guessing because their bots detect what % of page reads come from "suspicious" accounts. So with a big author, they may have thousands of reads from bots per day but hundreds of thousands of legit reads. For a small author, the thousands of bot reads makes up a much larger % and flags the account for the next round of docking.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Atlantisatheart said:


> What's coming in KU4?


Shouldn't have to wonder much longer, July is almost here.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Occam's Razor: given the choice between a convoluted and a simple explanation, the simple is probably right.

Premise/hypothesis:

- Scammers hired bots to read pages of their books in order to get KENP that they did not actually deserve. 

- They targeted innocent books along with the scammer books in order to cover their tracks.

- Both scammer books and the innocent books had fraudulently inflated page reads as a result. This means that innocent authors had page reads that were not legitimate -- through no fault of their own, but still not legitimate.

- Amazon discovered the source of the bot page reads and terminated the accounts. 

- All their botted page reads will thus disappear from the fraudulent books and the innocent books alike.

Occam's Razor.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

sela said:


> Occam's Razor: given the choice between a convoluted and a simple explanation, the simple is probably right.
> 
> Premise/hypothesis:
> 
> ...


Agreed. Except with the additions of:

--Sometimes Amazon's algo detects borrow increases that actually line up with sales and promotions, flags them mistakenly, and yanks away 50% of reads because . . . 
--Accounts with actual fraudulent reads get 50% of their reads stripped as a penalty (probably because Amazon still can't actually count page reads accurately)

Too many people have lost 50% when they have different genres, wildly different sized catalogs, different situations with regards to new releases/backlists, for it to simply be reads disappearing when bad accounts are terminated. And too many people whose sales and borrows show only normal increases because of their efforts are getting their reads cut in half for me to believe they know what they're doing.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

kw3000 said:


> Yes, I'm with you, when I'd read the change in language in their email it gave me some hope that maybe staying in KU wouldn't mean risking my account. I think you're right, might have to accept (for now) that being part of the program means expecting up to half of our reads being expunged at some point. I suppose we can chalk all of this up to incremental improvement? May it continue!


For now, I'd still earn more via shaky page reads than if I had to go out in the wide world and flounder. Lifting the account risk means I'll stay longer as I slowly grow my business. Still not happy, but not freaking out anymore.


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## Gentleman Zombie (May 30, 2011)

C Winters said:


> If Amazon think its okay to go into money authors have earned from borrows and just take whatever they want without any evidence to justify it, I think KU's days are numbered. As bad as Wide might be, it certainly can't be THAT bad...


Though a few people who disagree with me I'll say this. But for all it's warts and boils, KU is still hugely profitable for a lot of authors. People don't give up that type of money easily and it's nearly impossible to do as well wide. Wide is slower and takes much more effort. However, it's probably best in the long run. But we humans aren't so great at thinking long-term.


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## Book Cat (Jan 3, 2016)

sela said:


> Occam's Razor: given the choice between a convoluted and a simple explanation, the simple is probably right.
> 
> Premise/hypothesis:
> 
> ...


The problem with that theory is that a fair few people hit, myself included, had low page reads to sales ration.

I had 117 sales of one of my books to 22k page reads (as I posted earlier in this thread). Amazon gutted the page reads down to 7100.

So, they are saying two-thirds of my already low page reads was bots. Mind you, that was a book 2. Book 1 between the two times it was hit, lost about 50% of page reads each time.

Book 1
Sales Pages Borrows*
353 94,675 363

book 1 data after second June hit
Sales Pages Borrows*
359 53,045 203

So, I am not buying that they are all illicit page reads. This book 1 stuck in the 3ks on Amazon for nearly two weeks before I pulled it out of KU after the hit in early May.

Everything I have heard about KU says most authors earn between 50-60% of their income from it, assuming their books get high enough in the ranks to get noticed by KU readers.

I find it fascinating that book 2 was hit so hard. I have no way to really track read through, as so much has happened to these books in the last month, it makes tracking anything pointless and hard. Two page read hits, and book 1 was "missing" for 33 hours due to that Amazon glitch mid last week. Plus, pulling out of KU had made them plummet off a cliff.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

"Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field  Indie world knows for a certainty what's going to work how Amazon KU works." - William Golding [my edits]


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

I had a thought, which is always dangerous.

What if the strange 50% level of read take back, is actually Amazon being retrospective? Say they detected the botting going back a whole year, but they already paid out on it, so they are recovering as much as they can on the sly in the month just past.

Just a thought.


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## notenoughcoffee (May 5, 2018)

TimothyEllis said:


> I had a thought, which is always dangerous.
> 
> What if the strange 50% level of read take back, is actually Amazon being retrospective? Say they detected the botting going back a whole year, but they already paid out on it, so they are recovering as much as they can on the sly in the month just past.
> 
> Just a thought.


This is kind of what I'm wondering. What if all along, no one had accurate page reads?

I suppose we'd need to know how many KU subscribers there even are in the first place, to even guess at that though.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

Book Cat said:


> Everything I have heard about KU says most authors earn between 50-60% of their income from it, assuming their books get high enough in the ranks to get noticed by KU readers.


_If_ Amazon is actually (more or less) accurately detecting bot accounts and nullifying their reads, it is probably fair to assume that the botting has been going on for quite some time - and the only thing that has changed is that Amazon has finally developed the tools to detect it.

If so, that would suggest that general ideas and expectations about what is 'normal' in terms of sales to page reads have in fact been distorted by past bot activity. Meaning that, potentially, many authors may have been enjoying something like double the KU reads they should have received - for who knows how long - due to widespread botting.

I don't know if Amazon is accurately detecting and removing robo-reads, or if it has some crummy algorithm that is flagging every KU account that borrows more than three books a week. Just pointing out that _if_ there is indeed widespread bot activity, which is definitely possible at least, this may well mean that the community's general sense of what is 'normal' in KU may be significantly inflated.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

I wonder whether any of this is related to a very curious spamming scheme which has been evolving recently on Goodreads.

People will send you a friend request, and in the request they give you the shortened URL to a book, usually on Amazon. What is so curious: the books are not new books, just now added to Amazon. Instead they are often classics or 20+ year old bestsellers. Books which absolutely don't need any advertisement to sell.

The scheme is enervating. Everyone I know well on Goodreads, including myself, gets 2-3 such requests per day. Goodreads staff is killing them sight unseen, the origins appear to be mainly foreign language users who freshly subscribed to Goodreads. Their potential purpose is a huge puzzle, but in light of what is discussed here, I wonder whether the scammers are girding their loins and are now blowing smoke over some thing.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

Reading through all this makes me glad I never seriously considered KU.

Too much power in someone else's (seemingly fickle) hands.


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## EllieDee (May 28, 2017)

> Reading through all this makes me glad I never seriously considered KU.
> 
> Too much power in someone else's (seemingly fickle) hands.


I hear that. You know what's funny? Around New Year's, I actually thought about enrolling a couple of titles into KU while keeping the rest wide. You know, dip my toes in the water of both ponds. And then it hit, just one scandal after another, one trend of small authors getting screwed after another. It's _June_, it's still pandemonium out there, and there's no end in sight!

So I've changed my mind on that one. FU, KU!


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## Book Cat (Jan 3, 2016)

EllieDee said:


> I hear that. You know what's funny? Around New Year's, I actually thought about enrolling a couple of titles into KU while keeping the rest wide. You know, dip my toes in the water of both ponds. And then it hit, just one scandal after another, one trend of small authors getting screwed after another. It's _June_, it's still pandemonium out there, and there's no end in sight!
> 
> So I've changed my mind on that one. FU, KU!


I imagine this same thing will be happaning this time next month, and the month after that...

Most authors wont leave KU as long as Amazon does not threaten accounts like it did in May and April (and likly before that).

That said...

It would not surprise me if each month a few authors get terminated. Like, maybe 2% of people hit. This way the number is few enough, other authors can just assume those authors must have truly done something wrong, and that's why they got terminated. The authors would be random, not based on earning/page reads.

What purpose would it serve to slowly axe people like that? Reducing the numbers of lower earning authors from KU, without causing an uproar.

I can't remember who said it, someone on a podcast, but an experienced author in the business. They said they felt Amazon was becoming more unfriendly to authors (and others) who sell on the site but don't make them much money and he felt this would only get worse in the following years.

If he is right, perhaps this is part of weeding the small prawns out of KU. I mean, it mainly smaller people, maybe with a decent hit on their hands, or new authors being hit by this. And, as I and others have shown with our data, its not like our page numbers were extremely out of sink with sales, in fact, they were low in ration to sales.

I don't buy the "they are taking page reads away now to make up for bots earlier." I didn't have enough page reads on my other books to make up for the over 100k I have lost in the two times I was hit. I am pretty new to this industry, though I have followed it closely for the last 4 years. I would pit my knowledge of it against any of the decent-selling authors.

So, anyway, in the end, I guess we can theorize all day. But one thing is clear: Indy publishing is becoming an increasingly hostile, competitive and less profitable place for many authors.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Has anyone done a poll on exactly which sub-cats books are in which are being read stripped?

I'm wondering if its very sub-cat specific, or not.

We keep talking generally, but should we actually be looking at the very specific?

It already seems like this is not bot reads, since none of the stats so far show any. So what it its something different to do with specific sub-cats? Do we have any info?


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## Book Cat (Jan 3, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> Has anyone done a poll on exactly which sub-cats books are in which are being read stripped?
> 
> I'm wondering if its very sub-cat specific, or not.
> 
> ...


Most that I have heard of are LITRPG and Reverse Herem. I am sure there must be others. Books closely matching these have been hit too.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Book Cat said:


> Most that I have heard of are LITRPG and Reverse Herem. I am sure there must be others. Books closely matching these have been hit too.


Those are the 2 I've heard about as well. Be nice to know the others.

But lets take these 2 for starters. What is different about them as sub-cats? And is it possible Amazon is taking reads from every single author in those sub-cats, because of whatever is different?

Ok, I may be way out of the box here, but we are getting no-where inside the box.


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## RinG (Mar 12, 2013)

Has anyone who hasn't been hit been seeing lowered page reads? I haven't lost any after the fact, but the last two months my page reads have been half what I would expect. Just wondering if it's related...


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

sela said:


> Occam's Razor: given the choice between a convoluted and a simple explanation, the simple is probably right.
> 
> Premise/hypothesis:
> 
> ...


Occam's Razor rarely applies to massively corrupt corporations because Profit Motive and is undermined by contrived coincidences such as the culling just happening to bring the Global Fund back into line with what Amazon is willing to pay on it.

They keep shoveling free accounts onto the pile, creating more page reads that are making zero money on them and it's time to recoup some of that off what they see as their indentured servants.

Hey, it's not like they fought back literally every time Amazon's screwed them before.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Rinelle Grey said:


> Has anyone who hasn't been hit been seeing lowered page reads? I haven't lost any after the fact, but the last two months my page reads have been half what I would expect. Just wondering if it's related...


No. But I'm still in the tail wagging stage of a new release.

Are you doing AMS at the moment?


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## RinG (Mar 12, 2013)

Yep, doing my usual AMS. Had two new releases in the last couple of months, and they've barely had a page reads bump at all!


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## going going gone (Jun 4, 2013)

Rinelle Grey said:


> Has anyone who hasn't been hit been seeing lowered page reads? I haven't lost any after the fact, but the last two months my page reads have been half what I would expect. Just wondering if it's related...


Hi, Rinelle! Mine have been strange all year.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

Rinelle Grey said:


> Has anyone who hasn't been hit been seeing lowered page reads? I haven't lost any after the fact, but the last two months my page reads have been half what I would expect. Just wondering if it's related...


(Speculation warning Since it seems that Amazon had finally been cracking down on the bots, we may be approaching a point where many existing bot accounts have been shut down and are no longer producing robo-reads. And botters may have stopped creating new accounts, at least until/unless they can figure out how to get around Amazon's detection methods.

The result being, perhaps, that many illegitimate page-reads are being stopped in advance - rather than initially being counted and then stripped later. This is good in the sense that authors can make more accurately informed decisions about advertising, etc., rather than having inflated expectations of a book's performance and KU royalties.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

sela said:


> Occam's Razor: given the choice between a convoluted and a simple explanation, the simple is probably right.
> 
> Premise/hypothesis:
> 
> ...


Agree. I've been wondering how they chose which innocent authors to target. What if they hit the sponsored ads in their particular genre? I've been checking mine this morning and I did have some "possible" suspicious author names and book titles in mine, because I haven't been careful enough about choosing them. I turned them off just in case. From what I've read on this subject so far, the AMS ads seems to be the only common denominator. If I'm right, we need a (private) list of author names to avoid in our ads.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

boba1823 said:


> (Speculation warning Since it seems that Amazon had finally been cracking down on the bots, we may be approaching a point where many existing bot accounts have been shut down and are no longer producing robo-reads. And botters may have stopped creating new accounts, at least until/unless they can figure out how to get around Amazon's detection methods.
> 
> The result being, perhaps, that many illegitimate page-reads are being stopped in advance - rather than initially being counted and then stripped later. This is good in the sense that authors can make more accurately informed decisions about advertising, etc., rather than having inflated expectations of a book's performance and KU royalties.


That's as good a bit of speculating as I've seen so far. We can only hope it's true.


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## Sam Rivers (May 22, 2011)

> The result being, perhaps, that many illegitimate page-reads are being stopped in advance - rather than initially being counted and then stripped later. This is good in the sense that authors can make more accurately informed decisions about advertising, etc., rather than having inflated expectations of a book's performance and KU royalties.


That would be good since writers wouldn't get upset by getting page reads and having them taken away.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

Sam Rivers said:


> That would be good since writers wouldn't get upset by getting page reads and having them taken away.


And even more importantly than avoiding upset, avoiding wasting money on ads that aren't actually working.

One of the big reasons why I haven't tried KU is because of Amazon's really poor reporting. They don't even tell you how many borrows a book is getting? Yikes. The idea of trying to discern how well advertising is working based on page reads is just too much guesswork for me.

Then with the current situation, I imagine running a FB ad that seems to be generating say a 75% return factoring in page reads, only to discover a month later - oh, actually it was running at a 25% _loss_ for an entire month - ouch. That's nuts.

Although personally I do suspect that at least most of the stripped page reads are in fact illegitimate robo-reads, I also feel that Amazon should be obliged to pay authors for them. If Amazon is going to offer (sorta) real-time sales/page-reads statistics to authors, it should have an obligation to ensure that those are accurate since authors are obviously going to rely on that information to make business decisions that cost money.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Vaalingrade said:


> Occam's Razor rarely applies to massively corrupt corporations because Profit Motive and is undermined by contrived coincidences such as the culling just happening to bring the Global Fund back into line with what Amazon is willing to pay on it.
> 
> They keep shoveling free accounts onto the pile, creating more page reads that are making zero money on them and it's time to recoup some of that off what they see as their indentured servants.
> 
> Hey, it's not like they fought back literally every time Amazon's screwed them before.


There's another aphorism that applies -- a variant of Hanlon's Razor: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

Or, in Amazon's case, "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by Amazon's desire to use as many algorithms as possible to avoid having to hire actual human beings."

That's called Sela's Razor.


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## HeyImBen (Mar 7, 2013)

Rinelle Grey said:


> Has anyone who hasn't been hit been seeing lowered page reads? I haven't lost any after the fact, but the last two months my page reads have been half what I would expect. Just wondering if it's related...


I can pinpoint the day my page reads dropped. Normally I get anywhere from 2K-5K reads/day. Beginning April 8th they dropped to 1K-2K/day with a couple days spiking over 2K. I ran promotions and had a new release in mid-May and I'm now back to where I was before April 8th.


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## doolittle03 (Feb 13, 2015)

cadle-sparks said:


> Hi, Rinelle! Mine have been strange all year. And right now, I have rankings that seem far too high for sales reported, and I have to wonder which is true, the one automated system or the other. More and more, as these sorts of problems occur, my trust for Amazon is eroded (and not believing a word of what they told me on AMS ads after a few months of that experiment eroded a big chunk of it at once), and I am left with the uncomfortable conclusion that we have no idea if anything they report to us is true or not. I could be selling 100 books a day and they're telling me 10. You could be getting 5000 page reads a day but they're telling you half that.
> 
> Without a vast audit, I see no way we can know.


This is my feeling. I have an historical romance pen name that's had reliably decent page reads in the past. Nothing spectacular, just what one would expect from the niche I write in, and since March they've stalled and even with new releases, they've dropped to nothing. It's as if they're not in KU at all.

My gut tells me something is wrong. Something is hinky inside the Amazon fortress.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

I personally am not confident at all that they are actually finding a lot of actual fraud based on what we do know from authors who are received the letters.  It doesn't make any sense.  At best they are catching frauds while having a fair amount of false positives.  Maybe.

Also, the letters are telling authors to stop what they are doing, not that some of the page reads were coming from other illegitimate accounts.  Now maybe for legal purposes they would never say that, but they are saying the author in question has illegitimate page reads and then hitting them with a 50% penalty.  How could half of everyone's page reads that are getting the letters be illegitimate?  That's a very stiff penalty, especially when no proof has to be given and author's have no recourse for trying to show their innocence.

I also don't think Amazon is doing anything nefarious. They are relying on automation and their algorithms, so I agree with Sela's Razor, lol.

None of us know the extent of the fraud or how much Amazon might be getting rid of (assuming that 3 new frauds don't crop up to take the old one's place), so yeah it's  all speculation.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

sela said:


> There's another aphorism that applies -- a variant of Hanlon's Razor: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
> 
> Or, in Amazon's case, "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by Amazon's desire to use as many algorithms as possible to avoid having to hire actual human beings."
> 
> That's called Sela's Razor.


You have permanently displaced Occam in my mind, sela.


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## SalomeGolding (Apr 25, 2018)

Nic said:


> I wonder whether any of this is related to a very curious spamming scheme which has been evolving recently on Goodreads.
> 
> People will send you a friend request, and in the request they give you the shortened URL to a book, usually on Amazon. What is so curious: the books are not new books, just now added to Amazon. Instead they are often classics or 20+ year old bestsellers. Books which absolutely don't need any advertisement to sell.
> 
> The scheme is enervating. Everyone I know well on Goodreads, including myself, gets 2-3 such requests per day. Goodreads staff is killing them sight unseen, the origins appear to be mainly foreign language users who freshly subscribed to Goodreads. Their potential purpose is a huge puzzle, but in light of what is discussed here, I wonder whether the scammers are girding their loins and are now blowing smoke over some thing.


Very curious.

Are they perhaps attempting to get innocent readers labelled as bots? Another smokescreen being thrown up?


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

kw3000 said:


> Point is, it's impossible to say what's what because it's all completely hidden in pea soup fog. We have no way of knowing where the reads are coming from so we no way of knowing if we're being wronged, righted, robbed, botted, compensated or gifted. It's a guess wrapped inside an estimate covered in speculation sauce.


This is why I'm going to give wide a shot, despite the odds. We don't know anything, but we SHOULD know all of these things. It's not like Amazon doesn't have the capability to let us know how many borrows we have in a day. So now we have many unknowns:

1. How many borrows?
2. How many legit page reads?
3. How many false page reads?
4. What will the payout be this month? 
5. Will I make $4,000 or $1,000 this month? (not me, but bigwigs)

I can't think of any other business where sales and payout rate is kept completely hidden from vendors and you just have to trust the store with no way to audit. Now there's also the hidden surprise if you'll be paid .0045 per page read or .00225 (once Amazon confiscates 1/2 page read profit in the following month). I suppose it's better than a permanent ban, buuuuut no one can plan their life around all those unknowns.


----------



## Bella Breen (May 24, 2015)

Book Cat said:


> Most that I have heard of are LITRPG and Reverse Herem. I am sure there must be others. Books closely matching these have been hit too.


Mpreg as well.


----------



## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

EllieDee said:


> I hear that. You know what's funny? Around New Year's, I actually thought about enrolling a couple of titles into KU while keeping the rest wide. You know, dip my toes in the water of both ponds. And then it hit, just one scandal after another, one trend of small authors getting screwed after another. It's _June_, it's still pandemonium out there, and there's no end in sight!
> 
> So I've changed my mind on that one. FU, KU!


That would make sense if losing your entire account weren't a distinct possibility. Now that it is, being in KU at all is a gamble, because of getting targeted by camo reads from bots.



Book Cat said:


> It would not surprise me if each month a few authors get terminated. Like, maybe 2% of people hit. This way the number is few enough, other authors can just assume those authors must have truly done something wrong, and that's why they got terminated. The authors would be random, not based on earning/page reads.
> 
> What purpose would it serve to slowly axe people like that? Reducing the numbers of lower earning authors from KU, without causing an uproar.


This makes no sense, even from Amazon standards. There are SO many ways to reduce KU participation by the prawns without, as you say, causing an uproar.

In fact, doing it the current way, like the way you theorize, IS causing a huge uproar.

The simplest way to get rid of the prawny is to charge a small monthly fee, say $5, to participate in Select. Those making very little in KU would leave. This could be ramped up to $10, $15 and so on over time. That would cause thousands of the prawny to bail, if that were Amazon's goal.


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## ........ (May 4, 2013)

Is there widespread confirmation that the penalty is always 50%? 

I've heard people saying it but are the collecting evidence along the way? I don't track my numbers day to day so honestly if they were cut I wouldn't know at all (except perhaps noticing a lower figure on Book Report).

A 50% cut isn't bad page reads being removed. It's an algorithm, a checkbox unthinking punishment. It means that Amazon doesn't know how many pages reads are fake otherwise they'd just remove those. 

It really looks like they find a bot KU reader account, then select every book it touched and cut page reads by a fixed percentage for all those authors.


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

........ said:


> *Is there widespread confirmation that the penalty is always 50%? *
> 
> I've heard people saying it but are the collecting evidence along the way? I don't track my numbers day to day so honestly if they were cut I wouldn't know at all (except perhaps noticing a lower figure on Book Report).
> 
> ...


No. If you look at my post above, you'll see that I got hit (on one book) for 68%, for my March reads. And Raven (in the original post) says she lost 60% -- from 94k down to 38k ... and then in a later post said they took another 4k, making it about 64%.

My total cuts came to 65% over all books. One day as few as 7 pages were cut (out of 16) and as many as 3803 out of 3843 on another day (my best day before the cut, one of my worst afterwards). All told, I lost 15,833 out of 24,829. I immediately began pulling books. Didn't lose any pages in April, nor in May (out of 5877 and 773 respectively)


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

........ said:


> Is there widespread confirmation that the penalty is always 50%?
> 
> I've heard people saying it but are the collecting evidence along the way? I don't track my numbers day to day so honestly if they were cut I wouldn't know at all (except perhaps noticing a lower figure on Book Report).
> 
> ...


50% seems to be the most common. But there does seem to be some kind of formula going on. Like 25%, 50%, 65%. You don't usually see someone they got hit for 5% or 16%.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

sela said:


> There's another aphorism that applies -- a variant of Hanlon's Razor: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
> 
> Or, in Amazon's case, "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by Amazon's desire to use as many algorithms as possible to avoid having to hire actual human beings."
> 
> That's called Sela's Razor.


How many times does someone have to get caught hiding an ace up their sleeve in a poker game before we can assume he's not in fact saving those aces to eat later and are actually cheating?

I think we have to really decide which narrative to hold to

Are Amazon business geniuses who know the market and are doing the best to make a profit and we should just suck it up because we're just not as good at capitalism?

Or are they drooling morons who just happen to screw up in such a serendipitous way--usually Every July and November--that it always hurts authors and helps their bottom line?


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## meh (Apr 18, 2013)

TOS.


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## 39416 (Mar 18, 2011)

Has any author presumably innocent actually been banned over this?

Has any author presumably guilty been actually banned from these recent page-deletion goings-on?


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## MissingAlaska (Apr 28, 2014)

I'm beginning to think that spam-bots are now targeting other authors as a way to trigger Amazon-bots to strip page reads, hurting legit authors and causing us to lose confidence in this system. It stands to reason that fewer legitimate authors in KU means more room for the spammers. There is nothing to lose for the cheaters in this situation.  

My page reads completely dried up this week (zero for seven days). Historically, my reads have been meager but consistent and reliable since KU was first unveiled (about 10000 pages a month). This might be a blip -- but I'm getting the feeling that my reads have also been stripped.


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

MissingAlaska said:


> I'm beginning to think that spam-bots are now targeting other authors as a way to trigger Amazon-bots to strip page reads, hurting legit authors and causing us to lose confidence in this system. It stands to reason that fewer legitimate authors in KU means more room for the spammers. There is nothing to lose for the cheaters in this situation.
> 
> My page reads completely dried up this week (zero for seven days). Historically, my reads have been meager but consistent and reliable since KU was first unveiled (about 10000 pages a month). This might be a blip -- but I'm getting the feeling that my reads have also been stripped.


I've had zero reads this month.


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## Ryan W. Mueller (Jul 14, 2017)

I haven't had any pages stripped, but my page reads have really dried up in the last month.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

I wonder if perhaps the Zon's overall eBook sales and KU readership has seen a decline, and the KU-bot thing has just exaggerated it.

Are there any overall stats, or is that just a company secret?


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## Gaylord Fancypants (Jun 15, 2018)

Lilly_Frost said:


> I think it's all a big company secret. I'm also starting to wonder if maybe a large percentage--maybe even a majority--of KU accounts aren't fake in some way or another. Either botted or one person with 2 or 3 accounts engaging in incentivized behavior.


Similar rumors have been flying literally since KU began. Amazon has always been cagy about it. I finally met a real human being in the real-world meatspace who had even heard of KU just a few weeks ago. Otherwise even heavy readers, when I mention KU, they're like "what's that?" It does seem like Amazon purports to have a lot more subscribers than there really are.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

I have my suspicions about KU being as botty as Twitter, as well.

However, I'm also wondering - based on these recent reports - whether Amazon is starting to delay its reporting of page-reads. It would be sensible, assuming there's a lot of robo-reading activity throughout the KU ecosystem, to delay reporting so as to pre-emptively remove illegitimate reads rather than stripping them after they have already been reported.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

boba1823 said:


> However, I'm also wondering - based on these recent reports - whether Amazon is starting to delay its reporting of page-reads. It would be sensible, assuming there's a lot of robo-reading activity throughout the KU ecosystem, to delay reporting so as to pre-emptively remove illegitimate reads rather than stripping them after they have already been reported.


In the ASN FB group Marie Force asked how people would feel if page read reporting was delayed rather than having pages stripped later. Don't know if her question was based on insight or just curiosity.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

I never agreed to VerticalScope's rights-grabbing TOS.


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## Guest (Jun 15, 2018)

*Quote:
"The simplest way to get rid of the prawny is to charge a small monthly fee, say $5, to participate in Select."*

How about we pay publishers a fee?

Or would that be called subsidy publishing?


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Shelley K said:


> Coincidentally, delaying page reads is one more way to make it difficult to tell whether AMS ads are producing results. The dashboard is already tragic. This would make it worse.


My response (as someone who has helped financial institutions with their transaction monitoring systems) was that I couldn't see how it would be workable. The delay to review questionable page reads would be too long.

Maybe you could delay page reads for just certain types of accounts (like new ones) that are especially prone to fraudulent behavior, but there's no way you'd ever want to commit to not pulling back page reads later if something slipped through the cracks.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

okey dokey said:


> *Quote:
> "The simplest way to get rid of the prawny is to charge a small monthly fee, say $5, to participate in Select."*
> 
> How about we pay publishers a fee?
> ...


As Amazon is a distributor, not a publisher, the two issues are not the same.

However, in a broader light, unless an author handles everything including e-commerce, fees get paid. A publisher takes a big percentage of an author's revenue and pays them a smaller percentage as royalties. If they have an agent, the agent gets a cut. Amazon gets their 30-65% plus delivery fees.

The only difference here would be that this fee would be up front rather than taken from existing earnings--and that's frankly the point. It would discourage those uploaders who can't even clear $5 a month in profits from doing so. This principle is no different from the rest of the business world, where nearly all businesses have up-front costs.

KDP is nearly unique in creating a place to sell content with no up-front costs. If the goal is to get people to self-filter unprofitable content that clogs up the works, this seems a simple way to do it.

Said another way, no business principle is absolute. "Money should always flow to the author" is a great principle, but that's not absolute either. For example, Ingram has at times charged a reasonable setup fee (still does on some items, if I remember correctly) and nobody is squawking about them being a vanity publisher.

Substituting rules--even principles--for informed judgment is self-defeating.


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## MissingAlaska (Apr 28, 2014)

boba1823 said:


> I have my suspicions about KU being as botty as Twitter, as well.
> 
> However, I'm also wondering - based on these recent reports - whether Amazon is starting to delay its reporting of page-reads. It would be sensible, assuming there's a lot of robo-reading activity throughout the KU ecosystem, to delay reporting so as to pre-emptively remove illegitimate reads rather than stripping them after they have already been reported.


THIS makes a lot of sense (or, it's just wishful thinking on my part).

If this is the case, Amazon might want to think through the ramifications. I always said that once my page reads dry up that I was going wide -- and I've been preparing to do so this week. Admittedly, I'm just a prawn -- but my read-throughs from book to book are over 80% with good, organic reviews. I made at least a few customers happy. Cumulatively, if enough of us prawns disappear, there's less bait to attract the shrimpboats (aka mega-readers -- how's that for a crappy metaphor?)

The idea that KU might be infested with bots (like Twitter) is also a little scary... but believable.


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## Avis Black (Jun 12, 2012)

I wonder if authors are inadvertently triggering bot behavior.  For example, Author B sees that Author A is doing well on the bestseller lists, and doesn't realize that it's due to bots.  So Author B sets up AMS ads with Author A's name and book titles as keywords, or uses similar category keywords with the hope of landing ads on Author A's book pages.  Then the bots, in trying to cover their tracks, discover Author B's book because of nearby placement and bot-reads it like crazy.  Author B, who has no idea where the reads are coming from, just thinks the ads are working well.  Then Amazon discovers Author A's botting and strips both Author A and B of reads for that month, and Author B is left stunned and shocked.


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## doolittle03 (Feb 13, 2015)

boba1823 said:


> However, I'm also wondering - based on these recent reports - whether Amazon is starting to delay its reporting of page-reads. It would be sensible, assuming there's a lot of robo-reading activity throughout the KU ecosystem, to delay reporting so as to pre-emptively remove illegitimate reads rather than stripping them after they have already been reported.


I hope this is what's going on. I wish they would just tell us. "Dear KDP Select publisher, page reads reports are delayed out of necessity to audit illegitimate activity. Thank you for your understanding."

But as MissingAlaska said, without knowing, page reads drying up for no apparent reason is driving authors out of the program, maybe prematurely.


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## meh (Apr 18, 2013)

TOS.


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## Ann Howes (Apr 7, 2018)

Jan Hurst-Nicholson said:


> I've had zero reads this month.


Yeah, late May and June have been brutal for me too. I had a two week period of zero sales (even though I had a Facebook ad and an AMS ad) and very few page reads. Then it improved for about a week, then again the last two days, nothing. My AMS ad has a decent click to impression ratio (under a thousand) so I don't know what the hell is going on. Its demoralizing.


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## Gaylord Fancypants (Jun 15, 2018)

I don't think I've gotten any pages within the first maybe 2-3 days of a book's release recently, so a reporting delay seems possible.



MissingAlaska said:


> THIS makes a lot of sense (or, it's just wishful thinking on my part).
> 
> If this is the case, Amazon might want to think through the ramifications. I always said that once my page reads dry up that I was going wide -- and I've been preparing to do so this week. Admittedly, I'm just a prawn -- but my read-throughs from book to book are over 80% with good, organic reviews. I made at least a few customers happy. Cumulatively, if enough of us prawns disappear, there's less bait to attract the shrimpboats (aka mega-readers -- how's that for a crappy metaphor?)
> 
> The idea that KU might be infested with bots (like Twitter) is also a little scary... but believable.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

judygoodwin said:


> I have a serial romance so the typical behavior is for someone to go through each part in a week or so. Therefore, whoever said that maybe they're removing more than 3 books a week may be onto something.


I was very nearly mostly kidding when I said that. If it turns out to be true, I'll weep.


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## Ryan W. Mueller (Jul 14, 2017)

I have a grand total of 23 KENP so far in June. I've never had a month with less than 1000 KENP. For May, I had 3688. If this is the new reality of KU, I'm out.

I've already unchecked the boxes. Everything should be out in August.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

David VanDyke said:


> The only difference here would be that this fee would be up front rather than taken from existing earnings--and that's frankly the point. It would discourage those uploaders who can't even clear $5 a month in profits from doing so. This principle is no different from the rest of the business world, where nearly all businesses have up-front costs.
> 
> KDP is nearly unique in creating a place to sell content with no up-front costs. If the goal is to get people to self-filter unprofitable content that clogs up the works, this seems a simple way to do it.


How is charging authors $5 a month to be in KDP going to eliminate bot-readers and other gaming of the system? The small people aren't the problem. The little guy who maybe sells 5 books a year and isn't in KU isn't the problem. The ones who appear to be the problem are the ones making big money -- the ones who are all over KU, and to whom $5 would be chump change -- and even with a $5 charge they would continue to profit off of questionable tactics.

Edit to Add: after re-reading your posts, I understand more clearly you are not in favor of such an idea.


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## George Trigiris (Jun 12, 2018)

This is just another example of amazon being amazon, a.k.a. bullies.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

jb1111 said:


> How is charging authors $5 a month to be in KDP going to eliminate bot-readers and other gaming of the system? The small people aren't the problem. The little guy who maybe sells 5 books a year and isn't in KU isn't the problem. The ones who appear to be the problem are the ones making big money -- the ones who are all over KU, and to whom $5 would be chump change -- and even with a $5 charge they would continue to profit off of questionable tactics.
> 
> Edit to Add: after re-reading your posts, I understand more clearly you are not in favor of such an idea.


Yeah, I was not suggesting that as an answer to botting.

I was refuting the assertion that Amazon is doing all this stuff supposedly in order to drive out prawny indies from the program.

I advanced the $5 fee as a much more believable way to cut down on prawny indies, IF that were Amazon's goal--which I don't think it is.

In other words, if Amazon wanted fewer small indies in KU, it would create a direct burden to the smallest indies in order to discourage them--just the same way it does with its payment system where it requires thresholds and fees if you want a check (cheque) mailed to you. It wouldn't create a bunch of chaos and "hope" some people bailed.


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## ........ (May 4, 2013)

Here are the steps Amazon could take to fix a lot of problems:

1) Only one bank account can be associated with one publishing account at a time. It's trivial to set up multiple KDP accounts but not so much with banks. If you keep opening and closing accounts they notice.

2) All accounts must have an address tied to them and a letter is sent out with a verification code in it

3) All accounts must have a phone number connected to it for second verification by text message or automated phone call. This is a common technology

4) Even the most prolific author isn't publishing as much as these scam accounts. Flag for personal check any accounts with high publishing numbers

5) For all new accounts a real life human checks the books published if their first royalty amounts are above a certain level. If someone new publishes thirty books and has a $5K month out of the gate then check their books before first royalty is paid.

6) One address per KDP account. If two people live at the same address and want to publish they can supply utility bills to prove they both live their. This puts another barrier to these scam accounts.

7) Require submission of tax documents/identification.

All up just these moves would mean a scam account would need a unique address they can receive physical mail at, unique bank account, a unique phone number and would be examined closely before their first payment hits.

Finally, it would be profitable to have a person or even a few people to go through accounts from highest earnings down to manually verify if they're a real person. 

Essentially, real authors have characteristics that scammers don't, like a website or social media. Once you get past the whales and are down looking at KDP accounts raking in $50K a year, how many fakes do you have to find to make it worth hiring someone? One person finds one account at that level and that's their wage for a year. 

I'd also add that KDP should randomly send out a text message verification or real address verification. Scammers would then have to keep any fake number and address live all the time, which costs money. 

Amazon could also flag any accounts that publish and then unpublish. Real authors do unpublish but not at the rate scammers do.


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## LitRPG (Mar 14, 2018)

Book Cat said:


> Most that I have heard of are LITRPG and Reverse Herem. I am sure there must be others. Books closely matching these have been hit too.


Oh, good. LitRPG is one of the main categories being hit? i haven't even published anything yet, but take one look at my username and guess which genre I'm trying to write? Maybe I should just launch with no KU. Sigh.


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

I wonder how these scammers manage with their tax returns. Do Amazon report them, or are most of them living outside the US?


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## Book Cat (Jan 3, 2016)

LitRPG said:


> Oh, good. LitRPG is one of the main categories being hit? i haven't even published anything yet, but take one look at my username and guess which genre I'm trying to write? Maybe I should just launch with no KU. Sigh.


I was a LitRPG writer hit twice.

I'd suggest to go Amazon exclusive, but maybe wait until next month to see if Amazon hits people again, and if they terminate people, then decide. But, if you are going to release before July 8th-10th, then maybe risk it? I mean, it will help your rank and even if they gut 50% of your pages, you will still make money off them. I have had 0 sales of my LITRPG wide in 5 weeks. The market for it is on Amazon, and the wide stores care less about you than Amazon does.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Book Cat said:


> I was a LitRPG writer hit twice.
> 
> I'd suggest to go Amazon exclusive, but maybe wait until next month to see if Amazon hits people again, and if they terminate people, then decide. But, if you are going to release before July 8th-10th, then maybe risk it? I mean, it will help your rank and even if they gut 50% of your pages, you will still make money off them. I have had 0 sales of my LITRPG wide in 5 weeks. The market for it is on Amazon, and the wide stores care less about you than Amazon does.


Can I ask a stupid question at this point?

What is the attraction of writing LitRPG? And can it be changed into something not being hit by Amazon? Seems to me the easiest thing would be to stop writing litrpg, and write something different using the same skill set. But then, I know nothing about it.


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

TimothyEllis said:


> Can I ask a stupid question at this point?
> 
> What is the attraction of writing LitRPG? And can it be changed into something not being hit by Amazon? Seems to me the easiest thing would be to stop writing litrpg, and write something different using the same skill set. But then, I know nothing about it.


It's a popular genre that is really hot right now. Books can easily hit 1K or 2K without any marketing at all. It's a bit difficult to write properly, and probably shouldn't be written by people who aren't intimately familiar with MMOs or RPGs, unless they are prepared to do a lot of research (I haven't written any, as keeping track of the numbers and doing math sounds like too much of a chore to me).


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Saboth said:


> It's a popular genre that is really hot right now. Books can easily hit 1K or 2K without any marketing at all. It's a bit difficult to write properly, and probably shouldn't be written by people who aren't intimately familiar with MMOs or RPGs, unless they are prepared to do a lot of research (I haven't written any, as keeping track of the numbers and doing math sounds like too much of a chore to me).


What exactly is LitRPG and MMOs?


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## Saboth (May 6, 2017)

Jan Hurst-Nicholson said:


> What exactly is LitRPG and MMOs?


An MMO is an online game where thousands or millions of people play in a game world (like a fantasy world filled with giants, ogres, etc.) They create an avatar to explore this world, going on quests, teaming up with other players to accomplish goals.

litRPG has different genres in it, but in general it's usually a story from the viewpoint of one of these characters. Either someone in the real world ends up in one of these games, somehow, or they are in the game due to virtual reality, or the story is simply from the pov of a character in the game. They go on quests, explore the world, etc. The main difference is the reader is aware they are in a game, and they are provided with the character stats. Like a character might have 5 strength, 3 agility, 2 wisdom, etc., and they gain more as they level up in the game. So there's usually math involved, where the character becomes more powerful as they gain more levels and equipment.

"I looked at my stats and put one point into strength, because I wanted to be able to use the new sword I got from the quest, which requires 6 strength. Now when I hit a goblin, it takes 11 damage instead of 9, because the sword gives me 1 extra damage, and my strength gives me 1 extra damage."


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## MissingAlaska (Apr 28, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> What is the attraction of writing LitRPG? And can it be changed into something not being hit by Amazon? Seems to me the easiest thing would be to stop writing litrpg, and write something different using the same skill set. But then, I know nothing about it.


Readers of "Ready Player One" wanted more and couldn't find it. It was an untapped niche for quite a while. Even now, I'm not sure there have been any breakout successes though the potential is there with the right twist on the genre.


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Saboth said:


> An MMO is an online game where thousands or millions of people play in a game world (like a fantasy world filled with giants, ogres, etc.) They create an avatar to explore this world, going on quests, teaming up with other players to accomplish goals.
> 
> litRPG has different genres in it, but in general it's usually a story from the viewpoint of one of these characters. Either someone in the real world ends up in one of these games, somehow, or they are in the game due to virtual reality, or the story is simply from the pov of a character in the game. They go on quests, explore the world, etc. The main difference is the reader is aware they are in a game, and they are provided with the character stats. Like a character might have 5 strength, 3 agility, 2 wisdom, etc., and they gain more as they level up in the game. So there's usually math involved, where the character becomes more powerful as they gain more levels and equipment.
> 
> "I looked at my stats and put one point into strength, because I wanted to be able to use the new sword I got from the quest, which requires 6 strength. Now when I hit a goblin, it takes 11 damage instead of 9, because the sword gives me 1 extra damage, and my strength gives me 1 extra damage."


Thanks. Sounds complicated. The maths alone would disqualify me .


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

MissingAlaska said:


> Readers of "Ready Player One" wanted more and couldn't find it. It was an untapped niche for quite a while. Even now, I'm not sure there have been any breakout successes though the potential is there with the right twist on the genre.


But why would Amazon be targeting authors there? Or are they basically fanfic writers who are ignoring all the rules? Has to be some reason why bots are targeting these books, and reads are getting removed.

I assume these authors have permission from the game owners to write about them, especially using in game characters?


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

TimothyEllis said:


> But why would Amazon be targeting authors there? Or are they basically fanfic writers who are ignoring all the rules? Has to be some reason why bots are targeting these books, and reads are getting removed.
> 
> I assume these authors have permission from the game owners to write about them, especially using in game characters?


We're authors. We can make up our own games and characters. In any event, when you go into an MMORPG, you pick your own name, the type of character you'll play, etc. So, I could go in as a human, an elf, etc, and be a mage, a ranger, a warrior, etc, and call myself Hrrchrk if I want. And if I were writing a LitRPG, I wouldn't set my story in "World Of Warcraft", but in "Quest for the Purple Apple", or something else that no one has used.

By the way, MMORPG stands for Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Game.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

TimothyEllis said:


> But why would Amazon be targeting authors there? Or are they basically fanfic writers who are ignoring all the rules? Has to be some reason why bots are targeting these books, and reads are getting removed.
> 
> I assume these authors have permission from the game owners to write about them, especially using in game characters?


Phoenix recently hypothesized that the heavy losses in several new, underfed subgrenres might be due to contamination from incentivized readers' accounts rather than botting accounts. See her posts here and here.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Becca Mills said:


> Phoenix recently hypothesized that the heavy losses in several new, underfed subgrenres might be due to contamination from incentivized readers' accounts rather than botting accounts. See her posts here and here.


I can see that. Anything done to incentivize people to read a specific book, resulting in KU reads, would be against TOS.



D.A. Boulter said:


> We're authors. We can make up our own games and characters. In any event, when you go into an MMORPG, you pick your own name, the type of character you'll play, etc. So, I could go in as a human, an elf, etc, and be a mage, a ranger, a warrior, etc, and call myself Hrrchrk if I want. And if I were writing a LitRPG, I wouldn't set my story in "World Of Warcraft", but in "Quest for the Purple Apple", or something else that no one has used. By the way, MMORPG stands for Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Game.


Ok, so here's my thing: anyone who can do that, can write fantasy already. Why bother organizing it to a game, and incurring the wrath of Amazon? Why not say litrpg is a death trap, and start writing normal fantasy?

I'd have taken the first read strip as a sign, and rewritten the current book to be normal fantasy. Take the ones being tripped out of litrpg, and rewrite them as pure fantasy. Problem solved. Bit of work, but why stay where the hammer is being flailed?


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

TimothyEllis said:


> Ok, so here's my thing: anyone who can do that, can write fantasy already. Why bother organizing it to a game, and incurring the wrath of Amazon? Why not say litrpg is a death trap, and start writing normal fantasy?


Ouch, man, that would be rough though wouldn't it? Changing the genre you're writing in.. just in the hope of avoiding getting caught up in Zon's Hall of Knives v.2.3? Maybe if you're 100% commercially oriented and really don't care about the genre at all. But even then, much of the point of publishing in LitRPG is because it is seen as a hot, under-served genre with hungry hungry hippos readers. So the change might hurt. (And I'm sure a lot of people writing LitRPG do actually enjoy it.)

If I were in that boat, though, I wouldn't switch for another reason: There's really no way to predict where danger will fall in the future. Normal fantasy may well become a hotbed of less-than-ethical authors/publishers in the future. In fact, I think that's potentially plausible scenario - particularly if Amazon ends up coming down really hard on the stuffing and 'compilation' business. Stuffers rely on books with huge KENP counts. If they can't continue doing the recycling-mosiac approach that has been going on in Romance, perhaps they will just start publishing massively long Fantasy books. They aren't doing the actual writing anyway, right? So.. I could see it happening.


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## D.A. Boulter (Jun 11, 2010)

TimothyEllis said:


> Ok, so here's my thing: anyone who can do that, can write fantasy already. Why bother organizing it to a game, and incurring the wrath of Amazon? Why not say litrpg is a death trap, and start writing normal fantasy?
> 
> I'd have taken the first read strip as a sign, and rewritten the current book to be normal fantasy. Take the ones being tripped out of litrpg, and rewrite them as pure fantasy. Problem solved. Bit of work, but why stay where the hammer is being flailed?


First of all, LitRPG doesn't 'incur the wrath of of Amazon' because of what it is. For some reason the scam-botters seem (and that's 'seem' -- we don't know anything for sure) to have used LitRPG as a blind. If everyone stopped writing LitRPG or pulled all LitRPG books out of KU, then it would just be someone else. If they next pick Space Opera, would you suggest that everyone pull their Space Opera books and 'rewrite them as 'pure SF'? If they next went to Mystery, should everyone pull their Mystery books and re-write them as something else? Should I rewrite my Science Fiction books as Romance -- they do have some romance elements -- even though I love Science Fiction and don't care that much about Romance? I'm going to write what I love to write. I'd die if I were forced to write only Horror, 'cause I really don't like Horror.

Besides, not only LitRPG got hit. I got hit for something else, too. It just _seems_ that LitRPG got hit harder than most -- maybe LitRPG writers are more vocal about it?

But, the best reason to not quit LitRPG and rewrite it as 'pure fantasy' (whatever that is) is because there's a paying audience there. And those that* love* to write LitRPG would like to serve that audience ... and make money doing it. I know some authors who write LitRPG -- who got hit -- just pulled their books out of KU and continued to write what they love to write, what makes them money. They continue to serve their audience.

Why, really, should authors have to change their genres because of what someone else does?


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Amazon's issues follow you like a spreading plague. No one is safe. Switching genres to stay ahead is like being the second slowest runner when being chased by a bear. For the next bear, you're now the slowest, lol.


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## adsmith20181 (Apr 9, 2018)

I don't know about you guys but my Book Report earnings for June have dropped by 24% since yesterday, so I'm assuming that's stripped pagereads. 

On the plus side (depending on how you look at it), no email about it. I mean, it'd be nice to know, but it's also good not getting an email of doom threatening my account.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

D.A. Boulter said:


> First of all, LitRPG doesn't 'incur the wrath of of Amazon' because of what it is. For some reason the scam-botters seem (and that's 'seem' -- we don't know anything for sure) to have used LitRPG as a blind.


I suspect because it is topping the charts in a lot of fantasy, so if you want to give someone a boost in also-bots go after the LitRPG books that are #1 in the subs.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

adsmith20181 said:


> I don't know about you guys but my Book Report earnings for June have dropped by 24% since yesterday, so I'm assuming that's stripped pagereads.
> 
> On the plus side (depending on how you look at it), no email about it. I mean, it'd be nice to know, but it's also good not getting an email of doom threatening my account.


This is about the time of month when the page cuts happen. My understanding is you see the pages cut and the email comes about a day later.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

adsmith20181 said:


> I don't know about you guys but my Book Report earnings for June have dropped by 24% since yesterday, so I'm assuming that's stripped pagereads.
> On the plus side (depending on how you look at it), no email about it. I mean, it'd be nice to know, but it's also good not getting an email of doom threatening my account.


For anyone who has been stripped of reads....

A theory came up on another thread, which might explain what's happening. Its not a complete theory, more of a hypothesis than a theory, perhaps more of a guess than a hypothesis.

It came from the stuffers thread, where its been suggested that anyone who had any prior contact with a stuffer now banned, back over the last 2 years or more, is now linked to the stuffers by Amazon, and is being page stripped because of the contact. Its come to light that a lot of people did cross promotions with some of them more than a year ago, and some have been in multi-author box sets with them. Since most people dont know the pen names of these stuffers, they have no idea they did have previous contact with them, which Amazon now considers suspect behavior.

This is being put forward as one reason for needing a list of banned scammers in a prominent place, so we can avoid contact with anything to do with them in the future, and be able to track back and find if we had any contact with them in the past. The discussion has gone quiet now, unresolved.

But I think it's worth the while of anyone being read stripped, to go back and find out if they have been linked to a stuffer/scammer via any sort of promo in the last 2-3 years. It would be worth while for some of you to either prove or disprove this theory.


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## 77820 (Jun 19, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> For anyone who has been stripped of reads....
> 
> A theory came up on another thread, which might explain what's happening. Its not a complete theory, more of a hypothesis than a theory, perhaps more of a guess than a hypothesis.
> 
> ...


My wife and I were stripped of about 2/3 of our March reads. Neither of us have had any contact with any author other than each other nor have we ever been stripped of page reads before. We don't cross promote nor do we participate in box sets. All we've used to promote our books is AMS ads and promote our books in our own personal Twitter and FB accounts. We took all of our books out of Select mid-April so the point is moot in our case.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> For anyone who has been stripped of reads....
> 
> A theory came up on another thread, which might explain what's happening. Its not a complete theory, more of a hypothesis than a theory, perhaps more of a guess than a hypothesis.
> 
> ...


I can disprove that theory also. I haven't had any box sets with other authors, I haven't promoted anywhere other than my own blog, website, Facebook page, and Twitter account, and I have not promoted any other authors or joined any promotional groups. In other words, I strictly keep to myself. I have always been very cautious about befriending others. I don't give away my trust easily and I've read too many horror stories of authors trusting the wrong people to let my guard down. One trend I have noticed is that authors who are being stripped of page reads have had new releases the same month that they were stripped. I fully believe the Zon's bots are to blame for this mess. I believe they see the spike in pages read for that new release and then flag the account to be stripped. I haven't found anyone who has been stripped less than 50% either which seems odd all on its own. It would be nice if they gave us a way to defend ourselves though. Some way to request an investigation to be done to prove that those pages stripped were illegitimate would be nice. It would go a long way to regain the trust of the authors who I believe they have wrongly stripped. A bit more information of why they stripped pages would be nice also. It would give us an idea of what to avoid if we did something on our end to cause the scammers to target us. Something more than the answers that they're giving us would be greatly appreciated by many.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Raven K. Asher said:


> I can disprove that theory also. I haven't had any box sets with other authors, I haven't promoted anywhere other than my own blog, website, Facebook page, and Twitter account, and I have not promoted any other authors or joined any promotional groups.


So you haven't done any news letter swaps with anyone? Not even once?


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## Colin (Aug 6, 2011)

Raven K. Asher said:


> ... I fully believe the Zon's bots are to blame for this mess. I believe they see the spike in pages read for that new release and then flag the account to be stripped...


This fits in with my own experience. Two new releases within a month also sends the dumb-bots into a frenzy.


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## Avery342 (Aug 23, 2016)

Page Reads stripped by 50% in March and no cross promos whatsoever. No swaps or any other contact with the Masterminds. I'm more on the page with the new release theory. It seems to hit authors with new releases much heavier. And I had two new releases (different pens) that month.

Funny, though, in April my page reads skyrocketed from March (even before they took the reads) and they let me keep every single one of them. Weird, huh?


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## GoneToWriterSanctum (Sep 13, 2014)

I don't consent


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## Gaylord Fancypants (Jun 15, 2018)

KateDanley said:


> Pure tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but this ^ is the common denominator I've been seeing.


Yeah I've done virtually all of the things people are citing as a possible factor. I've done multi-author compilations, I've promoted through various means, I've included bonus books, I mass released books recently, and none of these page-read cuts have affected me. The one thing I haven't done is buy AMS ads.

The only reasonable conclusion is that AMS ads are risky.


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## Raven2478 (Oct 23, 2016)

TimothyEllis said:


> So you haven't done any news letter swaps with anyone? Not even once?


Nope not a single time in the five years that I've been at this.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Gaylord Fancypants said:


> Yeah I've done virtually all of the things people are citing as a possible factor. I've done multi-author compilations, I've promoted through various means, I've included bonus books, I mass released books recently, and none of these page-read cuts have affected me. The one thing I haven't done is buy AMS ads.
> 
> The only reasonable conclusion is that AMS ads are risky.


And I've run AMS ads on my contemporary romance novels that are in KU and not been hit either. So maybe the only reasonable conclusion is that we don't have the whole picture so can't see the factors that are driving this and that maybe there are multiple factors at play and that different people have been impacted for different reasons.


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## 77820 (Jun 19, 2014)

Cassie Leigh said:


> And I've run AMS ads on my contemporary romance novels that are in KU and not been hit either. So maybe the only reasonable conclusion is that we don't have the whole picture so can't see the factors that are driving this and that maybe there are multiple factors at play and that different people have been impacted for different reasons.


Back in mid-March, I added verbiage to all the of our ads which indicated the books were available on KU. Stuff like "Available on KU," or "Free on KU." We'd been seeing a number of authors suggest this addition, so we tried it out. After getting the "Strip and Threaten" e-mail in the beginning of April, we removed the verbiage from all ads before pulling all our books from Select by mid-April. I'm not suggesting this means something. I only offer it as a datapoint.


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## traineroflegend (Jul 4, 2018)

Cassie Leigh said:


> And I've run AMS ads on my contemporary romance novels that are in KU and not been hit either. So maybe the only reasonable conclusion is that we don't have the whole picture so can't see the factors that are driving this and that maybe there are multiple factors at play and that different people have been impacted for different reasons.


I agree with this. Saying that "Amazon is targeting people who use AMS" or "Amazon is targeting LitRPG authors" carries the same weight as "Amazon is targeting people whose first name starts with the letter A, D, M, or P" or "Amazon is targeting people who publish their books between the minutes 37 and 59 of every hour". For every vocal person affected, there's dozens of people who are in similar conditions and have not been affected.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

After watching from the sidelines for months, my guess is that it has to do with readers’ accounts, and writing in genres and sub genres targeted by black hats. I suspect it has to do with incentivized readers and the other things they read, and possibly direct camouflage by bad actors (targeting other authors’ books to divert attention from what is happening with theirs). 

It is by no means everybody. It seems to be a very small percentage of people who have been targeted, which I know is not much comfort if you have been. But I have not heard of many people getting targeted who were not writing in a genre frequented by certain shady individuals and pushed by certain Facebook groups and newsletter-swap and other promo services. (A certain type of romance, urban fantasy, LitPRG, reverse harem, etc.) I believe one problem with writing in hot niches  (besides it being tricky to stand out)  is that it is where the get-rich-quick crowd will always be hanging out. Even a brush from a tentacle of a dead jellyfish can be excruciatingly painful.


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