# Lowering the KNEP Cap from 3000 to 1000 Pages



## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

I propose we contact Amazon and ask to lower the current KNEP cap from 3000 pages to 1000 pages.

Asking Amazon to police their entire store for "stuffed" content is silly and ineffective. If the customers don't mind having bonus material, Amazon won't disrupt their experience. However, if they lower the KNEP cap for *payable* material, the customers can still read their bonus material, but the exploitation of the KU system will be resolved and the monthly page inflation slow.

_Plus--Amazon has already lowered the cap once before._ This is an easy, effective, and fair solution, and one Amazon is equipped to implement immediately.

On average, each KNEP page equates to 150-200 words per page. At the current 3000 KNEP cap, this means a file could contain upwards of 600,000 words. This is an obscene amount of words--far longer than any novel. Even the largest George RR Martin novel is only 2/3 of that cap.

Lowering the cap to 1000 will mean a file could contain upwards of 200,000 words, which could still allow for even the largest scifi/fantasy novels. However, it will dramatically lower the amount of money potentially made from those who would exploit the pages-read system--limiting earnings from $14 per entire file to $4 per file.

This solution requires no additional programming, manpower, or oversight from Amazon. It is an easy fix that will slow the rampant page stuffing which exploits a loophole in the pages read system. It will ensure that All-Star Bonuses will once again go to the books that earned the most reads, not the authors publishing vast amounts of ghostwritten material with the most pages included in the file. The rampant page inflation will slow, resulting in greater payouts per page. And it will also deter some of the unseen scammers who are clickfarming and boosting books in lower ranks to steal from the system.

I've already spoken with an Amazon rep on the phone regarding this issue. While he could offer me no guarantees, he directed me to have anyone in favor of this change to email KDP at:

KDP-CRS <at> amazon.com

Numerous authors have already emailed their support--mostly top 100 romance authors. If authors from other genres also email in--especially genres which do not traditionally "stuff" their new releases--it will help to demonstrate the seriousness of this particular program exploitation.

I firmly believe Amazon does not understand the exploitation of their systems or how large a 3000 KNEP file truly is. If authors share their experiences, concerns, and common word counts and KNEP pages for their single-title files, the representatives will understand the importance of this issue.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

writerbiter said:


> This solution requires no additional programming, manpower, or oversight from Amazon. It is an easy fix that will slow the rampant page stuffing which exploits a loophole in the pages read system. It will ensure that All-Star Bonuses will once again go to the books that earned the most reads, not the authors publishing vast amounts of ghostwritten material with the most pages included in the file. The rampant page inflation will slow, resulting in greater payouts per page. And it will also deter some of the unseen scammers who are clickfarming and boosting books in lower ranks to steal from the system.


Spitballing here, but dropping the cap isn't really the issue is it? It's stopping the stuffers. What's to stop a scammer from releasing a ton of 1000 page books rather than slightly fewer 3000 page books? And would a glut of 1000 page books in the market potentially harm writers who write really long books and might end up close to that cap even tho they might be entirely honest writers and not scamming?


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

be careful what you suggest to amazon, they are known to act on suggestions authors provide.


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## jsm (Jun 27, 2015)

I don't agree with this. I have a book that's roughly 250,000 words (about 1,350 KENPC if I recall) and another that's roughly 200,000 (about 1,100 KENPC). They are box sets for the complete 'seasons' for a serial I wrote, neither of which contain any stuffed material, bonus material, etc., just the story itself. 

While I agree with the sentiment behind your proposal (stopping the scammers), I don't think a blanket solution like this that penalizes authors who write legitimate books (that happen to be long) is the answer.


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## MarkParragh (Oct 11, 2016)

Based on the individual book KENP counts, the box set I'm planning - three full-length books plus two linking novellas - wouldn't be 3,000 KENP, but it would certainly be more than 1,000.

I suspect I'm far from the only person who would run afoul of that limit.


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## Jill Nojack (Mar 7, 2014)

jsm said:


> I don't agree with this. I have a book that's roughly 250,000 words (about 1,350 KENPC if I recall) and another that's roughly 200,000 (about 1,100 KENPC). They are box sets for the complete 'seasons' for a serial I wrote, neither of which contain any stuffed material, bonus material, etc., just the story itself.
> 
> While I agree with the sentiment behind your proposal (stopping the scammers), I don't think a blanket solution like this that penalizes authors who write legitimate books (that happen to be long) is the answer.


I assume that the individual books are available separately in KU? So, while it may not be quite as convenient for a reader as it would be to grab the entire series at once, nothing would prevent them from reading the books individually. There doesn't appear to be any penalty here.

When I like an author's books, I will certainly spend the time to research the reading order and borrow them individually. I do it all the time. I expect most readers are the same.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

This has been proposed before. Maybe they'll listen now, who knows?

Yes, it would cut a little into folks like jsm, but so does any regulation or restriction in life. We usually give up a little freedom or convenience in order to gain a bit more security or fairness overall. The trick is always to minimize the unfairness while maximizing the fairness.

But I'm in favor of any lowering of the cap. They could lower it to 1500, for example, which would affect very few legit authors, but cut into the scammers. It's not a solution in itself, but every measure that makes it harder for scammers without doing much to hurt the legit is a good thing. Just like in the physical world, it's not locks alone that minimizes your vulnerability to being robbed--it's locks and bars and lights and alarms and laws and vigilance and policing and neighbors and a dozen other factors together.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

If you do that, it will prevent those books that are over 1,000 KENP being included in KU. All that will happen is authors will split longer books. Also, that doesn't stop someone from stuffing 800 pages after their cover story. It will be a minor inconvenience to the scammers because they will have to produce more covers.

I would love to see some solutions that address the problem, and not the symptoms.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Hmm.

I'm pretty sure there is no solution that will harm no one; there never seems to be a harm-free way to solve any problem. If that's the case, the best solution would be the one that harms the fewest overall and harms no one catastrophically.

In terms of approaching Amazon, perhaps one worthwhile question is whether a 1,000- or 1,500-KENP cap would preserve what Amazon apparently likes about the 3,000-KENP cap. Pitching the positive might be as important as pitching the cessation of the negative.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

It might be more efficient to restrict bonus content to ten or twenty percent of the total file size. Enforcement could be as easy as hanging a threat over stuffer's heads that any book found in violation would be blocked until it was in compliance.


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## jsm (Jun 27, 2015)

Jill Nojack said:


> I assume that the individual books are available separately in KU? So, while it may not be quite as convenient for a reader as it would be to grab the entire series at once, nothing would prevent them from reading the books individually. There doesn't appear to be any penalty here.
> 
> When I like an author's books, I will certainly spend the time to research the reading order and borrow them individually. I do it all the time. I expect most readers are the same.


They are. While that may hold true for you, I think generally any time you make something less convenient for the consumer, conversions will go down.



brkingsolver said:


> If you do that, it will prevent those books that are over 1,000 KENP being included in KU. All that will happen is authors will split longer books. Also, that doesn't stop someone from stuffing 800 pages after their cover story. It will be a minor inconvenience to the scammers because they will have to produce more covers.
> 
> I would love to see some solutions that address the problem, and not the symptoms.


Well put. Quick fixes generally don't solve problems, they just band-aid over them. So if you lower the cap to 1,000 KENPC, scammers will probably just adjust their books to come in under the new limit.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

It's possible that might help, but my feeling is if you cut KENPC by 1/3 they will just respond by putting out at least three times more books to make up for it.


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

Jim Johnson said:


> Spitballing here, but dropping the cap isn't really the issue is it? It's stopping the stuffers. What's to stop a scammer from releasing a ton of 1000 page books rather than slightly fewer 3000 page books? And would a glut of 1000 page books in the market potentially harm writers who write really long books and might end up close to that cap even tho they might be entirely honest writers and not scamming?


The worst offenders, those who are exploiting the system, are spending a majority of their earnings on advertising--$1500-$2000 or more a day between Facebook and AMS ads. Probably more in certain special circumstances. They're able to do this because they have huge advertising budgets, a whole company based on hiring full-time salaried PAs, and a cadre of ghostwriters at their disposal. They're spending tremendous amounts of money to make very little, but they are making some profits, which encourages the behavior.

If they wish to publish more books, that's fine. They'll need to release _double or triple_ the amount of books on a budget that is _one third of their original earnings_. It will be impossible for them to profit with this new system.

Amazon is unlikely to change their policy on bonus content, so we need to meet them in the middle with a proposal that is easy for them to implement and returns the spirit of the program to the KU. This will limit bonus content and make it more difficult for those who take advantage of the system to reach the rankings which offer them the visibility to continue with their particular business plan.


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

jsm said:


> I don't agree with this. I have a book that's roughly 250,000 words (about 1,350 KENPC if I recall) and another that's roughly 200,000 (about 1,100 KENPC). They are box sets for the complete 'seasons' for a serial I wrote, neither of which contain any stuffed material, bonus material, etc., just the story itself.
> 
> While I agree with the sentiment behind your proposal (stopping the scammers), I don't think a blanket solution like this that penalizes authors who write legitimate books (that happen to be long) is the answer.


Unfortunately, lowering the cap would harm a small section of authors who write tremendously large books. However, in this instance, it would improve the store/economy for 99% of other authors out there. Very, very few authors write 200k+ books. Even yours is a boxed set. You could easily create two volumes for your set and still attract readers.

While you are not exploiting the system, but many other authors are, and their actions are reducing the amount of money your large box set would make. This change would greatly improve the KU for many many authors out there, and would protect the authors who can't or aren't able to create boxed sets like your series. Non-fiction authors. Women's fiction. Thrillers. Etc.


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## Desert Rose (Jun 2, 2015)

I still think the focus on how many pages are allowed in a book is the wrong focus. If we could be sure Amazon was only counting pages actually read by actual humans, as opposed to people using click farms, the number of pages in a book wouldn't matter, because people stop reading when they stop enjoying the book. The injurious effects of "stuffing" don't come from the length of the book, they come from the underhanded methods used to get paid for all of the pages. Legitimate page reads are not a problem, whether a book has a KENPC of 30 or 3000.


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## PatriciaDreas (Mar 30, 2017)

Dpock said:


> It might be more efficient to restrict bonus content to ten or twenty percent of the total file size. Enforcement could be as easy as hanging a threat over stuffer's heads that any book found in violation would be blocked until it was in compliance.


This sounds like a good solution.


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

Lorri Moulton said:


> Doesn't this mean George RR Martin would have to split his book in half to be in KU?
> 
> Seems like a better idea would be to not allow content that's already been published. Maybe a 10% cap on any previous material...just as there's a 10% cap in having anything outside of KDP available to the public?


At the current cap, even Martin's LONGEST book wouldn't fill the 3000 KNEP. He'd be lucky to reach 2/3rds of the limit. He could stuff a Game of Thrones (292k) and Clash of Kings (318k) into a single file if he wished.

And yes, after the change, he would have to cut his books in half. Then again, he needs special considerations from TOR/their printers in order to even print a paperback that large. He is an exception, not the rule. Especially as most agents/editors advice fantasy writers to aim for 80k-110k words, 150k words max.

How many KU authors out there legitimately have a 200k+ single title book--not a boxed series, a single story. It is an incredibly small number. We shouldn't make exceptions for a tiny percentage of writers while the community at large is suffering as a result of the exploits.


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

Dpock said:


> It might be more efficient to restrict bonus content to ten or twenty percent of the total file size. Enforcement could be as easy as hanging a threat over stuffer's heads that any book found in violation would be blocked until it was in compliance.


Unfortunately, that requires readers or other authors policing the store, and then it would require customer service agents on Amazon's side to verify the complaint. This adds MORE manpower to the equation, and Amazon is not a company that likes to hire MORE workers when it could simply automate a solution. Limiting the total amount of pages per file would reduce the amount of exploitative stuffing--and, when those publishers realize they aren't making the thousands of dollars required for them to publish their books and push the new releases to the top 100, they'd be forced out of the program. They won't be able to launch double or triple the amount of books on one third of their normal earnings.

This is the easiest way to make a change. Amazon won't hire people, reprogram the KU, review individual files more closely, or monitor for only original content. We have to make it easy on them. They've already lowered the cap once before. We'd be asking for them to do it again.


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## SuzyQ (Jun 22, 2017)

I think it would curtail the scammers for sure. And its still quite a lot of pages.


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## It&#039;s A Mystery (Mar 14, 2017)

Ok, so can someone explain this to me as I think I'm being an idiot... 

According to this thread the issue is people doing this with books...

Book 1: A,B,C,D

Book 2: B,C,D,A

Book 3: C,D,A,B

Book 4: D,A,B,C

Right?

But I don't see how this would work unless you are using click farms (which they might be).

A reader whose read book 1 isn't going to read the others as they have already done so!


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

I like it!

I do agree that this wouldn't fully solve the problem, but it WOULD force the scammers to pay significantly more in advertising, covers, etc., in order to make the same amount.

Amazon still needs to address wider issues with KU, but this would definitely be a step in the right direction. Right now, a full "rental" of a 3,000 page book pays the scammers over $13. In contrast, a full "rental" of a 1,000 page book would pay them about $4.50.  If you're a scammer earning 13 bucks a borrow, it's easy to see where you'd have the money to pay for not only huge advertising efforts, but also more nefarious services.

Personally, I'd be happy with a limit of 500 pages, but 1,000 is surely better than 3,000. Count me among those who will contact Amazon to ask for this.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

The problem with bonus content is one of enforcement: how does one determine 10%? Does the foreword count? Copyright? An excerpt? What about 11%? 15%? Sure, there can be automated mechanisms, but that requires programming. It also requires Amazon to get it right. Considering KDP flags my books for typos that appear in every dictionary on the planet, forgive me if I'm wary of any automated system combing my book for "bonus" content and then mistaking an index or afterword as such.

The 1,000 KENP cap does solve certain problems. One of the reasons authors place all the titles behind a new release is because of the All Star bonuses. These help subsidize massive ad spends. If these bonuses disappear, then at least some of these authors stuffing multiple books into a title will no longer have a sustainable business model. And it also means that more authors who are playing within the spirit of the TOS will get the single-title bonuses instead.

However, that doesn't solve the problem alone. I'm not convinced that book stuffing, as practiced by "normal" authors (e.g. people not using black hat techniques) is hurting most of us (again, it does hurt the Kindle All Stars). But in conjunction with click farms or click to the back inducements, it's a huge problem. *So any solutions should be aimed at making it more difficult for the people using clearly disallowed tactics to profit*.

*Here are my proposed solutions:*

1) *Fix the loophole in the Cloud Reader*. That's the only existing one I know of. When authors send KDP support a bunch of complaints about everyone using click-to-the-back/page skipping shenanigans, most of that stuff doesn't work any more, so it makes us look like we're tilting at long-fixed windmills. Allegedly there are other exploits, but DG (who says there are others) has refrained from publicly posting them. I understand why, but I think he might need to - or at least arrange some way of sharing them with the group - because then we can all determine if they are indeed big problems, and, if so, then email about the SAME problems and actually get KDP to take a look.

2) *reduce max payout to 1000 or 1500 KENP*.

3) *One title per ASIN if you want to enroll that book in KU*. You can still publish box sets/bundles, but they aren't eligible for KU. It's important to nail down what single title means: you can have a brief excerpt of the next book in the back, but no short stories, novellas, novels, or other bonus content. Standard inclusions: copyright, also-by, newsletter links, a brief afterword are okay. Anything you'd reasonably expect in a standard mass market paperback. Otherwise, just the book on the cover.

*Alternative idea (just spitballing)*

1) *cap the page read payout based on the price*. If you're at $0.99, you can't make more than $0.35 for a full read of your book. If you're at $2.99, then you can only make $1.70. I suspect even less people will like that, but why should we get paid more for a full read of their book than the purchase price? That doesn't really make a lot of sense. This also solves the downward price inertia issue that's killing some genres. 
*
General guidelines that I think would be good to follow, regardless of agreed upon solution:*

1) We need solutions that a lot of authors are behind, not just a random collection of ideas blasted at KDP. *One to three EASY fixes that address the root of the problem - a unified front is key*.

2) *Only 100% confirmed issues*. That page flip wigging out hurts us isn't actually confirmed, despite all the teeth gnashing (yes, I've read all the threads about it; no, I don't buy that everyone is being cheated out of money by it, since the glitch, if it still exists in any meaningful way, affects everyone). Regardless of how you feel (let's not get off in the weeds here - seriously), Amazon just ignores it. Don't muddy the waters. Keep emotions out of it. Keep it to things that their techs and support team can easily replicate and are OBVIOUS violations/problems.

That's key, I think, and one of the reasons suggestions often disappear into KDP Support purgatory. The tendency is for emotions to run high, and then everyone's running around reporting random BS and gets off in the weeds. That makes support go, _these authors are crazy - they're just on some witch hunt or stirring the pot_. If five hundred people propose the same ideas and report the SAME issues, then they have to sit back and be like _hmm, maybe this is a problem._

3) *Propose solutions that Amazon will realistically implement.* Like, "hire more people to review the books" isn't a fix. You know Amazon isn't going to do that, so don't send them that; it makes them ignore everything else. We know how Amazon works, and that's fine - they can run their business how they see fit. We should provide solutions they would realistically be willing to implement.

It's inevitable that any solution will result in some legitimate authors being hurt by the changes. The goal is to minimize that and maximize the positive effects. It is better we propose solutions that are more scalpel-like, rather than the inevitability of Amazon arriving with a hacksaw. Something is going to change. That much is clear - the current system is not sustainable. But maybe we can have a say in our destiny. Because saying "I like things the way they are and nothing should change" is fine, but it's not going to be reality.

Nick


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

writerbiter said:


> Unfortunately, that requires readers or other authors policing the store, and then it would require customer service agents on Amazon's side to verify the complaint.


Authors are already policing the store and occasionally getting results, so no difference there except in the clarity of the violation. Amazon gendarmes want clarity just as much as we do.

But that's only half of the equation. A clear TOS statement such as "Bonus content shall not exceed ten percent of file size" doesn't engage the rambling "what if" discussion witnessed here on box sets, genre exceptions, etc. A stuffer only needs to get one book blocked or have his account suspended once to get a clear message -- stuffing is a violation of TOS. What is stuffing? Bonus content in excess of 10% of file size (or 20%, whatever).

I think your suggestion just tosses more mud into the already murky waters.


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## PermaStudent (Apr 21, 2015)

writerbiter said:


> Unfortunately, that requires readers or other authors policing the store, and then it would require customer service agents on Amazon's side to verify the complaint. This adds MORE manpower to the equation, and Amazon is not a company that likes to hire MORE workers when it could simply automate a solution. Limiting the total amount of pages per file would reduce the amount of exploitative stuffing--and, when those publishers realize they aren't making the thousands of dollars required for them to publish their books and push the new releases to the top 100, they'd be forced out of the program. They won't be able to launch double or triple the amount of books on one third of their normal earnings.
> 
> This is the easiest way to make a change. Amazon won't hire people, reprogram the KU, review individual files more closely, or monitor for only original content. We have to make it easy on them. They've already lowered the cap once before. We'd be asking for them to do it again.


Unfortunately, this only (partly) solves the stuffing problem, because I suspect clickfarms have become the bigger beast as KU scams go. The two go hand in hand: a blackhat publisher pays a clickfarm for reads on a stuffed book. Under this scenario, it makes no difference to the clickfarm or the writer if 1000 bot accounts read a 3000 KENP book (=3,000,000 pages read) or 3000 bot accounts read a 1000 KENP book (=3,000,000 pages read) or 1000 bot accounts read 3 books at 1000 KENP each (=3,000,000 pages read). Knowing this, the page cap isn't the full problem: the bots and clickfarms are a problem all their own.

So what enables bots and clickfarms? Well, probably all of the free trials of KU that Amazon hands out. It's easy to make money hand over fist when you don't have to pay for the KU trial accounts generating your money. Also, they don't currently have a way to distinguish if a reader is a human or a computer program designed to flip pages for maximum profit.

Amazon could stop giving out free months of KU, but we all know that won't happen. They could stop paying on page reads from trial months, but that hurts all authors, and we have no way to know what percentage of reads that represents. Also, while it cuts into the bottom line, it would still be feasible to run a clickfarm with paid accounts. I also saw someone around here (I'm sorry, I don't remember who or where, but your idea is great!) suggesting they put in a CAPTCHA requirement. (Computers are bad at CAPTCHAs.) Maybe every 500-1000 pages? This would have an effect on the customer experience, but as it's only for books read through KU, I would think the intrusion would be negligible. It would also require that the clickfarms have more humans on hand to babysit the operation and input CAPTCHAs, and that will drive up scammers' costs.

I am also a proponent of silently stopping bot accounts on Amazon's end. When they find accounts that are botted, they *shouldn't* send an angry note to the account accusing manipulation. Keep collecting the KU payments and stop paying reads that they know are coming from botted accounts--that way, clickfarms don't know which of their reader accounts are still paying and which ones are caught. Clickfarms would have to regularly refresh *all* of their reader accounts to keep them fresh and paying, and that puts an extra time/money burden on them. In this scenario, the only authors who would miss those uncounted page reads are the ones who were expecting them because they paid a clickfarm to bot their book.

Just my rambling thoughts on the issue. I don't have anything in KU right now and haven't for a while.


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## GoingAnon (Jan 16, 2014)

ORIGINAL POST MODIFIED SEPT 21, 2018. I do not accept nor do I consent to KBoards/VerticalScope's Terms of Service which were implemented without proper notification. As I await a response regarding my request for full account and content deletion - pursuant to GDPR - my continued use of this forum should not be construed as consent to, nor acceptance of, KBoards/VerticalScope's aforementioned Terms of Service.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Alix Nichols said:


> ^^^This. I'll sign the letter. Authors would still able to have long books in KU, they just won't be paid for the extra pages. I have a full series box set that's over 1000 KENPC. I'll be happy to make less on it (and any future 1000+ KENPC title) if the new cap makes scamming KU no longer worth the candle. That's the ONLY way to get the scammers to stop stealing from the communal pot.


You should be paid what you've earned.

Most, maybe 90% of the "stuffed" books on Amazon are under 1000 KENP. Cruise New Adult and check product page counts then look at TOCs. You'll see two or three titles following the main title and their sum doesn't add up to 900 pages.

Putting out a 1000 KENP limit just gives stuffers something to AIM for and could well result in more stuffing.


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## GoingAnon (Jan 16, 2014)

ORIGINAL POST MODIFIED SEPT 21, 2018. I do not accept nor do I consent to KBoards/VerticalScope's Terms of Service which were implemented without proper notification. As I await a response regarding my request for full account and content deletion - pursuant to GDPR - my continued use of this forum should not be construed as consent to, nor acceptance of, KBoards/VerticalScope's aforementioned Terms of Service.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

I'd be okay with lowering it to 1500, but 1000? No. My series relaunch will result in a 270K word book. One book, not a box set. Yes, it has to be that long and no, that's not an editing issue. There are books by traditionally published authors with a comparable amount of pages.



Dpock said:


> You should be paid what you've earned.
> 
> Most, maybe 90% of the "stuffed" books on Amazon are under 1000 KENP. Cruise New Adult and check product page counts then look at TOCs. You'll see two or three titles following the main title and their sum doesn't add up to 900 pages.
> 
> Putting out a 1000 KENP limit just gives stuffers something to AIM for and could well result in more stuffing.


This.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Nicholas Erik said:


> *Alternative idea (just spitballing)*
> 
> 1) *cap the page read payout based on the price*. If you're at $0.99, you can't make more than $0.35 for a full read of your book. If you're at $2.99, then you can only make $1.70. I suspect even less people will like that, but why should we get paid more for a full read of their book than the purchase price? That doesn't really make a lot of sense. This also solves the downward price inertia issue that's killing some genres.


Your list of solutions makes a lot of sense. Count me in. I particularly like the one listed above. It makes zero sense that any author would earn 35 cents if someone BUYS a book, a much larger amount if someone only borrows it. If Amazon simply capped the amount you could earn per borrow at the amount you could earn per buy, it would solve a ton of these problems.

People will say, "Oh sure, but then the scammers will just charge 10 bucks for their book." GREAT! This will make it a ton harder for them to gift-card their way to the top, and will have the additional benefit of stopping the spiral to the bottom, pricing-wise. Right now, my genre (new adult) is packed with 99-cent stuffed books, making it nearly impossible for a book priced at $3.99 or even $2.99 to gain any traction.


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

No.

1000 KENP is roughly equivalent to 200,000 words. In a genre like epic fantasy, word counts are often higher than 200,000 for a single book. You'd be cheating authors out of legitimate page reads they've earned. It would force authors to release a single book in multiple parts, which would annoy readers.


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

writerbiter said:


> At the current cap, even Martin's LONGEST book wouldn't fill the 3000 KNEP. He'd be lucky to reach 2/3rds of the limit. He could stuff a Game of Thrones (292k) and Clash of Kings (318k) into a single file if he wished.
> 
> And yes, after the change, he would have to cut his books in half. Then again, he needs special considerations from TOR/their printers in order to even print a paperback that large. He is an exception, not the rule. Especially as most agents/editors advice fantasy writers to aim for 80k-110k words, 150k words max.
> 
> How many KU authors out there legitimately have a 200k+ single title book--not a boxed series, a single story. It is an incredibly small number. We shouldn't make exceptions for a tiny percentage of writers while the community at large is suffering as a result of the exploits.


Or Amazon could just deal with the people who are engaging in stuffing. It is not at all uncommon for epic fantasy authors to exceed 200,000 words. Not everyone in self-publishing writes short books.

This proposal would drive epic fantasy authors out of KU, and KU has a thriving epic fantasy market.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

Ryan W. Mueller said:


> Or Amazon could just deal with the people who are engaging in stuffing.


Here's a novel idea!


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Nicholas Erik said:


> The problem with bonus content is one of enforcement: how does one determine 10%? Does the foreword count? Copyright? An excerpt? What about 11%? 15%? Sure, there can be automated mechanisms, but that requires programming. It also requires Amazon to get it right. Considering KDP flags my books for typos that appear in every dictionary on the planet, forgive me if I'm wary of any automated system combing my book for "bonus" content and then mistaking an index or afterword as such.


Amazon could partner with Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection site. I use it all the time in teaching. It's basically a massive database consisting of the web, almost all academic journal articles, and all submitted work. You feed new work into it, and it checks that work against its existing database while adding the new work to the database. What you get back is a report with a percentage of matched text. It's not a percentage of _plagiarized _text, as properly marked and noted quotations will often show up as matched. But it does conveniently indicate which papers probably need a closer look and what areas of them need attention. It seems to me Amazon could productively work with a site like this by integrating the tool into the book file upload process. It would automatically (<--key element) identify and kick back submitted book files with a level of match to a currently published book(s) that exceeds a certain percentage. It'd catch scraped text; it'd catch duplication. It's very effective -- you can't fool it by just going through and making small changes here and there. And if universities and high schools all over the U.S. can afford it, I'm thinking it can't be *that* expensive.

An aside ... I wonder if Amazon has left the Cloud Reader unfixed as a honey trap. The Cloud Reader must be what page-read botters are using now. If a particular account is reporting lots of page-reads from the Cloud Reader ... bingo, it's a bot?



Ryan W. Mueller said:


> This proposal would drive epic fantasy authors out of KU, and KU has a thriving epic fantasy market.


You really think epic fantasy authors would leave en masse? They could still make $4.49 (1,000 KENP) or $6.74 (1,500 KENP) per full read (using the March figure of 0.00449). That's a pretty nice chunk of change. To match those payouts outside KU, they'd need to be able to sell books at $6.99 and $9.99, respectively.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Ryan W. Mueller said:


> Or Amazon could just deal with the people who are engaging in stuffing. It is not at all uncommon for epic fantasy authors to exceed 200,000 words. Not everyone in self-publishing writes short books. This proposal would drive epic fantasy authors out of KU, and KU has a thriving epic fantasy market.


No one disputes that Amazon should deal with the scammers. And I do sympathize with those who write super long books. But at least you'd have some way to deal with this if the 1,000 cap were implemented. Dividing up your books might not be your first choice, but at least it's an option.

For those of us in genres that have been impacted by these scammers, we're seriously short of options, unless we want to stuff and bot, too. Until your genre is personally impacted, you have no idea what this is like, to have most of the top 100 spots claimed by 99-cent stuffed books that earn 10 bucks a borrow.

The sad truth is, right now, there ARE authors being drummed out of KU. Plenty of them. Most of us are in romance, but the scammers have slimed their way into other genres, too. If this keeps up long enough, they'll reach epic fantasy soon enough.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

> ... cap the page read payout based on the price. If you're at $0.99, you can't make more than $0.35 for a full read of your book. If you're at $2.99, then you can only make $1.70. I suspect even less people will like that, but why should we get paid more for a full read of their book than the purchase price? That doesn't really make a lot of sense.


It really doesn't make sense that one would make more from a borrow than a sale. But then, look at how people got so upset that a short story made the same as a novel in KUv1. People are going to complain, mostly about things that personally hurt them. The thing about capping the payout is, you'd know going on that you were limited to a certain number of pages for a payout. You could write whatever length you want, but only be paid X amount for page reads.

I think some people would rather deal with the scamming than have their payouts capped. It's clear Amazon doesn't want to take any of the steps that have been outlined *over and over and over and over* again, for years. Years, folks. The above quoted procedure seems to be a viable solution, easily implemented with bots. Cause Amazon ain't hiring nobody they don't have to.

Of course, the only real, dependable solution is to simply scrap the program and go back to selling books.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

she-la-ti-da said:


> It really doesn't make sense that one would make more from a borrow than a sale. But then, look at how people got so upset that a short story made the same as a novel in KUv1. People are going to complain, mostly about things that personally hurt them.


While I do agree that complaints are more likely when people are impacted personally, I think you've hit on something pretty important here. In both cases -- meaning the case of a short story earning the same as a long novel AND the case of a borrow earning more than a sale -- the scenarios are oddly disconnected from real market forces.

In the real world, it costs more to buy something than to borrow something. Similarly, in the real world, a ten-page story does not earn the same as a 300-page novel. When Amazon imposes conditions that defy traditional market forces, things can very quickly get out of whack. And those unnatural conditions are easily exploited by people more interested in making quick cash rather than building a true customer base.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

In all due respect to the authors of longer books, under the proposed 1000 KENP cap, most of these authors would still be making more for a full-read borrow than they would for a sale. I'm sensitive to the concerns of people who write longer books, but most of them wouldn't be getting ripped off - let's just do the math.

The standard indie pricing is $4.99/$5.99 for epic fantasy (where books commonly trend 100k+). I'm sure a few folks can charge more, but those are the standards. At those prices, you make $3.50 minus delivery costs (so about $3.40) and $4.20 (so about $4.10). For a full-read borrow, assuming your book maxes out the 1,000 cap, you'd be making $4 (assuming a worst case scenario of $0.004/page) - 15% more than if you priced at $4.99, and 2.5% less than what you'd make at $5.99.

That's way better than most genres already, which makes sense given how the program is set up: KU favors and rewards longer books. That's fine. But let's assume that the 1000 KENP cap + single title only rules come into effect, and stabilize the payout around 0.0045. Then you're making $4.50 a full read - 30% and 10% more than you were before. Or hell, let's get crazy - it bumps things up to 0.005. Then you're making 40% and 20% more.

Dying on the hill of principle seems like a cutting off your nose to spite your face situation. I'm not being snarky, I'm just being real. If you wrote some 300,000 word doorstop that's getting full reads, yeah you'll be hurt - but is it really "fair," to be honest, that you get paid $13 or whatever for a full read versus $4 for a sale, anyway? That's the current system, sure, and to be clear, I begrudge no one for getting that amount for their work. Good for them and fair play. But a 2x or 3x skew between reads and sales payouts doesn't seem economically viable or make much sense, objectively speaking. That seems more like a bug in the system than a feature.

Regardless of questions of fairness/balance, the truth remains: the number of legitimate single title books exceeding 200,000 words has to be vanishingly small. 0.5%? 0.25%? Most authors would be unaffected by this. Many would, however, be devastated if KU implodes. No idea if KU is in danger, but the current issues, if unaddressed, could threaten the program entirely. I'm not speaking for myself, there, since many of my titles are not in KU. I'm just looking at this from a sustainability argument: 97.5% of something is better than 100% of nothing. Again, any proposed changes should be based on what solves the biggest number of issues, thus benefiting the greatest number of authors, while harming the fewest. I am not saying that the 1000 KENP cap is the answer, merely that it solves many issues, and presents downsides that hurt a very limited section of the author population.

There is no solution that doesn't hurt someone. The goal is to minimize the number harmed, and also minimize the magnitude of the harm itself. On balance, I suspect many more epic fantasy authors would be _helped_ by these changes, rather than harmed.

Any changes must ultimately be compatible with the biggest fish in the eBook market: romance. It's 50% of the eBook market, and pretty much dictates the long-term viability of KU. The sustainability of KU - or any subscription program - hinges on the ability to A) keep quality romance authors in the fold while B) not being killed by "whale" romance readers or C) outright scams. KU seemed to be doing a decent job of the first two points (whether Amazon is subsidizing it or not is an open question; regardless, whatever it cost them as a loss leader is an acceptable expense, provided they don't have to pay for a bunch of inflated reads to prop up the diluted pool and keep their best authors happy). Then C came along and looks like it's shooing big authors away - not yet in droves, but certainly a caravan or two - while encouraging others to book stuff, thus double-dip page reads or grab more page reads from the whale readers than they otherwise would be able (B). But those occasional double-dip/extra reads from book stuffing are a minor issue in comparison to the Megoladon type of botting/click-farm scams that make the whale readers look like plankton.

Nick


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## Elizabeth Barone (May 6, 2013)

Jim Johnson said:


> Spitballing here, but dropping the cap isn't really the issue is it? It's stopping the stuffers. What's to stop a scammer from releasing a ton of 1000 page books rather than slightly fewer 3000 page books? And would a glut of 1000 page books in the market potentially harm writers who write really long books and might end up close to that cap even tho they might be entirely honest writers and not scamming?


Right. The issue isn't so much length as it is people gaming the system in an effort to gain more page reads. Plus, a 3,000-page cap would hurt authors who write series exclusively in KU and release KU box sets of that series, too. (As far as I know, this is still allowed. Correct me if I'm wrong.)

I wonder if it'd do Amazon any good to use or create software like what universities use for plagiarism protection. Instead of checking against other books, though, they could use it to crawl the internet and see if the content exists anywhere else. (I'm thinking specifically of a book that was stuffed with email newsletters. Most providers archive newsletters online, usually for subscribers to access if they can't see the email in their inbox.)

I don't know, honestly. There doesn't seem to be a good solution to this problem, other than Amazon employing a whole department to check books before greenlighting them for KU. That could get very expensive for them, so it's not a practical solution.


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## A.R. Williams (Jan 9, 2011)

writerbiter said:


> _Plus--Amazon has already lowered the cap once before._ This is an easy, effective, and fair solution, and one Amazon is equipped to implement immediately.


So, because lowering the cap the first time was so effective, easy, fair and efficient--you need to do it again?

It failed the first time because it didn't attack the problem. That's why there are still 30 page Book Stuffing threads.

It might work the second time though, I'm sure the scammers will get the message and know that Amazon is serious this time.


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

So what stops the stuffers from simply publishing three "books" at 1000KENP instead of one at 3000KENP? It's slightly more inconvenient for them, but they know how to game the system. They'll do the same thing. Hurting legitimate authors is not the answer.

As someone mentioned above, there are plagiarism checkers you can work with. If a book isn't explicitly stated to be a box set (which I still believe is considered okay) and it contains huge chunks of other books, then the program will see that and Amazon can respond accordingly.

Justifying hurting some authors because more authors are getting hurt in a different genre is not the answer. It's nothing more than a temporary band aid and fails to address the root of the problem. If it were an actual, viable solution, I'd deal with it. But it won't work.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Yeah, I agree. And honestly, even if something was over 3,000 before the cap, if real readers were actually reading and enjoying these massive tomes then it would all be legit.

And yes I think the scammers will just make up for it in volume.



A.R. Williams said:


> So, because lowering the cap the first time was so effective, easy, fair and efficient--you need to do it again?
> 
> It failed the first time because it didn't attack the problem. That's why there are still 30 page Book Stuffing threads.
> 
> It might work the second time though, I'm sure the scammers will get the message and know that Amazon is serious this time.


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## sammie997 (Apr 13, 2018)

First of all, this is a mathematically silly idea if the objective is more visibility in KU versus bookstuffers. They will just create more, smaller books clogging up the charts 3x as much to make the same income. This would make the problem worse, not better.

Second, LOTS of authors (epic fantasy primarily) write books longer than 200k (1000 KENP-ish.) Cut the books up, you say? Where should Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix be chopped, which contains 257k words? How about Brandon Sanderson's Oathbringer, coming in as over 1,200 print pages? 

Just let them not get paid for those pages, you say?

So, let me get this straight: someone who might spend 2-3 years on a tome, creating an entirely new world with its own cultures, languages, races, economies, and geography, then hire an illustrator to create a map for that world, then spend $1,000-3,000 on cover art, then spend $3k+ in developmental and line editing on a 250-300k word book, all so that they might possibly create something that could someday become a timeless classic, should be paid LESS PER PAGE overall so that your man-chest covered 55k romance novel that you wrote in a month can have more visibility versus bookstuffers?

How about this - since the vast majority of the bookstuffers are in the romance genre, maybe romance writers should get half the KU rate. That sound fair? Or maybe just kick them all out of KU. No? Don't like that idea, do ya, when you're the one having the monetary value of your work reduced?

You lose all moral high ground when you're willing to throw an entire genre of writers under the bus so you can make a few extra bucks. And it wouldn't even give you the desired result.


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

Ryan W. Mueller said:


> So what stops the stuffers from simply publishing three "books" at 1000KENP instead of one at 3000KENP? It's slightly more inconvenient for them, but they know how to game the system. They'll do the same thing. Hurting legitimate authors is not the answer.
> 
> As someone mentioned above, there are plagiarism checkers you can work with. If a book isn't explicitly stated to be a box set (which I still believe is considered okay) and it contains huge chunks of other books, then the program will see that and Amazon can respond accordingly.
> 
> Justifying hurting some authors because more authors are getting hurt in a different genre is not the answer. It's nothing more than a temporary band aid and fails to address the root of the problem. If it were an actual, viable solution, I'd deal with it. But it won't work.


Those who are stuffing their books to the 3000 limit are using their earnings to advertise heavily. THOUSANDS of dollars a day in ads. They aren't profiting much--75% or more goes to their ads, their ghostwriters, their full-time staff, and their covers. Cutting the KNEP will reduce their earnings by a third. They won't be able to publish and effectively launch double or triple the amount of books with one third of their "normal" earnings. It just won't work.

Amazon is not going to devote their servers to plagiarism checkers for the hundreds of thousands of books published on their site. It isn't feasible. They won't dedicate the time or processing power to it. We can't ask them to change their fundamental system--it's not important enough to them as the customers have no issue with bonus content. But limiting the cap IS something they've done before which requires no more effort, manpower, or processing power, and it will NOT impact customer experience which is all Amazon cares about

Also, epic fantasy may have SOME authors with 200k+ word epics, but they are an exception and a very large minority. A very, very small percent of authors write a single title book that large. You--they--are outliers, and a cutoff has to be made somewhere. Some innocent people will get caught, but the overall experience for EVERY author in the KU will be better as the page inflation is already cutting into YOUR earnings since those exploiting the system are taking larger amounts of the pot.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

You may be right writerbiter, but they still have economies of scale on their side and they can adjust and do it on sheer volume. 

The problem is fake readers/incentivized readers and fake page reads.

Anyway, how many of them go  up to 3,000 KENPC now?  I have seen quite a few in the 1,500 to 2,000 range.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

JulesWright said:


> You may be right writerbiter, but they still have economies of scale on their side and they can adjust and do it on sheer volume.
> 
> The problem is fake readers/incentivized readers and fake page reads.
> 
> Anyway, how many of them go up to 3,000 KENPC now? I have seen quite a few in the 1,500 to 2,000 range.


Most don't hit 1000 KENP, which is why the idea has zero merits.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

Nicholas Erik said:


> In all due respect to the authors of longer books, under the proposed 1000 KENP cap, most of these authors would still be making more for a full-read borrow than they would for a sale. I'm sensitive to the concerns of people who write longer books, but most of them wouldn't be getting ripped off - let's just do the math.


You're assuming per-page payouts will stay the same. We all know they can vary quite a bit, and can dip quite low at times. I wouldn't be surprised if the average keeps on dropping in the not too distant future. The missing KENP might, at some point, make the difference between earning the equivalent of a sale and earning less.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Dpock said:


> You should be paid what you've earned.
> 
> Most, maybe 90% of the "stuffed" books on Amazon are under 1000 KENP. Cruise New Adult and check product page counts then look at TOCs. You'll see two or three titles following the main title and their sum doesn't add up to 900 pages.
> 
> Putting out a 1000 KENP limit just gives stuffers something to AIM for and could well result in more stuffing.


Most "legitimate" authors only use one or two bonus books, but that can easily be over 1k KENPC. IME, 1k KENPC is about 160k words.

Most marketers use 4-5+ bonus books.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

C. Rysalis said:


> You're assuming per-page payouts will stay the same. We all know they can vary quite a bit, and can dip quite low at times. I wouldn't be surprised if the average keeps on dropping in the not too distant future. The missing KENP might, at some point, make the difference between earning the equivalent of a sale and earning less.


Why would the page read rate go down if all the gray hat and outright scammed reads would be removed? It's possible, but doesn't strike me as likely. Unless Amazon is subsidizing the pot and then would drop it to cut costs. Which is possible, but that's another issue entirely.

Further, I based all my estimates around one of the lowest KENP rates on record (the lowest?) - 10% lower than March's. Which is not to say it can't go lower, but it strikes me as supremely unlikely that all the side shenanigans would be fixed, only for the payout to suddenly crater.

Nick


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Crystal_ said:


> Most "legitimate" authors only use one or two bonus books, but that can easily be over 1k KENPC. IME, 1k KENPC is about 160k words.
> 
> Most marketers use 4-5+ bonus books.


I have an 80k book that comes out to 386 KENP, so logically 160 would equal 772 (though I know it's not an exact science). Anyway, I think the 1000 KENP limit is unworkable in any form and do not support it. Limiting bonus content to a percentage of total content makes sense to--apparently--just me. In any event, I think bonus content of any sort should NOT exceed the KENP of the titled book on the product page.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

sammie997 said:


> First of all, this is a mathematically silly idea if the objective is more visibility in KU versus bookstuffers. They will just create more, smaller books clogging up the charts 3x as much to make the same income. This would make the problem worse, not better.
> 
> Second, LOTS of authors (epic fantasy primarily) write books longer than 200k (1000 KENP-ish.) Cut the books up, you say? Where should Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix be chopped, which contains 257k words? How about Brandon Sanderson's Oathbringer, coming in as over 1,200 print pages?
> 
> ...


I have a simple question for you. Why does any author of fiction deserve more than $10 take home per book? You used J K Rowling as an example. One of the best known fantasy writers of our time. There is not a single book that she writes that SHE takes home $10 per copy on. Many of her paperbacks are sold for less than $10. 
Books have a value limit regardless of length or time it takes to write them. For decades trade paperbacks have had a set price range regardless of their length. Quality determines how many people read it and to a small extent how much you can charge for it, but there always is a maximum the market will pay. Rowling doesn't just say my books is longer than Roberts book so I deserve more.

Do I think a 270k book is as valuable as a 50k book? It depends on the book. I don't read epic fantasy so I would say that 50k book might be worth more too me. Do I appreciate the work that it takes to write that novel? absolutely


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Why would the page read rate go down if all the gray hat and outright scammed reads would be removed? It's possible, but doesn't strike me as likely. Unless Amazon is subsidizing the pot and then would drop it to cut costs. Which is possible, but that's another issue entirely.


Firstly, I doubt all, or even most scammed reads would be removed. They'd find new ways to cheat the system, and as someone else pointed out, many scam books are already less than 1000 KENP.

Secondly, if enough readers stop paying for a KU subscription - last I knew, KU was definitely losing readers - payouts will drop for sure. Or a myriad other factors could lead to lower payouts. It has happened before.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Dpock said:


> I have an 80k book that comes out to 386 KENP, so logically 160 would equal 772 (though I know it's not an exact science). Anyway, I think the 1000 KENP limit is unworkable in any form and do not support it. Limiting bonus content to a percentage of total content makes sense to--apparently--just me. In any event, I think bonus content of any sort should NOT exceed the KENP of the titled book on the product page.


The thing is, Amazon clearly doesn't care about limiting bonus content. If they cared, they'd do it.

Dropping the cap is all upside for Amazon. They no longer have to pay more than $5/read. The rate will go up, authors will be happy, they'll be able to spend less topping off the pot.


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## sammie997 (Apr 13, 2018)

idontknowyet said:


> I have a simple question for you. Why does any author of fiction deserve more than $10 take home per book? You used J K Rowling as an example. One of the best known fantasy writers of our time. There is not a single book that she writes that SHE takes home $10 per copy on. Many of her paperbacks are sold for less than $10.
> Books have a value limit regardless of length or time it takes to write them. For decades trade paperbacks have had a set price range regardless of their length. Quality determines how many people read it and to a small extent how much you can charge for it, but there always is a maximum the market will pay. Rowling doesn't just say my books is longer than Roberts book so I deserve more.
> 
> Do I think a 270k book is as valuable as a 50k book? It depends on the book. I don't read epic fantasy so I would say that 50k book might be worth more too me. Do I appreciate the work that it takes to write that novel? absolutely


Respectfully, your reply would suggest that you are unfamiliar with the costs associated with successfully publishing independently. Even with a mythical 3,000 KENP book, no author is netting $10/book. That's particularly true in the epic genres; production costs of a quality 200k+ novel are astronomical. When you factor in marketing costs, margins shrink by as much as half again. More, while launching - and that does not take into account the additional risk associated with writing epics.

That being said, we're talking about a closed system wherein a retailer pays by the page. In that context, there is no defense of the argument that a short book should earn more per page than a longer book that takes several multiples of time, money, and energy to produce, and entertains the reader for significantly longer. That is not a value judgement, of course; the value of any art is in the eye of the beholder. To try to increase the earnings of short book authors at the expense of long book authors, in order to address a problem that is not the fault of the long book author, is unreasonable.

To those who say, "well, epic fantasy authors are a minority," I'd say this: why does that make an action that harms them any more defensible? Because you think you are many, and they are few, that makes a campaign like this somehow more moral? I absolutely 100% agree that there needs to be a solution to resolve blatant and flagrant bookstuffing. But punishing fellow authors - no matter how few you think they may be - in order to improve your own visibility is a flat out indefensible position. In a system that pays by the quantity of pages read, limiting the amount of legitimate pages another author can get paid for is thievery.

Anyone who is not deficient in human empathy should understand as much, but if you still feel this is a fight worth starting, watch what happens if the idea of a 1k page cap gains momentum. You'll find out just how powerful, vocal, and organized the epic fantasy community can be.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

It's a no from me.

The proposal will do nothing to stop scammers. But it will penalize people with legitimately longer books/box sets. And there are lots of them.


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## dgcasey (Apr 16, 2017)

writerbiter said:


> The worst offenders, those who are exploiting the system, are spending a majority of their earnings on advertising--$1500-$2000 or more a day between Facebook and AMS ads. Probably more in certain special circumstances. They're able to do this because they have huge advertising budgets, a whole company based on hiring full-time salaried PAs, and a cadre of ghostwriters at their disposal. They're spending tremendous amounts of money to make very little, but they are making some profits, which encourages the behavior.


Are you kidding me? First of all, what makes you think they're advertising their books? They don't give a fig about ranking or advertising. They'd rather fly under the radar anyway. They stuff a bunch of meaningless pages into a book and then they have their click farms read through the book and they get paid. They don't want a whole lot of human eyes looking between their covers.

And second, I doubt they have a large number of ghostwriters or large companies. Most of their "books" are plagiarized works from other authors. The last time I went looking for these thieves I found a whole raft of books filled with bits and pieces of Wizard of Oz books and some out of print Russian novels. It doesn't take an army of ghost writers to create these books. I could create a dozen of them in an hour if I wanted to.

Your "solution" does nothing to fix the problem. It just makes the scammers rework their methods and continue exactly as before.


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## El-Do (Apr 14, 2018)

What evidence is there to suggest Amazon would be inclined to increase the KU payout if the cap drops from 3,000 words to 1,000? Let's go crazy and say this wipes out the scammers--why would Amazon keep the global fund at a level that would, with scammers gone, dramatically increase payouts? It's pretty clear Amazon believes KU's payout range is acceptable for authors in the program. Amazon's a business. If they can invest less money while keeping KU's payout the same, why wouldn't they? How will they possibly be positively impacted by paying authors more? 

Further, I don't think it's silly to expect Amazon to police its own storefront. I think the viewpoint that Amazon is incapable of doing so is rather absurd, actually. KU is a program they created, and they should be responsible for ensuring it works as intended--for both authors and customers. 

Ultimately, writing is a business for me. KU is a tool that makes my business, as a fantasy author with long books and box-sets, more profitable than going wide. If the cap dropped to 1,000, that would no longer be the case, and I'd simply leave the program. I suppose that could serve as Amazon's motivation to pay authors more per page in the event they cap pages at 1,000, but the increase would have to be substantial.


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## Rosie Scott (Oct 3, 2017)

Ryan W. Mueller said:


> Or Amazon could just deal with the people who are engaging in stuffing. It is not at all uncommon for epic fantasy authors to exceed 200,000 words. Not everyone in self-publishing writes short books.
> 
> This proposal would drive epic fantasy authors out of KU, and KU has a thriving epic fantasy market.


+1. As someone who writes epic/military fantasy books over 200,000 words often enough, I agree with this. If legitimate reads were taken from me as a reaction to a crime I did not commit, I'd leave KU immediately.

I can't stand scammers, but lowering the cap wouldn't just hurt honest authors who spend immense time writing doorstopper books, it also wouldn't solve the problem. Authors can split their longer books up and annoy their readerbase, but the scammers will adapt and multiply their output. Overall, everyone loses.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

sammie997 said:


> Respectfully, your reply would suggest that you are unfamiliar with the costs associated with successfully publishing independently. Even with a mythical 3,000 KENP book, no author is netting $10/book. That's particularly true in the epic genres; production costs of a quality 200k+ novel are astronomical. When you factor in marketing costs, margins shrink by as much as half again. More, while launching - and that does not take into account the additional risk associated with writing epics.
> 
> That being said, we're talking about a closed system wherein a retailer pays by the page. In that context, there is no defense of the argument that a short book should earn more per page than a longer book that takes several multiples of time, money, and energy to produce, and entertains the reader for significantly longer. That is not a value judgement, of course; the value of any art is in the eye of the beholder. To try to increase the earnings of short book authors at the expense of long book authors, in order to address a problem that is not the fault of the long book author, is unreasonable.
> 
> ...


Time does not determine value. There are many 50-70k books that have taken years for the author to write. I will give you that editing costs for a longer book is significantly more. When it comes to marketing romance is a pretty competitive genre. As an indie you choose how much to spend and where to spend it. Marketing costs don't determine the value of your book. The issue at hand is market and value.

Amazon created an entirely new market for authors. One that simply didn't exist before. KU is a flawed system that they created to drive market share to Amazon not to make money for authors. They created a value system that is not based on a normal market. This system has been incredibly sucessful for Amazon. As a reader I have not seen the world from the authors view point, but if i had to hazzard a guess Amazon is not concerned as much about the author as they are about the reader. When all I could find was a sea of novellas, I cancelled my KU subscription. I, as many other KU readers do, prefer to read a book that is a book and not a chapter. You the author felt it was unfair that people were paid the same for a chapter as they were for a 200k+ book. Amazon changed it to "be fair" or did it change it to make readers happier. We can hope it was a little of both.

How Amazon currently determines what a page is worth or even a book is a mystery to all. They certainly wont share it with us the author. The only market we can base actual value on is the one that is data driven. We can see what consumers are willing to pay for a book. It is not $14 per ebook. Yes there may be a few that sell at the rate, but for most that do it is only for a short time and not as high a volume as they sell at a lower price. Many consumers want to pay $10 to read as many books as they want within a month. To decide that any one group of people want to steal from you because they want to solve a problem with a flawed system is a bit much. I believe this forum is all about helping others to succeed.

I do believe your view point is flawed. You are now fighting people that are trying to help fix a system, because it has inflated the value of your book.

Why does Amazon allow such a high KENP if the first place. If i had to guess it would be not for the single long novel, but instead for all the box sets out there. Poeple like box sets therefor Amazon likes boxed sets. Does Amazon want to pay 4x more than the cost of a single book to have them in KU. No fiscally it makes no sense. Why do they accept it then, because it is a small loss comparitively.

I personally dont think Amazon wants to get rid of stuffers. Bots yes Scammers yes Stuffers nope Why dont they? Because stuffers make them money. Do they make them money on KU? Nope Stuffers make them money in ads and market share. Stuffers can bid more so they drive up the price of ads. Not just for other stuffers but across the board. Where people might cap out at .26 cents per click they are now bidding $1-2 per click because rank is important on Amazon.

Now I dont know anything about your book personally. If you are one of the few that are selling a ebooks for $14+, great that is the value of your book. If you arent, please dont let a abritrary valuation that Amazon can change at any moment determine your reality.

If you want to fix the stuffers problem make a suggestion as to how. Don't accuse the people that are trying to help others of stealing from you.

Who knows where KU will end up if the problems in it arent fixed.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

To those who write books over 1,000 pages long, do you think it's realistic to expect to make more from a borrow than from an actual sale? If so, your expectations might be warped due to the strange world of KU. This is similar to how those who wrote 50-page novellas under KU 1.0 expected to be paid the same for a borrow as for a 1,000-page fantasy book. 

When a system works for us, it's easy to ignore its inherent flaws and accept the system as normal. But flawed systems are rarely sustainable, especially when they're so flawed that they're easy to game. They lead to unnatural behavior, such as chopping up books in KU 1.0 and stuffing books in KU 2.0. 

As it stands, the system is unsustainable. And it will only become more unsustainable as more authors are pushed into either (1) dropping out of KU entirely because they can't compete with the stuffers or (2) stuffing (or worse) because it's the only way they can make any money.


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## sammie997 (Apr 13, 2018)

P.J. Post said:


> 1k is still too high, 750 works better. 750 is about 600 print pages or about 160k words long. Nick did some nice math that supports the theory that money = money.
> 
> *Reality check:* Zon is NOT going to invest anything into resolving this. Changing the cap is the equivalent of checking a box, followed by literally no action at all. They might do this. Hopefully, we can talk them into checking one more box - limit the number of books an account can enroll into KU each month.
> 
> ...


You make statements above that have no basis in fact, yet you present them as fact:

"KU was never designed as a platform for box sets any more than it was designed for a handful of writers that publish extremely long books."

The more logical theory is that KU was designed to give readers the best value possible, so they become loyal to the brand. If that is the case, then KU absolutely was designed to encourage publishers, indie or otherwise, to offer lots of content at the most affordable possible price.

You talk about individual vs. shared interests - whose shared interests should we be catering to? Romance authors? Short story writers? Epic authors? Those somewhere in the middle? Those who write "average" length books, whatever that happens to be? Who gets to decide who wins and who suffers? At what point should quality be taken into account? At what point should the rarity of a type of work in relation to its demand be taken into account?

The idea of limiting the number of titles an account can submit makes next to no sense at all. Even a small imprint could have dozens of authors, all scheduling releases around the holidays.

You want KU to be curated, so only high-quality (and non-stuffed) work gets in? Books with original artwork, professional editing, formatting, and proofing? LET'S DO IT. Seriously, let's start a massive movement, all of us, and make it so a book can't get into KU without passing some kind of basic quality test. I LOVE that idea. You want to petition Amazon to add at least some degree of eyeballing to multi-volume sets, with clear limitations as to what's OK and what isn't? GREAT!

There are so many ways we authors can work together to encourage Amazon to make KU better. But if you're going to try to increase your margins at the cost of other legitimate authors by trying to get Amazon to tip the scales in your favor, it doesn't matter how many you harm. One is enough to make your actions selfish.

----

I'll leave this as my last comment to all before I get to work organizing the epic fantasy community against this nonsense. Plenty of authors succeed WILDLY in this ecosystem by writing great books and marketing them well.

_Heavily edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

sammie997, further posts of that nature will lead to a ban from the thread. That kind of venomous, personal tone isn't how we roll around here.


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## sammie997 (Apr 13, 2018)

Becca Mills said:


> sammie997, further posts of that nature will lead to a ban from the thread. That kind of venomous, personal tone isn't how we roll around here.


Fair point on tone, Becca. Mea culpa, sincerely. I strongly feel, however, that this cannot be overstated: a vast, sweeping approach that could dramatically reduce the incomes of legitimate authors so that the "aggregate" can make some small gain in chart visibility is, in my opinion, more than "just business." It *is* personal. A 20% reduction in an author's income can make the difference between someone being able to keep their home or losing it to foreclosure. The authors who would be on the receiving end of this type of thing are real, live human beings, with families and bills - they're not the ones gaming the system. I think that fact gets lost when people start talking about what's best for the "aggregate," and it rankled me.

I will temper my tone in the future, and withdraw from this thread for now.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

I'm a romance author, and my books average 80,000 words. You know what's the perfect KU limit for me? 450 pages. 

If I were only concerned with myself, or only romance authors, I'd push for a KU limit of 500 pages, or heck, even 400. So, to those who write very long books, please understand that we're not suggesting something that works for us and only us. If that were the case, we'd suggest a much lower limit. In truth, a 500-page limit would probably be enough to cover more than 90% of the books in the Kindle Store.

But we truly do want all genuine authors to succeed. Just the fact we're suggesting a limit of double that should let you know that we're seeking a compromise that will work for all of us. Right now, you feel safe and happy with KU, because the rot of stuffers and scammers hasn't so fully infected your genres. But if this keeps up, it's only a matter of time. How will you feel when you need to spend hundreds a day in advertising just to get any visibility? Or when you pull up your category and almost all the books are priced at 99-cents and stuffed with filler? Because if nothing changes, it really is only a matter of time.

Time and time again, Amazon has proved itself unwilling or unable to police their system. I suspect changes are coming sooner than later, and if we can agree on the best compromise, maybe we can guide them to modify the system to the benefit of all of us -- and of course, to the detriment of the scammers.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

MmmmmPie said:


> To those who write books over 1,000 pages long, do you think it's realistic to expect to make more from a borrow than from an actual sale? If so, your expectations might be warped due to the strange world of KU. This is similar to how those who wrote 50-page novellas under KU 1.0 expected to be paid the same for a borrow as for a 1,000-page fantasy book.
> 
> When a system works for us, it's easy to ignore its inherent flaws and accept the system as normal. But flawed systems are rarely sustainable, especially when they're so flawed that they're easy to game. They lead to unnatural behavior, such as chopping up books in KU 1.0 and stuffing books in KU 2.0.
> 
> As it stands, the system is unsustainable. And it will only become more unsustainable as more authors are pushed into either (1) dropping out of KU entirely because they can't compete with the stuffers or (2) stuffing (or worse) because it's the only way they can make any money.


This sums up the problem succinctly. There was an overcorrection after KU1 to favor super long books. Amazon probably figured this wasn't as gameable, and they were right: it's hard to create an actual 200k word book. But it's less difficult to create one stuffed full of recipes and then bot-read. Each change has second order effects that are difficult to anticipate. The previous page cap helped clamp down on some of the more egregious stuffing behavior.

But the current system is not long for this world; the writing is on the wall. Emotions aside, the numbers don't work. The best option is to devise a solution that hurts the least number of authors. Worst case scenario, KU could just disappear. Or it could be replaced with a curated Prime Reads type thing. Neither of those are good for the majority, and a lot of mid-list authors would see their careers vanish overnight (not me, but I'm not all-in on KU). There are very few people writing legitimate 200k+ books. Way less than 1% of books. Most of these people will still get paid a little more than a sale for a full-read. That strikes me as reasonable (and sustainable), just not the skewed windfall that they might be accustomed to.

The botted massive bogus books are having a huge negative impact on KU. Capping the KENP payout immediately solves a raft of problems with these volumes, and it costs Amazon $0. That strikes me as a viable solution.

For the record, getting rid of KU box sets would hurt me, so I have skin in that game. But the single title per KU ASIN is a move that clearly needs to be made, too. Maybe they finally give us better options as a result, too, like bundling and series discounts. Who knows? What I do know is that the current stuffed titles, if allowed to continue, are going to result in changes that most of us are unlikely to find favorable. But a cap + single title rule hurts the least number of people and gets rid of most of the BS without requiring a huge effort on Amazon's part.

General comments in regards to what has been discussed in the thread:

This has nothing to do with chart visibility. It has to do with sustainability. 97.5% (e.g. getting $4 for a full read vs. $4.10 for a sale of a $5.99 book) of something is still a good living. 100% of nothing, if KU implodes, or Amazon changes the rules for the far worse, is...well, that affects many, many more people. Some people might think that KU dying is a good thing; I'm mostly indifferent, despite actively engaging in this discussion. But I'd prefer for the thousands of people who have staked their livelihoods on Amazon exclusivity not to be out in the cold - and if I can help support easy fixes that will enable that, I am willing to do so.

There is no perfect solution that doesn't affect someone. We can talk "fair" or "moral" all day long, but reality is reality, and that won't change. Regardless, the most moral solution, at least to my sensibilities, is to seek a solution that significantly reduces the number of people screwed - not declare the status quo as more fair just because you're not personally getting screwed right now. But everyone must ultimately decide such things for themselves.

Amazon is not going to curate books. They are not going to weed out bonus content beyond a certain percentage with manpower. They are not going to police the store. _Should _doesn't matter; they've never done it, and they're not going to do it. It is not in their corporate DNA. There are ways to work within what they are willing to do to make things better. Not perfect, but better.

If anything, though, these threads suggest that coming to an agreement on this is an almost impossible task. Amazon's solution, given KU1/KU2, will likely be more disruptive than a page cap or box sets disappearing. Hopefully that does not happen, but given past history, that hope strikes me as optimistic.

Back to writing; if anyone starts a concerted effort they'd like the community to get behind, please send me a PM. I'll be happy to support any reasonable efforts.

Nick


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Amazon is not going to curate books.


Curate? No. Police? Yes, they do it all the time. They block books, shift their categories, suspend accounts, monitor formatting quality, etc. 24/7, quite contrary to your assertions. Their problem with book stuffing is due to their opaque TOS. Their own employees fail to fully grasp it.

If they limited the ratio of bonus content to title content, book length becomes a non-issue. It's a no-brainer. They've already got the manpower to enforce their TOS. What they lack is a clear TOS for their manpower to enforce. Initially, they decided ambiguity would give them wiggle-room. That's reasonable for a start-up program but counterproductive now (clearly). They need to grow up.


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## Desert Rose (Jun 2, 2015)

writerbiter said:


> The worst offenders, those who are exploiting the system, are spending a majority of their earnings on advertising--$1500-$2000 or more a day between Facebook and AMS ads. Probably more in certain special circumstances. They're able to do this because they have huge advertising budgets, a whole company based on hiring full-time salaried PAs, and a cadre of ghostwriters at their disposal. They're spending tremendous amounts of money to make very little, but they are making some profits, which encourages the behavior.


This would seem to imply these "offenders" are working hard and spending lots of money in order to attract legitimate readers to read their books. I think that makes them "skilled marketers", not scammers. Arguing that the problem is they have too much money to spend on advertising is like arguing the local chain grocery is scamming because they can out-advertise the mom-and-pop store down on the corner.

The people who are actually hurting everyone in KU are the ones NOT advertising, because they don't need to...they buy their readers from click farms instead.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

Dpock said:


> Curate? No. Police? Yes, they do it all the time. They block books, shift their categories, suspend accounts, monitor formatting quality, etc. 24/7, quite contrary to your assertions. Their problem with book stuffing is due to their opaque TOS. Their own employees fail to fully grasp it.
> 
> If they limited the ratio of bonus content to title content, book length becomes a non-issue. It's a no-brainer. They've already got the manpower to enforce their TOS. What they lack is a clear TOS for their manpower to enforce. Initially, they decided ambiguity would give them wiggle-room. That's reasonable for a start-up program but counterproductive now (clearly). They need to grow up.


Most of what you mentioned is automated or semi-automated. I was specifically talking about human interventions/policing, of which Amazon generally is not a fan, and which many are offering as the primary alternative to hard yes/no rules that can easily be checked by machines. My argument is not so much that these wouldn't work, it's more that whether or not they would work is irrelevant, since Amazon is exceedingly unlikely to implement any of them due to costs.

The costs of policing bonus content halfway decently are likely way, way higher than simply allowing the scammers to steal from the pot. Fully checking the bonus content likely demands a human review team, because any automated mechanism will easily be fooled - you could just stuff the extra book into a 700 page epilogue or Chapter 56 or whatever. They will have to check each book that comes in - even ones that are reuploaded, to fully catch the problem. Given the volume of titles on the store and being published per month, that's a lot of manpower.

Perhaps the aforementioned plagiarism checkers would be effective and sophisticated enough to prevent this and thus not necessitate hiring a bunch of additional employees. In that case, it is certainly a viable solution. You still need Amazon to build it (or license it and then integrate it into their systems), though, which takes time and resources. That's far from free - and you run the risk of their automated checker being less than reliable or introducing unforeseen problems into the fold, as some of their other automation does.

Nick

ETA: if anyone believes that actual human oversight is a better solution, then organize and make a proposal to KDP support. Given Amazon's corporate culture, and the associated costs, I don't see this gaining any traction with them, however, and believe efforts are much better focused on alternative solutions. An automated checking mechanism for duplicate content could work, assuming that Amazon gets it right. If anyone wants to put that forth as an alternative proposal to KDP, I am open to that, although there are surely some potential downsides that could end up irritating us all.

Now back to writing for real.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Dragovian said:


> This would seem to imply these "offenders" are working hard and spending lots of money in order to attract legitimate readers to read their books. I think that makes them "skilled marketers", not scammers.


If these "offenders" were truly paid according to real pages read by real customers, I could agree with this. But on many devices/systems, skipping around (such as through the TOC) can net you credit for pages that weren't actually read. Similarly, when they use the same story as stuffing in multiple books, they have the potential to be paid twice, three times, or more, for the same content.

Plus, there's nothing saying that they don't make use of both -- bots and advertising. If you're in the Amazon top 100, you'd better have some actual readers, not all bots, or even Amazon, as lax as they can be, will get suspicious.


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## GoingAnon (Jan 16, 2014)

ORIGINAL POST MODIFIED SEPT 21, 2018. I do not accept nor do I consent to KBoards/VerticalScope's Terms of Service which were implemented without proper notification. As I await a response regarding my request for full account and content deletion - pursuant to GDPR - my continued use of this forum should not be construed as consent to, nor acceptance of, KBoards/VerticalScope's aforementioned Terms of Service.


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## El-Do (Apr 14, 2018)

Nicholas Erik said:


> This sums up the problem succinctly. There was an overcorrection after KU1 to favor super long books. Amazon probably figured this wasn't as gameable, and they were right: it's hard to create an actual 200k word book. But it's less difficult to create one stuffed full of recipes and then bot-read. Each change has second order effects that are difficult to anticipate. The previous page cap helped clamp down on some of the more egregious stuffing behavior.
> 
> But the current system is not long for this world; the writing is on the wall. Emotions aside, the numbers don't work. The best option is to devise a solution that hurts the least number of authors. Worst case scenario, KU could just disappear. Or it could be replaced with a curated Prime Reads type thing. Neither of those are good for the majority, and a lot of mid-list authors would see their careers vanish overnight (not me, but I'm not all-in on KU). There are very few people writing legitimate 200k+ books. Way less than 1% of books. Most of these people will still get paid a little more than a sale for a full-read. That strikes me as reasonable (and sustainable), just not the skewed windfall that they might be accustomed to.
> 
> ...


Nick, perhaps you answered this elsewhere. If so, I apologize. What is there to suggest the scamming, click farms, etc. wouldn't simply continue under a new, lower cap? This is what happened the last time the cap was dropped, no?

Caps have not discouraged, to any measurable extent, botted, bogus books in the past, indicating it's not a viable solution and is certainly not an answer for the long-term viability of KU.


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

dgcasey said:


> Are you kidding me? First of all, what makes you think they're advertising their books? They don't give a fig about ranking or advertising. They'd rather fly under the radar anyway. They stuff a bunch of meaningless pages into a book and then they have their click farms read through the book and they get paid. They don't want a whole lot of human eyes looking between their covers.
> 
> And second, I doubt they have a large number of ghostwriters or large companies. Most of their "books" are plagiarized works from other authors. The last time I went looking for these thieves I found a whole raft of books filled with bits and pieces of Wizard of Oz books and some out of print Russian novels. It doesn't take an army of ghost writers to create these books. I could create a dozen of them in an hour if I wanted to.
> 
> Your "solution" does nothing to fix the problem. It just makes the scammers rework their methods and continue exactly as before.


You're seeing only half of the problem.

Look at the top 100. Look in romance. Over half of the romance books in the top 100 are produced this way. They're publishers, not authors. Their romances hit the top 100 with 8-11 books stuffed into the back. They publish 2-4 books a month, just in romance--and now they're targetting other genres as well.

Amazon will remove the Wizard of Ozes and out-of-print novels when they're reported. But the romances are legitimate to them, and those are the ones adding millions upon millions of pages to the pot every month. The top KU bonus threshold has moved from 12 million page reads to over 20 million page reads because of them--romance authors consistently hitting the top 100 with 3000 KNEP files.


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## 97251 (Jun 22, 2017)

I don't accept the new Forum TOS and refuse to support offensive ads


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## dgcasey (Apr 16, 2017)

writerbiter said:


> Look at the top 100. Look in romance. Over half of the romance books in the top 100 are produced this way. They're publishers, not authors. Their romances hit the top 100 with 8-11 books stuffed into the back. They publish 2-4 books a month, just in romance--and now they're targetting other genres as well.


Well, not to get into a war of words here, but I'm not seeing it. I just went and looked at Kindle ebooks > Romance and wasted a couple minutes of my life and only found one book in the top 20 that "might" be one you're talking about. The other nineteen books were all between 200 and 350 pages, more or less. Hardly worth the time of a stuffer.

As I said before, the scammers don't care about ranking and most of them are going to pick a category that doesn't get the looks that most do. They pick a quiet, out of the way category, they load their "books" and then start their click-bots to reading them. They don't waste time or money on covers. A lot of those books will show no cover at all. The author's name is usually a made up jumble of letters. And I would assume that after they've exhausted the page reads on each book, they unpublish it, probably republishing it with a different title and author name and do the whole thing all over again.

The place I found them was in the Legal Thrillers category, the one John Grisham is stuck in. And don't look in the Best Sellers list. Look in the New Release list and a couple a pages in. And I'm sure LT isn't the only category to find them in. Seems their latest trick is to release books in the Swedish language. I'm guessing Amazon doesn't have too many Swedes working in the "check these titles" department.

The only point I'm trying to make is, don't make the mistake of thinking the scammers are spending tons of money to get their books to the top, because they're not. They don't want to be at the top and when a title outlives its usefulness to them, they unpublish it. They want to operate just under the radar, getting their checks from Amazon each month and going about their merry way. Visibility is the last thing a scammer wants.


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## Lu Kudzoza (Nov 1, 2015)

A page cap is the type of solution that comes from the bad manager syndrome. One person in the office is consistently coming in late so the bad manager installs a time clock, which punishes everyone else in the office. When instead, a good manager would deal with the actual problem -- the employee who is coming in late.

The actual problem with the scammers are book stuffing and botting. So, Amazon should spend their time trying to identify books stuffed with duplicate content and identifying bots. Identifying duplicate content isn't a hard thing to do with today's technology. The next thing Amazon should do is identify bot networks and stop counting page reads from them (which already appears to be happening based on people losing page reads from March). 

If the author community wants the problem solved we wouldn't be pressuring Amazon to make a quick fix that won't fix the problem. Instead, we should be pressuring Amazon to identify duplicate content and bots... then remove them from the store.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

dgcasey said:


> Well, not to get into a war of words here, but I'm not seeing it. I just went and looked at Kindle ebooks > Romance and wasted a couple minutes of my life and only found one book in the top 20 that "might" be one you're talking about. The other nineteen books were all between 200 and 350 pages, more or less. Hardly worth the time of a stuffer.


Ah, but that's part of the problem. These books LOOK like they're a normal length, because the scammers are exploiting a quirk of Amazon's listing mechanism. What these authors often do is create a paperback of the non-stuffed version (meaning the novel actually being advertised.) Because Amazon uses the paperback length as the page count, the length of the kindle version is disguised. There's also a funny thing where in lots of cases, the page length isn't listed at all. I don't know how that happens, but you'll also see that a lot on stuffed books.

To determine if a book is stuffed, you have to dig deeper. Look at the TOC. Look where the "free look inside" ends. In many cases, half, or even the whole "book" is contained within the free preview.

The sad truth is, they've gotten sneakier. Also, some categories are hit harder than others. For example, new adult is almost all stuffed books now. In fact, it's gotten so bad that the scammers have had to branch out into other genres. Once they've destroyed romance, they'll move into other categories, like the aliens in Independence Day.

EDIT to ADD: Another clue is that these books are almost always priced at 99 cents, which helps if they want to engage in gift-carding, etc.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

sammie997 said:


> Fair point on tone, Becca. Mea culpa, sincerely. I strongly feel, however, that this cannot be overstated: a vast, sweeping approach that could dramatically reduce the incomes of legitimate authors so that the "aggregate" can make some small gain in chart visibility is, in my opinion, more than "just business." It *is* personal. A 20% reduction in an author's income can make the difference between someone being able to keep their home or losing it to foreclosure. The authors who would be on the receiving end of this type of thing are real, live human beings, with families and bills - they're not the ones gaming the system. I think that fact gets lost when people start talking about what's best for the "aggregate," and it rankled me.
> 
> I will temper my tone in the future, and withdraw from this thread for now.


Thank you, sammie997.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

writerbiter said:


> The worst offenders, those who are exploiting the system, are spending a majority of their earnings on advertising--$1500-$2000 or more a day between Facebook and AMS ads. Probably more in certain special circumstances. They're able to do this because they have huge advertising budgets, a whole company based on hiring full-time salaried PAs, and a cadre of ghostwriters at their disposal. They're spending tremendous amounts of money to make very little, but they are making some profits, which encourages the behavior.
> 
> If they wish to publish more books, that's fine. They'll need to release _double or triple_ the amount of books on a budget that is _one third of their original earnings_. It will be impossible for them to profit with this new system.
> 
> Amazon is unlikely to change their policy on bonus content, so we need to meet them in the middle with a proposal that is easy for them to implement and returns the spirit of the program to the KU. This will limit bonus content and make it more difficult for those who take advantage of the system to reach the rankings which offer them the visibility to continue with their particular business plan.


This suggests to me perhaps books produced in content mill fashion, but not nefarious. If someone is paying to acquire real readers then that's not cheating the system. Using bots and incentivizing readers is.

Instead of jiggering with the page count why not just cap what a book can earn at the maximum of what they charge for the book. So if someone wants to price their book at $9.99 then fine, the maximum you can earn in page reads for that book is 70% of that (or less if page reads would be less).

That still doesn't really get rid of the problem but limits what is earned per book to something reasonable.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

JulesWright said:


> Instead of jiggering with the page count why not just cap what a book can earn at the maximum of what they charge for the book. So if someone wants to price their book at $9.99 then fine, the maximum you can earn in page reads for that book is 70% of that (or less if page reads would be less).
> 
> That still doesn't really get rid of the problem but limits what is earned per book to something reasonable.


Would we then end up with a whole lot of books earning 35% of $399.99 for a full KU read?

Joking. Sort of.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Lol, yes possibly. Maybe we need a hard limit, ha ha. Max that can be earned on a book no matter what. The braintrust will work on a work around.

In all seriousness though, I don't think a book should be able to earn way more on a KU read than what it is selling for.



Becca Mills said:


> Would we then end up with a whole lot of books earning 35% of $399.99 for a full KU read?
> 
> Joking. Sort of.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

JulesWright said:


> In all seriousness though, I don't think a book should be able to earn way more on a KU read than what it is selling for.


Not every KU borrow is a full read, however. People buy books they never finish, but already paid the full price for. If a KU reader stops after 10 pages because the story isn't what they expected, or they dislike the main character or there's too much romance in the book, the author earns a few cents.

I wish we could somehow check how many pages are read (on average) per borrow. I'd really like to know!


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Yes, I just meant the max they should be able to get for one book. And yeah, we don't have the info on how many pages are coming from a borrow, and I don't know if Amazon tracks it internally or easily can.



C. Rysalis said:


> Not every KU borrow is a full read, however. People buy books they never finish, but already paid the full price for. If a KU reader stops after 10 pages because the story isn't what they expected, or they dislike the main character or there's too much romance in the book, the author earns a few cents.
> 
> I wish we could somehow check how many pages are read (on average) per borrow. I'd really like to know!


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

JulesWright said:


> This suggests to me perhaps books produced in content mill fashion, but not nefarious. If someone is paying to acquire real readers then that's not cheating the system. Using bots and incentivizing readers is.
> 
> Instead of jiggering with the page count why not just cap what a book can earn at the maximum of what they charge for the book. So if someone wants to price their book at $9.99 then fine, the maximum you can earn in page reads for that book is 70% of that (or less if page reads would be less).
> 
> That still doesn't really get rid of the problem but limits what is earned per book to something reasonable.


There are several issues and they're not all related (bots, stuffers, content mills, bot/stuffers, and content mills/stuffers with or without bots, etc.). Botting is really a standalone issue impervious to book-length (though affected if restricted, it doesn't really interfere with their scheme).

Restricting bonus content to a percentage of titled content would take care of bonus-stuffers dominating several categories in romance. Their gimmick is to publish a novella and include 3 or more bonus novellas (so the titled content is just a third or less of total content). This makes the $0.99 price point viable and puts downward pressure on price-points generally in the entire genre. Apparently, they're not violating TOS as it now stands. Assuming a human eyeball has a limited capacity for reading pages, these bonus-stuffers get the lion's share of available KU reads in some romance categories. Without a change in TOS, you're handicapped if you don't stuff, publish every two weeks, and price at $0.99. If you don't want to go along, petition Amazon. What else can you do?

Restricting KENP to 1000 pages per book would only marginally hurt the botters and few stuffers (their books typically, even when stuffed with eight novellas, do not exceed 1000 KENP pages). However, it would hurt a lot of legitimate authors writing long books.

The content mill/botter will just publish two five-hundred page books or ten hundred page books, whatever it takes to get under whatever threshold Amazon imposes.

There is a viable solution to bonus-stuffing -- limit bonus content to a percentage of titled content. They don't need to police it. KU writers will do that.

There's no solution to simple botting other than fine-tuning algorithms to work more effectively and with less collateral damage, though someone did mention a Captcha solution that might work. I think that merits further thought.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

JulesWright said:


> Yes, I just meant the max they should be able to get for one book.


Ideally, the payout for the _average amount of pages read per book_ should be equivalent of the sales price. I don't think it's unfair for a KU book to earn 6 dollars from a full read-through - some borrows will result in 4 dollars, or 2, or 20 cents. The higher payouts compensate for lower ones from partial reads and it more or less evens out.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

C. Rysalis said:


> Ideally, the payout for the _average amount of pages read per book_ should be equivalent of the sales price. I don't think it's unfair for a KU book to earn 6 dollars from a full read-through - some borrows will result in 4 dollars, or 2, or 20 cents. The higher payouts compensate for lower ones from partial reads and it more or less evens out.


Yes, average readthrough would probably make more sense.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

C. Rysalis said:


> I wish we could somehow check how many pages are read (on average) per borrow. I'd really like to know!


You can ball-park it using the TCK sales calculator. If it says your rank means 20 sales a day, and you only see three in your KDP dashboard, you've had (roughly) 17 borrows. Divide your reads by 17 to get your average read-through.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Dpock said:


> There are several issues and they're not all related (bots, stuffers, content mills, bot/stuffers, and content mills/stuffers with or without bots, etc.). Botting is really a standalone issue impervious to book-length (though affected if restricted, it doesn't really interfere with their scheme).
> 
> Restricting bonus content to a percentage of titled content would take care of bonus-stuffers dominating several categories in romance. Their gimmick is to publish a novella and include 3 or more bonus novellas (so the titled content is just a third or less of total content). This makes the $0.99 price point viable and puts downward pressure on price-points generally in the entire genre. Apparently, they're not violating TOS as it now stands. Assuming a human eyeball has a limited capacity for reading pages, these bonus-stuffers get the lion's share of available KU reads in some romance categories. Without a change in TOS, you're handicapped if you don't stuff, publish every two weeks, and price at $0.99. If you don't want to go along, petition Amazon. What else can you do?
> 
> ...


Yes, I think things are getting mixed or conflated. Someone can run a perfectly legitimate enterprise where they have huge ad spends, hire ghost writers and cover designers and pump out lots of books. They could get tons of page reads that way legitimately.

Those who use bots or incentivize readers can just pump out more books no matter what the length restrictions are.

I don't know how they can easily measure bonus content. People can just call it an epilogue or something. I've already posted a lot about bonus content in another thread. The best solution seems an ASIN can only be in KU once. I also don't think real readers are going to read the same bonus content over and over.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

Dpock said:


> You can ball-park it using the TCK sales calculator. If it says your rank means 20 sales a day, and you only see three in your KDP dashboard, you've had (roughly) 17 borrows. Divide your reads by 17 to get your average read-through.


True, but some readers don't even open the newly borrowed book until 4 weeks later. Or 8. Or they read 20 pages right away, and the rest as soon as the next holiday comes around.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

Not Lu said:


> A page cap is the type of solution that comes from the bad manager syndrome. One person in the office is consistently coming in late so the bad manager installs a time clock, which punishes everyone else in the office. When instead, a good manager would deal with the actual problem -- the employee who is coming in late.
> 
> The actual problem with the scammers are book stuffing and botting. So, Amazon should spend their time trying to identify books stuffed with duplicate content and identifying bots. Identifying duplicate content isn't a hard thing to do with today's technology. The next thing Amazon should do is identify bot networks and stop counting page reads from them (which already appears to be happening based on people losing page reads from March).
> 
> If the author community wants the problem solved we wouldn't be pressuring Amazon to make a quick fix that won't fix the problem. Instead, we should be pressuring Amazon to identify duplicate content and bots... then remove them from the store.


_This _is what I'd sign a petition for.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

I think people are conflating two separate issues. One is booting. Lowering the page cap won't make a big difference. It's not a big deal for botters to open 3x the accounts.

The other is stuffing, which is driving up the All Star threshold, lowering the rate, and making romance flooded with .99 books. It will happen to other genres eventually as well.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

C. Rysalis said:


> True, but some readers don't even open the newly borrowed book until 4 weeks later. Or 8. Or they read 20 pages right away, and the rest as soon as the next holiday comes around.


Which is why I said "ballpark" and "roughly". For some reason, only those on Amazon imprints are given borrow/read-through data. Why they don't provide it to all of us is a mystery.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

Dpock said:


> Which is why I said "ballpark" and "roughly". For some reason, only those on Amazon imprints are given borrow/read-through data. Why they don't provide it to all of us is a mystery.


I had no idea. I thought Amazon doesn't have that kind of data.

Now I'm a little grumpy


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## Desert Rose (Jun 2, 2015)

MmmmmPie said:


> If these "offenders" were truly paid according to real pages read by real customers, I could agree with this. But on many devices/systems, skipping around (such as through the TOC) can net you credit for pages that weren't actually read. Similarly, when they use the same story as stuffing in multiple books, they have the potential to be paid twice, three times, or more, for the same content.
> 
> Plus, there's nothing saying that they don't make use of both -- bots and advertising. If you're in the Amazon top 100, you'd better have some actual readers, not all bots, or even Amazon, as lax as they can be, will get suspicious.


Why would anyone who was stuffing books full of gibberish for fake page reads want to bot their way to visibility instead of staying under the radar? Rank is for getting actual readers; botters don't need it because their page reads are going directly to their books, not finding them organically. You get readers, you risk people who will complain and report that the middle of your book is machine translated nonsense. I really feel like two different issues are being conflated under the banner of "stuffing": people who put out massive books full of gibberish and get bot reads, and people who put out actual books and advertise their way to the top of the lists. The latter may have the potential to be paid more than once for the same content...but, if Amazon can count page reads, that still requires a reader to READ that content again.

The real issue remains whether Amazon can tell what a page read is, or not. And that question appears to be up in the air; people have said, "yes, it's all fixed but the cloud reader" and "no, it's not fixed" just in the past week.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

El-Do said:


> Nick, perhaps you answered this elsewhere. If so, I apologize. What is there to suggest the scamming, click farms, etc. wouldn't simply continue under a new, lower cap? This is what happened the last time the cap was dropped, no?
> 
> Caps have not discouraged, to any measurable extent, botted, bogus books in the past, indicating it's not a viable solution and is certainly not an answer for the long-term viability of KU.





Crystal_ said:


> I think people are conflating two separate issues. One is booting. Lowering the page cap won't make a big difference. It's not a big deal for botters to open 3x the accounts.
> 
> The other is stuffing, which is driving up the All Star threshold, lowering the rate, and making romance flooded with .99 books. It will happen to other genres eventually as well.


To answer your question, El-Do - Crystal nailed it. A page cap and single title ASIN rule helps eliminate the All Star problems and gets rid of the corresponding 10 - 30% boost "normal" authors generate from the stuffing strategy. It eliminates the "normal" authors who are using a loophole to gain more reads. Does this fix everything? No, but it also serves to make it more difficult for more aggressive botters shooting for the top 100 to gain reads - 3x the books means 3x the ad spend and 3x the weird activity. The problem used to be worse with an unlimited page cap, or at least more egregious; perhaps the impact is the same, after a recovery period during which people reorganized their tactics.

I agree that it's probably not enough to stop black hatters lurking under the radar. If you combine these with a duplicate content algorithm, however, then you have basically solved every problem that currently faces the store (temporarily; I'm sure there will be other second order effects).

In theory, a duplicate content algorithm - which would de facto end box sets and force a single title per ASIN policy, too - would solve all these major issues alone (bonus content from normal authors, clickfarming from black hatters). Although perhaps not: if someone is stuffing with their newsletters or some other non-duplicate content, they could still slip it past the duplicate filter. That's where a page cap would help. However, we'd have to see the duplicate filter in action before making any judgements; perhaps it would be intelligent enough to address this potential loophole.

The one issue not solved, then, is the unnatural market conditions: where people get paid $13 or $10 for a full read, when they only make $4 for a sale. Capping eliminates this problem, which is currently minor in comparison to these other problems. However, it remains to be seen how that would be exploited if all the other exploits are closed. Perhaps it wouldn't be a problem, though it strikes me as so unnatural that it would be extremely gameable in some fashion. It feels like the type of thing that Amazon will close on their own, anyway, because why would they pay 2x for someone renting the book vs. buying it?

But perhaps not. It doesn't bother me if real authors continue getting $13 for their doorstop book - as I stated before, good for them, although this payout skew strikes me as unsustainable. If all the other problems are closed, and it turns out not to be an issue (again, just looking at the numbers, I doubt this; and it's probably wise for anyone currently banking on $10 to $13 full reads to sustain their business to try to rebalance some of them toward sales), then why not let them continue? It seems worth testing, at the very least, before deciding that a page cap is mandatory. Especially since the page cap is the least effective single solution for combatting the biggest problems.

In any event, if someone put together a duplicate content filter + single ASIN per KU title proposal, I think that would solve the major issues, while eliminating the objections that people have raised. Assuming Amazon got the tech right (which is a big assumption, I think, but I'm willing to see). I understand some people are making good money off box sets (mine do well), but it seems they need to be eliminated from KU entirely for this to work. I don't see an alternative to that, though I am open to suggestions.

Nick


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## sammie997 (Apr 13, 2018)

Why does everyone keep ignoring the elephant in the room?

This is a problem IN THE ROMANCE GENRE. And it could only ever *be* a problem in the romance genre.

Why? Because a poorly-written, incoherently-compiled stuffed book with a stock photo cover in any other genre would get one-starred into oblivion. Try pulling this nonsense in sci-fi, or fantasy, or literally *any* other genre, and see what happens. 

The rest of the KU literary world is suffering because of a problem in ROMANCE. A stuffed book like this pops up in the other genres, the readers themselves would police the issue, and without question, the other authors in the genre would root out any violators with a quickness. Content farms don't have the talent to create consumable content in the more complex genres. It's not rocket science to write another billionaire bad boy book. That stuff can be created formulaically, in volume, and that's why you have the problem you have. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't romance writers who produce gorgeous work. I'm sure many do, and I'm sure many of YOU do. But punishing writers of longer books - books that cost TONS more to produce, and have the potential to stand the test of time as major literary accomplishments - by capping page read payouts is absolutely asinine. Why, so we can get more cookie-cutter billionaire man-chest bad boy stories at the top of the charts, at the expense of writers in other genres? This is not our mess, why should we pay to clean it up by having the value of our work reduced?

This problem can be solved EASILY and FAIRLY: 

1. Limit ROMANCE books to 1k KENP. No one writes romance stories over 1k. NO. ONE. 
2. Make those publishing anything (in any genre) over 200,000 words certify, with a mouse click while submitting a title, that there is no "bonus" content in the book, and if they get found to violate that provision, they lose ALL KENP earnings *and* royalties, and their account and any associated pen names are banned from KU for a year.

Problem solved. Long book writers earn the same per page as short book writers, so the scales aren't tipped unfairly. The scammers are hosed, and forced to operate at a MAJOR risk. Amazon gets to keep whatever royalties are associated with the scammers, even sales royalties, so that pays for whatever additional manual review is required.

If there are any problems with these proposed solutions, then we can talk about refining them. 

Lastly, for those of you who are saying "$5 is plenty for a book!": please think it through. You're all smart. If you were paying many, many thousands of dollars in production, editing, and graphics costs to create a 300k book, you'd feel differently. $5 wouldn't even come close to covering costs. How much do YOU earn for 300k words? You probably have 5-6 books you release to reach 300k. Are YOU OK with only earning $5 total KU money for 5-6 books? Of course not. And you shouldn't be. Your work is worth more than that. So is the work of epic writers.


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## bobfrost (Sep 29, 2013)

Amazon already polices duplicate content. Publish two box sets, one with books a b and c, the others with the same books in a different order (c b a) and amazon will send you a naughty gram asking you to take one down.

One title per ASIN for KU titles is so much easier than dealing with all this baloney. Amazon can police that easily. Epic writers can still reap the fruit of their epic. Box sets can still be sold (outside of KU), and everybody operates in a slightly more fair manner.

I couldn’t personally care less if they drop the kenpc cap to 1000. It won’t effect me at all. It would effect vanishingly few. Even so, I think it’s an unnecessary change that wouldn’t be as effective as just asking authors to put one book in any KU title. Easy peasy.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

sammie997 said:


> This is a problem IN THE ROMANCE GENRE. And it could only ever *be* a problem in the romance genre. Why? Because a poorly-written, incoherently-compiled stuffed book with a stock photo cover in any other genre would get one-starred into oblivion. Try pulling this nonsense in sci-fi, or fantasy, or literally *any* other genre, and see what happens. A stuffed book like this pops up in the other genres, the readers themselves would police the issue, and without question, the other authors in the genre would root out any violators with a quickness.


The reason they're in romance is because that's where the biggest pool of money is. Sadly, many of these scammers probably share your contempt for the genre, meaning they believe that anyone can do it. If fantasy books were the most lucrative, the scammers would be ruining your genre instead. They'd be saying, "Cripes, how hard can it be to throw a bunch of elves and dwarves together and have them go on a quest?" Note: I don't personally believe this. I'm just saying that all genres require a certain craftsmanship to produce quality, and it's easy to belittle a genre when you're not a fan.

As far as one stars and readers/authors policing the genre, this is easier said than done. In romance, we're literally flooded with these things. Plus, the scammers' reviews don't generally come from unbiased reviewers, but rather from people with an incentive of some sort . Basically, we romance authors (and readers, too) are facing a tidal wave of crap that has become nearly impossible to withstand, because these scammers/stuffers/whatever are putting out so many books, so often, and with such huge advertising budgets that it's like a firestorm. You can put out a small fire, but a raging inferno is a different matter.



sammie997 said:


> This problem can be solved EASILY and FAIRLY:
> 
> 1. Limit ROMANCE books to 1k KENP. No one writes romance stories over 1k. NO. ONE.
> 2. Make those publishing anything (in any genre) over 200,000 words certify, with a mouse click while submitting a title, that there is no "bonus" content in the book, and if they get found to violate that provision, they lose ALL KENP earnings *and* royalties, and their account and any associated pen names are banned from KU for a year.


While I don't necessarily agree that no one writes romance stories over 1K, speaking as a romance author, I would be fine with what you suggest. But I fear that you're missing something very important here. If these scammers were booted out of romance, they'd find another place to nest. That might be your genre. And trust me, reader-policing or not, you don't want to be facing this tidal wave of slop. If romance is limited to 1K, and others aren't, probably romance writers would breathe a huge sigh of relief, because it would be other genres getting hammered, not us.



sammie997 said:


> Lastly, for those of you who are saying "$5 is plenty for a book!": please think it through. You're all smart. If you were paying many, many thousands of dollars in production, editing, and graphics costs to create a 300k book, you'd feel differently. $5 wouldn't even come close to covering costs. How much do YOU earn for 300k words? You probably have 5-6 books you release to reach 300k. Are YOU OK with only earning $5 total KU money for 5-6 books? Of course not. And you shouldn't be. Your work is worth more than that. So is the work of epic writers.


I'm not trying to be snarky here, but I'm genuinely curious (since I don't write in your genre), what did fantasy authors do before KU 2.0? Under KU 2.0., you can earn several times more per rental than you can if someone actually buys the book. Before KU 2.0, were books in your genre priced higher? I know that's the case in romance. KU 2.0 has led to a drastic and troubling decrease in prices, as people push renting over buying. On a similar note, what would you do if KU went away entirely? Not concern-trolling here, but do you have a backup plan for when/if that happens? Because I suspect that if the scamming keeps up, we'll be seeing more drastic changes than what any of us have suggested.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

sammie997 said:


> Lastly, for those of you who are saying "$5 is plenty for a book!": please think it through. You're all smart. If you were paying many, many thousands of dollars in production, editing, and graphics costs to create a 300k book, you'd feel differently. $5 wouldn't even come close to covering costs. How much do YOU earn for 300k words? You probably have 5-6 books you release to reach 300k. Are YOU OK with only earning $5 total KU money for 5-6 books? Of course not. And you shouldn't be. Your work is worth more than that. So is the work of epic writers.


I've made decent money on my second book, which is 138K words, and it's all from purchases that pay me about $2.70 each (it's not in KU). I think that's how most of us do it -- with sales volume over time. A good book well handled can sell for years and years. Even with a lower per-unit payoff, it can add up quite a bit if you're writing something that has some endurance, which I think most epic fantasy authors are aiming to do.



sammie997 said:


> Why does everyone keep ignoring the elephant in the room?
> 
> This is a problem IN THE ROMANCE GENRE. And it could only ever *be* a problem in the romance genre.
> 
> Why? Because a poorly-written, incoherently-compiled stuffed book with a stock photo cover in any other genre would get one-starred into oblivion. Try pulling this nonsense in sci-fi, or fantasy, or literally *any* other genre, and see what happens.


In my experience, people tend not to see how formulaic and poorly written the work in their own genre may seem to outsiders. It's the formula and style they happen to like, so to them, it's good. But someone on the outside will pick it up and see stock characters, hoary plot tropes, stilted dialogue, or whatever other sins. That's why people on the outside of a genre aren't the ones who get to decide whether or not particular examples of it are good.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Becca Mills said:


> I've made decent money on my second book, which is 138K words, and it's all from purchases that pay me about $2.70 each (it's not in KU). I think that's how most of us do it -- with sales volume over time. A good book well handled can sell for years and years. Even with a lower per-unit payoff, it can add up quite a bit if you're writing something that has some endurance, which I think most epic fantasy authors are aiming to do.
> 
> In my experience, people tend not to see how formulaic and poorly written the work in their own genre may seem to outsiders. It's the formula and style they happen to like, so to them, it's good. But someone on the outside will pick it up and see stock characters, hoary plot tropes, stilted dialogue, or whatever other sins. That's why people on the outside of a genre aren't the ones who get to decide whether or not particular examples of it are good.


"Quite a bit" isn't a level playing field. A system like what's being proposed here says that a 300k work in a single volume should be worth less per word than three 100k works in multiple volumes, when the level of complexity in creating the piece is significantly higher - *only* so those who write smaller works can make more money. And let's be clear: that's the reason this discussion is being had. Those who write smaller works want more money. Which is great, if it's at the expense of bookstuffers; that's a fair-minded position to take. But at the expense of other legitimate authors?

It's kind of like saying, "$200,000 is plenty for a home builder to make, let's cap it at that," without taking into account that it costs significantly more to build a 4,000 square foot home than it does a 1,500 square foot home. It's illogical and arbitrary.

To be absolutely clear, lest it be assumed I think otherwise: I make no value judgement on the quality of one genre's creations versus another, only that I think it is quite clear that these stuffed books - the ones that are the root of the problem we are discussing - are being created by content farms with authors who have no vested interest in quality. They are ghostwriters being paid by the word (with terribly exploitative rates, as I understand it), and the quality of work has no bearing on an individual's name or professional reputation. Those who are publishing this work are making no effort to publish great stuff - they are pumping out volume, at the expense of readers and authors alike.

It can be argued that KU is stupid idea. I disagree, but other points of view are valid. But if someone else was to tell you, "OK, well, I think you should only earn $1.80 per book, versus the $2.70 you now earn, because by setting that limit in place *I* will make more money," I think your hackles would be raised, too. KU is a huge part of the book industry right now. The revenues it generates for authors are significant. But the playing field needs to be level, or it's really not about bookstuffers anymore, is it? It's about "as long as I get mine."


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

MmmmmPie said:


> The reason they're in romance is because that's where the biggest pool of money is. Sadly, many of these scammers probably share your contempt for the genre, meaning they believe that anyone can do it. If fantasy books were the most lucrative, the scammers would be ruining your genre instead. They'd be saying, "Cripes, how hard can it be to throw a bunch of elves and dwarves together and have them go on a quest?" Note: I don't personally believe this. I'm just saying that all genres require a certain craftsmanship to produce quality, and it's easy to belittle a genre when you're not a fan.
> 
> As far as one stars and readers/authors policing the genre, this is easier said than done. In romance, we're literally flooded with these things. Plus, the scammers' reviews don't generally come from unbiased reviewers, but rather from people with an incentive of some sort . Basically, we romance authors (and readers, too) are facing a tidal wave of crap that has become nearly impossible to withstand, because these scammers/stuffers/whatever are putting out so many books, so often, and with such huge advertising budgets that it's like a firestorm. You can put out a small fire, but a raging inferno is a different matter.
> 
> ...


Yes, please cap romance so people take this crap into other genres. I can't wait until it's fantasy that's flooded with .99 stuffed titles.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

bobfrost said:


> Amazon already polices duplicate content. Publish two box sets, one with books a b and c, the others with the same books in a different order (c b a) and amazon will send you a naughty gram asking you to take one down.
> 
> One title per ASIN for KU titles is so much easier than dealing with all this baloney. Amazon can police that easily. Epic writers can still reap the fruit of their epic. Box sets can still be sold (outside of KU), and everybody operates in a slightly more fair manner.
> 
> I couldn't personally care less if they drop the kenpc cap to 1000. It won't effect me at all. It would effect vanishingly few. Even so, I think it's an unnecessary change that wouldn't be as effective as just asking authors to put one book in any KU title. Easy peasy.


Fair enough. I've never tried to publish duplicate content, so I wasn't aware of this. That makes fixing this easier, at the very least.

One book per KU title makes sense to me, as I proposed in my original post, and it's an easy policy change. I'm on board, barring any compelling counter arguments.

To address other solutions:

1) capping romance will do nothing (besides getting romance authors to breathe a sigh of relief). All the stuffed books will immediately move to another popular genre with a clear formula (re: all of them).
2) checking a box that makes you swear not to break the rules will not do anything. You already agree to the KDP TOS; Amazon already sporadically bans people for breaking them. Anyone breaking the rules doesn't care, because Amazon's enforcement is spotty at best and the risk is worth the reward.

Any counter arguments to the single titles only in KU proposal? Box sets will no longer be eligible for the program, and as I've said, that will affect me. But that strikes me as a sensible and elegant solution that will require little effort on Amazon's part, but immediately wipe out a great deal of the problems. I'm sure there will be other problems that crop up, but at least it will cut down on a bunch of the current BS.

We'd need a clear definition of what "single title" means in terms of front/back matter allowed, but otherwise, that seems workable.

Nick


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

SeanHinn said:


> "Quite a bit" isn't a level playing field. A system like what's being proposed here says that a 300k work in a single volume should be worth less per word than three 100k works in multiple volumes, when the level of complexity in creating the piece is significantly higher - *only* so those who write smaller works can make more money. And let's be clear: that's the reason this discussion is being had. Those who write smaller works want more money. Which is great, if it's at the expense of bookstuffers; that's a fair-minded position to take. But at the expense of other legitimate authors?
> 
> It's kind of like saying, "$200,000 is plenty for a home builder to make, let's cap it at that," without taking into account that it costs significantly more to build a 4,000 square foot home than it does a 1,500 square foot home. It's illogical and arbitrary.
> 
> ...


I see your point, Sean, but I've never thought of books as having per-word value. I see them as having a market value. There are books I'll pay $15 for, and there are books I'll only pick up if they're free. That's the case even if the free book is much longer than the $15 book, took much longer to write, or had much higher production costs. A book's worth is really just a function of how much I want it, and I think most of us tend to recognize that and set our prices accordingly. I mean, a particular 1,500-sqft home might cost ten times what a particular 4,000-sqft home costs because other factors feed into desirability beside sheer size, right? I think of books the same way, so I have trouble reducing my feelings about value to a simple per-word calculus. My thoughts are also probably influenced by what authors have historically made. I mean, $5/book is *so* much more than the Tolkien estate must be making off each sale of _Fellowship_, you know? And that novel probably pushes up toward 200K. KU may be setting some authors' expectations way beyond what the book industry has ever been able to support in a long term way.

All that said, I'm not sure the KENP cap is the way to go, or that Amazon will have any interest in doing it. I really have no idea how to fix these problems. It's all just hideously complicated, and it's not like Amazon is a responsive partner as we try to address it.


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## Phxsundog (Jul 19, 2017)

I have nothing but love for romance. There's a grain of truth that this problem is a romance specific exploit driven by the big money in the genre. Plus the formulaic nature of some romance themes made it easy to break things down into a system the scammers were able to follow. Many of the scammers currently causing problems were around for years publishing piles of erotica titles and junk romances with bad covers and blurbs. What changed is when one very selfish author decided to sell them a master course that gave them a huge leg up. This person taught these bottom of the barrel scammers how to find good covers, write compelling blurbs, run Facebook ads and hire tons of ghosts. He then formed a collective with them under several rules: publish the same trends, spend at least $10k per book on ads and do email swaps daily.

Their strategy tries to make their books look as outwardly normal and marketable as possible while hiding junk underneath. The content is a wave of crap, as one person said. The vast majority of this content is bought at $0.01-0.02 per word off freelance sites. Sometimes (but only sometimes), they throw another couple hundred at line editors to make incoherent stories barely readable.

The whole scenario is like invasion of the body snatchers for real authors. Even real publishers who care about content quality. So many are being replaced and robbed blind by these machines with their KU gaming tricks and incredible ability to drop 2-4 books under each name every month like clockwork. Some of the same machines are now publishing 80,000 word novels weekly. Always stuffed. Always including exclusive never before published books hidden behind several other bonus books. Often with entire bonus books disguised as "sneak peaks" in the table of contents. They worry constantly about people like David Gaughran calling them out and have tried hard to hide their stuffing. They rush to get the paperback linked to Kindle quickly or sometimes publish it first, then tell Author Central to populate the paperback page count to hide the stuffing.

The posters who said they want to do this in other genres are right on the money. They've tried. It's much harder for them outside romance because there's no guru standing by to sell them info. They also depend on huge email lists and constant swaps. That hasn't been easy for them to come by outside romance. They were able to dupe lots of normal romance authors into swapping with them for a while. They use a website that showed up here months ago and was rebuffed over data security issues to coordinate swaps. They still con other authors into swaps by booking them with unsuspecting authors who share their whole lists, only to get a sendout back to a low quality segment of the scammers' own lists.

This group of 20-30 internet marketers has created a nightmare in romance and KU. Romance authors who worked for years to build a good brand are being reduced to second rung authors stuck behind the scammers. Solo authors are being replaced. This is not a problem limited to romance. This group wants to storm everything they can and take over with reams of rapid fire ghostwritten content. KU vulnerabilities will leave the door open to them to try unless something changes.

Something has to happen to stop this. Soon. Or they'll only grow more sophisticated. Eventually they'll find a way to invade mysteries, thrillers, fantasy, you name it. Lowering the page cap isn't a perfect solution but it's the best proposal I've heard.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Nicholas Erik said:


> One book per KU title makes sense to me, as I proposed in my original post, and it's an easy policy change. I'm on board, barring any compelling counter arguments.


I do like the single title idea, but I personally believe that these scammers will simply piece together several stories and call it a single story. Just off the top of my head, I can think of several ways that could be done with plausible deniability. Even in traditional books, there are stories within stories, such as the classic "1,001 Nights" example or "The Thirteenth Tale." This, unfortunately, will require Amazon to police it, which we know they won't do.

This also does nothing to address the primary problem of KU 2.0, which is that you can get 13 bucks a borrow for a 99-cent book. The 99-cent price point is rich for gifting to buy rank. The 13-dollar borrow is a juicy target for click farming and margins so unnaturally high that they can support artificially high advertising campaigns.

Personally, even though this suggestion sounds wonderful on merit, I believe it will be a mere speedbump to the scammers.

But please, don't take the above comments the wrong way. I'm so very thankful that we're brainstorming possible solutions. And if my thoughts on this don't line up with what others believe, I'll just be grateful that something is getting done.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Becca Mills said:


> I see your point, Sean, but I've never thought of books as having per-word value. I see them as having a market value. There are books I'll pay $15 for, and there are books I'll only pick up if they're free. That's the case even if the free book is much longer than the $15 book, took much longer to write, or had much higher production costs. A book's worth is really just a function of how much I want it, and I think most of us tend to recognize that and set our prices accordingly. I mean, a particular 1,500-sqft home might cost ten times what a particular 4,000-sqft home costs because other factors feed into desirability beside sheer size, right? I think of books the same way, so I have trouble reducing my feelings about value to a simple per-word calculus. My thoughts are also probably influenced by what authors have historically made. I mean, $5/book is *so* much more than the Tolkien estate must be making off each sale of _Fellowship_, you know? And that novel probably pushes up toward 200K. KU may be setting some authors' expectations way beyond what the book industry has ever been able to support in a long term way.
> 
> All that said, I'm not sure the KENP cap is the way to go, or that Amazon will have any interest in doing it. I really have no idea how to fix these problems. It's all just hideously complicated, and it's not like Amazon is a responsive partner as we try to address it.


Man, that really is the issue right there. Amazon needs to be prodded into action. Fair action, I'd say, but I don't think this idea is fair. It wouldn't harm me with the books I have out so far, but it would really change what I want to write down the line, and I have several author buddies who are writing 300k stories right now. I think one other thing to take into account is this: I am sure you're right, Tolkein's estate isn't making $5/book. But neither are they spending a nickel in advertising, production, branding, etc. The trad authors make way less in terms of the size of the check that comes in, broken down per unit, but they have no expenses. An indie epic author (who pays for editing and original art) is $5k into a book, minimum, before they hit the publish button, and the cost of advertising your way into the charts in fantasy right now is nutso. I heard someone above talk about 25c a click and I almost spilled my beer. I'd lop off my pinky toe if I could get a click for 25c. Some of my ad bids are well over $1. It's a $10k+ roll of the dice to launch an epic fantasy book, not to mention the many, many months of full time effort they take to write. Without KU, I'd have to price at $9.99, and no way a nobody like me gets sales at $9.99.

Anyhow, the idea I think is to punish the wrongdoers. I know that's harder, but a sweeping change to the entire thing to put a few dozen jerkwads out of business is shooting a mouse with a cannon. And really, I dunno that it would even work. Putting on my evil genius hat, if I were one of these outfits, I would just publish a ton of 1k books. I think this might even make them harder to spot, frankly. In any case, I doubt they'd just close up shop, and it would destroy AMS for those who advertise in the romance genre - there would be that many more titles clamoring for daylight. Ugh.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Phxsundog said:


> The vast majority of this content is bought at $0.01-0.02 per word off freelance sites.


That is the saddest thing I have read on Kboards. I knew it was low, but that's... I don't even have a socially acceptable word for it.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

To those who write 300,000-word books, please, pleeeeease consider what you're doing. You all seem like really decent people, dedicated to your craft and with a genuine concern for your fellow authors. But based on what Amazon has done in the past, I fear you're building your house on shifting sand. If you realize that you can't price your book at $9.99 (because it's higher than the "going rate" for a non-famous author), you must also realize that getting 13 bucks a borrow is unsustainable long-term.

This reminds me of the tail end of KU 1.0, where legitimate authors were in the middle of their 7-volume serialized stories, just as the hammer fell and KU 2.0 was announced, seemingly out of the blue. Here, these authors had built their entire plans around a quirk in Amazon's system that enabled them to receive more than the "going rate" for their work. And then, it was gone, leaving these authors scrambling, or hell, driving many out of the market entirely.

You're right that crafting a fantasy novel takes a lot of work, money, and time. Sheesh, the TIME. It's the thing we can't replace. A couple of years from now, it's very unlikely that KU 2.0 will be around in its current form. When the change comes, you'll want to have a backlist of novels you can earn money from. To ensure you're covered either way, are you absolutely sure that you wouldn't rather put out a trilogy rather than a single 300,000-word book? 

You probably won't believe this, but the above comments are rooted only in genuine concern. It seems that you're counting on KU 2.0 being around in its current form indefinitely. However, that seems highly unlikely, at least to me. As such, it might be worth asking yourself what you would do if KU wasn't around, and then taking whatever steps to ensure that your books would be profitable with or without KU. 

After all, these are scary times, my friends, and KU is long overdue for a serious shakeup.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

SeanHinn said:


> "A system like what's being proposed here says that a 300k work in a single volume should be worth less per word than three 100k works in multiple volumes, when the level of complexity in creating the piece is significantly higher - *only* so those who write smaller works can make more money. And let's be clear: that's the reason this discussion is being had. Those who write smaller works want more money. Which is great, if it's at the expense of bookstuffers; that's a fair-minded position to take. But at the expense of other legitimate authors?


I've published epic fantasy in both short and long versions. From my perspective, shorts are hard but long is excruciatingly difficult, so I agree with all the above. I don't think it's any different for other genres. But epic fantasy is by tradition trilogies, and a boxed set trilogy can be a gold mine -- in both sales and page reads. Why should someone be penalized for writing complex books that readers are craving and that earns legitimate authors money? Just why

There's no logical reason for the proposed cap. It will do nothing to stop the scammers, which is the reason put forward for the idea. What then is to be gained from it? Perhaps _some _of its supporters remember the days when a 10 page book earned as much per borrow as a 1000 page epic, and they'd like a return to something along those lines. Perhaps they'd even use scammers as a smoke screen to legitimize their real motive...

But at the end of the day, Amazon is going to do what Amazon is going to do. Except they've already considered all these issues in deciding the existing cap. And given they're now taking some action against the heart of the problem -- scammers -- I think that foreshadows the direction of their future intentions.

For the record, I'm a full-time author. This is my job. I only have one boxed set over the suggested limit, but I wouldn't want to lose a big chunk of the revenue it generates. Which I would. Readers buy a boxed set of a complete series more readily than they buy a boxed set of part of a series.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

dgcasey said:


> Well, not to get into a war of words here, but I'm not seeing it. I just went and looked at Kindle ebooks > Romance and wasted a couple minutes of my life and only found one book in the top 20 that "might" be one you're talking about. The other nineteen books were all between 200 and 350 pages, more or less. Hardly worth the time of a stuffer.


If you check out the _Women's Fiction_ category, you see a lot of stuffed books. You have to page through the LookInside to see the evidence of any stuffing, and if you see an 8 megabyte file size, that's evidence of it also.

FWIW, chances are high if you see a buffed tattooed dude on the cover and a provocative title, it has a certain amount of extra material inside.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Jack Krenneck said:


> Perhaps _some _of its supporters remember the days when a 10 page book earned as much per borrow as a 1000 page epic, and they'd like a return to something along those lines. Perhaps they'd even use scammers as a smoke screen to legitimize their real motive...


Egads, we've been found out! And we would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids, er, I mean fantasy authors.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

I see a certain amount of heat directed towards romance in particular, and some saying cap the genre and leave the other genres uncapped.

I don't agree with any particular genre -- be it romance or whatever -- being told they have to have a cap and other genres don't.

You don't penalise a genre -- try to fix the actual problem.


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

Unfortunately, you cannot simply limit the romance cap. Those exploiting the system will simply re-categorize their books. It's happening already. Look at Urban Fiction, Westerns, Vigilante Justice, etc. Romance is already creeping into other genres because it's easier to hit the top 100 subcat. And if a limit would be implemented strictly on romance, these authors will attempt the same strategy in other genres. Fantasy and sci-fi, thrillers, inspirational etc. It won't stop the root of the problem -- an _exploit_, not the behavior of individual publishers.

Remember, they are *not * writers. They don't care about the stories, the characters, or building a brand. They do this for the money, and they will do whatever it takes to earn more, including exploiting a system in place that a majority of writers do not abuse.

The program needs to be altered, and it's long overdue.

You also cannot rely on the community to police and review books for 10% or more bonus content. The review does not stop with the authors monitoring the store. A complaint will need to be read and verified by an Amazon representative. This would require more and more manpower, and Amazon is not a company that hires additional people to do these jobs. They demand automation. That's just how Bezos works. It's obvious the KDP department is tremendously understaffed already. Adding an additional workload for actual, warm-blooded reviewers will never happen. It's an expense, and they will not spend any additional money or sacrifice any additional staff.

On that note, any sort of plagiarism software is unlikely to be implemented. Thousands of books are published every day. Amazon cannot devote the resources to running a plagiarism checker on every one of them, especially as a plagiarism checker presupposes they have a scannable database somewhere where they can check for published material. Again, you're asking for more manpower, more programming, more delays, and more hands-on treatment of the program - at least in the beginning - to solve the problem. Assuming there's a technological solution to the problem without considering the processing power/server power such a review process would require is not thinking like Amazon--they want to do the most they can for the least amount of manpower, programming, and effort.

So, we have to meet them in the middle. Even further than the middle. And while a lower cap might harm a very select minority of writers who are writing longer books, they are a _small minority_. The overwhelming _majority_ of writers in the program write books that are smaller than two hundred thousand words (1000 KNEP). And while I'm seeing complaints from writers who utilize box sets, this change does not impact your individual books. You would still be able to publish your titles with no change whatsoever.

If we want to improve the program, we need to think about the majority of authors were utilizing it. And the majority of authors are writing single title books, not box sets, that are under two hundred thousand words. If the change benefits 99% of the writers using the program, is it fair to make exceptions for a minority of writers knowing that it causes a _massive_ exploit which detrimentally impacts the program for everyone?

No, it isn't fair. But neither is what these publishing houses are doing to the entire store.

Remember, there are two problems plaguing the store at the moment. Click farmers and publishing powerhouses who are exploiting the page system. The publishers are not only seizing a larger share of the monthly pot, there also taking the All-Star Bonuses. Unfortunately, the bonuses are no longer awarded to the authors who have a best-selling book. They rewarded to those ghostwritten publishers who have the largest _quantity_ in the store. This flies against the spirit of the program and is detrimental to many authors who should rightly be awarded the bonuses. They are seizing a large share of the monthly pot, they are driving prices down, and the longer Amazon allows this to happen, the more they will exploit the system.

As an example, last month, _twelve_ of these authors reached the Top 100 in a single weekend. That's not unusual. They usually release together, coordinating their tropes as well as their covers images and fonts and colors. Each of these authors included 6 to 12 bonus novels, as close to the three thousand page cap as they could get. At that point, the Top 100 was no longer the 100 best-selling books. It became the top _200_ (or worse). This happens twice a month, and, judging by their new publishing schedules, it will soon happen once a week.

They exploit the system, and they are rewarded for it because Amazon _does not_ believe bonus books constitute a detrimental experience for the readers. There is no cause for them to change anything about the bonus books or stuffing as the _readers_ do not complain.

Therefore, we need to address the problem differently, in a way that Amazon can and will implement. Lowering the cap is an easy and _free_ solution for Amazon. If earnings are reduced, those exploiting the system will not be able to launch as effectively. (Or at all.) And while the fear may be that those simply release more books, they cannot launch double or triple the amount of books on one third of the earnings. Not when they are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars _a day_ with each new release. They will not be able to profit. They will stop and move on to the next moneymaking scheme which may or may not be on Amazon (Ebay, Etsy, etc).

Unfortunately, I don't have a petition. The representative I spoke with asked for individual authors to email their thoughts to the department directly:

KDP-CRS <at> amazon.com


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## El-Do (Apr 14, 2018)

Every potential benefit of lowering the cap is based on nonexistent evidence. That's my problem with this sweeping change. You're hurting a lot of authors with box sets in exchange for potential benefits that may or may not be realized. Once a change like this goes through, there's no going back. 

To be clear, there is no evidence a lower cap will stop scammers and stuffers (evidence from prior lowering of cap suggests it will have no effect).

There is no evidence that the payout would go up even if scammers were stopped. 

There is no evidence the long-term viability of KU is in peril. 

We're talking about slashing earnings for many authors who are not running afoul of Amazon's policies for no clear benefit to authors as a whole. 

These are the sort of changes--based on mere possibilities and assumptions--you make when the outcome affects you and you only, ie: changing a cover, blurb, etc.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

SeanHinn said:


> "Quite a bit" isn't a level playing field. A system like what's being proposed here says that a 300k work in a single volume should be worth less per word than three 100k works in multiple volumes, when the level of complexity in creating the piece is significantly higher - *only* so those who write smaller works can make more money. And let's be clear: that's the reason this discussion is being had. Those who write smaller works want more money. Which is great, if it's at the expense of bookstuffers; that's a fair-minded position to take. But at the expense of other legitimate authors?


Every regulation or law involves some tradeoff of freedom-and-profit (call this FAP for now) vs. security/safety (SS). Like a speed limit on the freeway curbs FAP but provides increased SS.

This is the same--a little curbing of FAB could provide disproportionately large SS. They key is to find the sweet spot.

Nobody wants a cap of 200 KENPC, for example, just like nobody wants a speed limit of 40 on the freeway. The speed limit curbs the FAP of skilled drivers with perfect cars who feel comfortable going 150+, but mostly it inhibits those who would hurt other drivers if they were allowed to go that fast.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

writerbiter said:


> On that note, any sort of plagiarism software is unlikely to be implemented. Thousands of books are published every day. Amazon cannot devote the resources to running a plagiarism checker on every one of them, especially as a plagiarism checker presupposes they have a scannable database somewhere where they can check for published material. Again, you're asking for more manpower, more programming, more delays, and more hands-on treatment of the program - at least in the beginning - to solve the problem. Assuming there's a technological solution to the problem without considering the processing power/server power such a review process would require is not thinking like Amazon--they want to do the most they can for the least amount of manpower, programming, and effort.


The attractive thing about Turnitin is that the computing power wouldn't have to be native to Amazon, I don't think. Amazon would have to partner with Turnitin to add its existing database of book files to the Turnitin library and to integrate Turnitin into the file submission process. All that would be an upfront cost, but after that, it would be an automated process run (I think) off Turnitin's servers. Turnitin does this kind of integration work with companies who make online teaching platforms. Amazon already runs some kind of plagiarism checker on submitted files. I know because my free books trigger those annoying copyright queries every time I upload. They'd be replacing what they already have with something that can produced a fine-tuned percentage of matched text. If what they're using can't do that (who knows, maybe it can).

That said ...



writerbiter said:


> There is no cause for them to change anything about the bonus books or stuffing as the _readers_ do not complain.
> 
> Therefore, we need to address the problem differently, in a way that Amazon can and will implement. Lowering the cap is an easy and _free_ solution for Amazon.


... why would Amazon want any sort of solution, even an easy, free one, for a situation it doesn't perceive as a problem because readers aren't complaining about it? I'm not trying to be snarky. This is my fear, actually, based on the company's history of lax enforcement and the answers Shelley K got from Amazon a few days ago: that Amazon is fine with most of these stuffed books because a large segment of readers actually like them or, if there is no such segment of readers, all the readers who are not reading them are not complaining in sufficient volume.


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## Lu Kudzoza (Nov 1, 2015)

Becca Mills said:


> I see your point, Sean, but I've never thought of books as having per-word value. I see them as having a market value. There are books I'll pay $15 for, and there are books I'll only pick up if they're free. That's the case even if the free book is much longer than the $15 book, took much longer to write, or had much higher production costs. A book's worth is really just a function of how much I want it, and I think most of us tend to recognize that and set our prices accordingly. I mean, a particular 1,500-sqft home might cost ten times what a particular 4,000-sqft home costs because other factors feed into desirability beside sheer size, right? I think of books the same way, so I have trouble reducing my feelings about value to a simple per-word calculus. My thoughts are also probably influenced by what authors have historically made. I mean, $5/book is *so* much more than the Tolkien estate must be making off each sale of _Fellowship_, you know? And that novel probably pushes up toward 200K. KU may be setting some authors' expectations way beyond what the book industry has ever been able to support in a long term way.
> 
> All that said, I'm not sure the KENP cap is the way to go, or that Amazon will have any interest in doing it. I really have no idea how to fix these problems. It's all just hideously complicated, and it's not like Amazon is a responsive partner as we try to address it.


Becca, you nailed it. The price of a book should be based on how much the reader wants it. The price of a page read should also be based on how much the reader wants it. Right now, that's what Amazon is doing... paying the author as long as the reader keeps turning pages. Setting a page cap would mean that the reader wants to pay for the next page, but Amazon arbitrarily decided to stop paying the author because the reader went past a page limit that was pulled from someone's fanny (for no effective reason).

Back to solving the problem:

1. Identify and eliminate duplicate content in KU
2. Identify bots checking out books and don't give a botted book a rank boost
3. Identify bots reading pages and don't pay for a botted page read

On the bright side, it appears that Amazon is starting to go after the bots and stuffed content. Now that they've won their first case against a scammer they'll feel much more confident to go after the others (which is probably why people are losing page reads from March).


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

SeanHinn said:


> Man, that really is the issue right there. Amazon needs to be prodded into action. Fair action, I'd say, but I don't think this idea is fair. It wouldn't harm me with the books I have out so far, but it would really change what I want to write down the line, and I have several author buddies who are writing 300k stories right now. I think one other thing to take into account is this: I am sure you're right, Tolkein's estate isn't making $5/book. But neither are they spending a nickel in advertising, production, branding, etc. The trad authors make way less in terms of the size of the check that comes in, broken down per unit, but they have no expenses. An indie epic author (who pays for editing and original art) is $5k into a book, minimum, before they hit the publish button, and the cost of advertising your way into the charts in fantasy right now is nutso. I heard someone above talk about 25c a click and I almost spilled my beer. I'd lop off my pinky toe if I could get a click for 25c. Some of my ad bids are well over $1. It's a $10k+ roll of the dice to launch an epic fantasy book, not to mention the many, many months of full time effort they take to write. Without KU, I'd have to price at $9.99, and no way a nobody like me gets sales at $9.99.


That's really shocking to me, Sean. I had no idea y'all had to run such pricey ads. I guess a whole lot of books that take a long time to read are competing for a limited number of readers. Brutal. 



SeanHinn said:


> Anyhow, the idea I think is to punish the wrongdoers. I know that's harder, but a sweeping change to the entire thing to put a few dozen jerkwads out of business is shooting a mouse with a cannon. And really, I dunno that it would even work. Putting on my evil genius hat, if I were one of these outfits, I would just publish a ton of 1k books. I think this might even make them harder to spot, frankly. In any case, I doubt they'd just close up shop, and it would destroy AMS for those who advertise in the romance genre - there would be that many more titles clamoring for daylight. Ugh.


I think the idea is that they wouldn't be able to maintain their current per-book ad spends while remaining profitable: they'd have three times as many books to advertise, and each book would only earn 33% of what it used to.

But some folks have also said most of these books aren't really scraping the 3,000-KENP ceiling, anyway. So ... dunno.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

I really don't understand why lowering the page count would do anything. Black hatters won't care about page length if they are using automation.  If there are groups of writers cooperating with each other by sharing mailing lists, etc.  they also have economies of scale on their side compared to one writer who works alone trying to earn an honest living (although they too can be part of newsletter swaps, etc.)  They will still have economies of scale on their side even if they make less per book compared to one writer trying to do things honestly (not using black or gray methods, etc).    It wouldn't put them out of business.  I don't think most of their books right now are hitting close to 3,000 KENPC, maybe some are over 1,000 but don't think they go up to 3,000 that often. 

I don't understand why Amazon doesn't do anything about stuffing.  They are paying for extra page reads that way.  I don't know how that benefits them unless it attracts more people to subscribe to KU or people reading stuffed content keeps them tied to Amazon more so that they buy more Amazon goods.  Neither one of those seem likely to me, but I'm not sure.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

writerbiter said:


> So, we have to meet them in the middle. Even further than the middle. And while a lower cap might harm a very select minority of writers who are writing longer books, they are a small minority. The overwhelming majority of writers in the program write books that are smaller than two hundred thousand words (1000 KNEP). And while I'm seeing complaints from writers who utilize box sets, this change does not impact your individual books. You would still be able to publish your titles with no change whatsoever.
> 
> If we want to improve the program, we need to think about the majority of authors were utilizing it. And the majority of authors are writing single title books, not box sets, that are under two hundred thousand words. If the change benefits 99% of the writers using the program, is it fair to make exceptions for a minority of writers knowing that it causes a massive exploit which detrimentally impacts the program for everyone?


Epic writers/books do not represent only 1% of the books bought and read. If you're going to use numbers to persuade people to follow your movement, find out what they are first.

The tyranny of a majority against a minority is a thing loathed, rightly, by all fair-minded people.

If your objective is to ONLY punish the wrongdoers, to the benefit of the community at large, I assume, then, that you would be open to carving out an exception for writers of legitimate epics, yes? Your answer to that question will expose your motive.

I can't help but shake my head at how folks don't see how this wouldn't work at all, and would probably screw things up even worse. Do any of you guys use AMS? You know how it works, right? The more titles being advertised, the more expensive the bids become. When these stuffers/scammers start chopping their books into 1k chunks, you're gonna have a problem FAR worse than what you have now. Yeah, they will lose some margins, and they'll still print money. Your stuff will become INVISIBLE. Fine, forget whether it's fair or not, or whether it will severely harm good, honest people - clearly, many of the people in this thread don't care a whit about harming other authors, so long as they benefit - at least use common sense. It's a bad idea that won't work, and could make things a hell of a lot more awful.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

ParkerAvrile said:


> If all you had to do was throw $20-50K at a book to make a hit, every single big trad book would be a hit.


A 1/5 page ad in the New York Times Book Review is over $10,000 so a traditional publisher might look at a $50,000 launch as cheap. That figure rather exceeds my AMS budget for the next dozen years.

Are traditional publishing houses advertising in AMS? I've never noticed.

A book-stuffer FB group advocates $5000-$10,000 launches. They sell at $.99 and game KU with bonus books. I've seen BR screenshots purporting to show they consistently double their money (they have a bad boy romance focus).

I suspect Amazon's view is their customers get a lot of value from the bonus book situation. In other words, it's a boon for their customers. There's really no incentive for them to change the system because in their view it's not broken (unless the stuffers bring in the bots).


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

ParkerAvrile said:


> I don't want to be argumentative, but something's bothering me about this argument, what I've read of it.
> 
> I just think if the books are that bad, why do people keep coming back?


I think there are different camps when it comes to how stuffed books are generating income, and also when it comes to what Amazon's rules on stuffing really are. That we differ on the basic facts of the matter makes discussion, much less consensus, hard.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Hopefully this will put to bed the idea that it's reasonable to apply an arbitrary cap making a longer book the same value as a shorter book. There's a reason Oathbringer is almost 2x the cost of the other books, and it's not the cost of the extra paper. These are all well-known authors, so it's not about popularity, either. It's about the risk, effort, and expense required to produce the longer title.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

SeanHinn said:


> Hopefully this will put to bed the idea that it's reasonable to apply an arbitrary cap making a longer book the same value as a shorter book. There's a reason Oathbringer is almost 2x the cost of the other books, and it's not the cost of the extra paper. These are all well-known authors, so it's not about popularity, either. It's about the risk, effort, and expense required to produce the longer title.


Are you sure those differences aren't at least in part about the cost of paper and shipping, Sean? As an Amazon ebook, the Sanderson only costs about 20% more than the next most expensive of those books (Glass), despite the fact that it's three times longer. It's the equivalent of someone pricing at $5.99 instead of $4.99 -- well within the range of standard differences. It's not really like most of us making $2.05 to $4.10 per ebook sale and a few people making $13.50 per sale.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Becca Mills said:


> Are you sure those differences aren't at least in part about the cost of paper and shipping, Sean? As an Amazon ebook, the Sanderson only costs about 20% more than the next most expensive of those books (Glass), despite the fact that it's three times longer. It's the equivalent of someone pricing at $5.99 instead of $4.99 -- well within the range of standard differences. It's not really like most of us making $2.05 to $4.10 per ebook sale and a few people making $13.50 per sale.


Certainly in part, but if you ever have some time on your hands, price out big-order hardcover offset printing; the page number is a very small piece of the puzzle. You open those books up, and the real differences become apparent. Part of it is the art: maps, illustrations, original hand-painted scenes for the jacket. Those are expected in the epic genre, not just bonuses that the well-to-do include. And then, above all, is the editing. You can't get away with a beta team and a proof team in epic. There are too many moving parts, too many characters, and all-original terms, themes, religions, calendars, units of measurement - the appendices alone on these books can be 20-30 pages. You need full-on, developmental editing, not only for the book being produced, but the editor must also be familiar with the world you've created. They charge to read and review the previous books in the series. Consistency checking alone can take many weeks of work, before you ever get to line editing or proofing. Top-notch editors in this genre charge 3c/word just for the developmental edit, and if you don't pay top dollar, it *really* shows. Readers in this genre will bomb a book with even a slight consistency issue. Rightly so, I might add - the quality bar is set really, really high when you're trying to be the next Tolkein.

And, again, it's the advertising. The demographic of epic consumers tends to be on the higher-income side, which makes targeting them on ANY platform more expensive. I'll shoot you a PM of my AMS ads if you'd like to see what the bids are - you'll need your fainting couch. All that has to be built in to the pricing and revenue models. And, just like in any other genre, it takes a few books to gain any traction, so you're years into a series before you begin to have a clue as to what your readthrough is going to look like, and whether or not you have a story that is even *maybe* someday going to be profitable enough to complete. Which is the #1 reason trads don't buy epics from noobs - it's just too big a risk.

By the way, I'm not complaining even a bit - I love writing in this genre. It's the biggest challenge of my life, and I have never felt so fulfilled. But if I can't earn a living, I can't keep doing it, and again, I'm not anywhere near as invested as many of my peers.

This is a genre worth supporting, folks, even if you don't read in it. There are great literary works being created right now by brilliant, dedicated people who have bet the farm on being able to break into the genre and maybe, just maybe, have a chance to be the next author of a timeless classic.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

SeanHinn said:


> Hopefully this will put to bed the idea that it's reasonable to apply an arbitrary cap making a longer book the same value as a shorter book. There's a reason Oathbringer is almost 2x the cost of the other books, and it's not the cost of the extra paper. These are all well-known authors, so it's not about popularity, either. It's about the risk, effort, and expense required to produce the longer title.


Hardcovers have a different value perception than paperbacks or ebooks. People assign value based on the cost to manufacture the book. Hardcovers have been valued in the $20-30 range regardless of length for a very long time. A paperback of the same length would only sell for 7.99 to maybe 13.99 and the ebook even less. Much of this has to do with the buyers perception of value and costs involved in production. Try selling a fiction ebook for $20-40. See how many actual sales happen.

Established authors with a huge following and name recognition are an exception to this range.


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

In a thread full of people advocating to willingly give up their own current rights & ability to make money in KU to stick it to the allged scammers, it's refreshing to read the posts from those of ya'all standing up against that.

Limiting the page cut off & therefore ability of a book to make more money in KU or taking away All Star bonuses [which many authors of longer novels such as in sci fi receive] is not going to stop scamming. It is cutting off your nose to spite your face.


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

SeanHinn said:


> Hopefully this will put to bed the idea that it's reasonable to apply an arbitrary cap making a longer book the same value as a shorter book. There's a reason Oathbringer is almost 2x the cost of the other books, and it's not the cost of the extra paper. These are all well-known authors, so it's not about popularity, either. It's about the risk, effort, and expense required to produce the longer title.


I agree w/ you.

It takes longer to plot, write, edit, & proofread a longer book. Therefore there is a bigger risk that you sink all that time or money [which are the same thing, to me anyway] into a book that doesn't sell. So, it makes sense to me that longer books would be priced higher.

I do understand the arguments that say it can be just as painstakingly hard for writers & editors to trim words down to only the most essential. But in general if it's [ghost]written or edited or proofread by anyone but the publisher, that's likely done on a per word basis so longer books cost more for the publisher to produce whether they are in hardcover or eBook format.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

idontknowyet said:


> Established authors with a huge following and name recognition are an exception to this range.


That's exactly the point - one cannot reach the level where their work is valued on par with the "big" folks - even if the quality is comparable, or superior, in the minds of readers - unless they can manage to keep at it and earn a living long enough to command the higher prices. Reduce the incomes of those authors, and significantly fewer will ever have a chance to make it to the promised land. We indies don't get to produce hardcover epics, it's cost prohibitive, so all we get is a chance to earn with ebooks. If you make it impossible for an author to break even on longer works - and a 20-30% reduction in revenues is all it would take - those works simply never see the light of day. That's a tragedy.


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## jckang (Jul 10, 2016)

I don't have much to add beyond what has already been said, but I wanted to add my support to the following points that have been brought up:

1.  Lowering the KENP max to 1k isn't going to punish the scammers.  It will just make them work a little harder as they add more books for their KU clickfarms to readthrough.


2. It will harm authors with larger books:  at 150k words, my largest single book is 1015 KENP; a box set of mine is 2900 KENP.  There are plenty of authors with 200k+ books in KU, and I agree with others who've said that if you support a lower KENP limit because it doesn't affect you, that is pretty selfish.

3. Multi-Author box sets ads value to KU subscribers, and can help newer authors with discovery.

4.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

SeanHinn said:


> Certainly in part, but if you ever have some time on your hands, price out big-order hardcover offset printing; the page number is a very small piece of the puzzle. You open those books up, and the real differences become apparent. Part of it is the art: maps, illustrations, original hand-painted scenes for the jacket. Those are expected in the epic genre, not just bonuses that the well-to-do include. And then, above all, is the editing. You can't get away with a beta team and a proof team in epic. There are too many moving parts, too many characters, and all-original terms, themes, religions, calendars, units of measurement - the appendices alone on these books can be 20-30 pages. You need full-on, developmental editing, not only for the book being produced, but the editor must also be familiar with the world you've created. They charge to read and review the previous books in the series. Consistency checking alone can take many weeks of work, before you ever get to line editing or proofing. Top-notch editors in this genre charge 3c/word just for the developmental edit, and if you don't pay top dollar, it *really* shows. Readers in this genre will bomb a book with even a slight consistency issue. Rightly so, I might add - the quality bar is set really, really high when you're trying to be the next Tolkein.
> 
> And, again, it's the advertising. The demographic of epic consumers tends to be on the higher-income side, which makes targeting them on ANY platform more expensive. I'll shoot you a PM of my AMS ads if you'd like to see what the bids are - you'll need your fainting couch. All that has to be built in to the pricing and revenue models. And, just like in any other genre, it takes a few books to gain any traction, so you're years into a series before you begin to have a clue as to what your readthrough is going to look like, and whether or not you have a story that is even *maybe* someday going to be profitable enough to complete. Which is the #1 reason trads don't buy epics from noobs - it's just too big a risk.
> 
> ...


No one is discounting the costs of your books, nor the time or dedication. You have to love it maybe even live it to write them. That doesnt overide the fact that a work of fiction has a value cap placed by readers. This value has been decided not by your fellow authors but by your readers for years and years. As has been stated before very few people will pay more than $10 for a fiction ebook. That has nothing to do with how well written or how long the book is. KU is a synthetic market subject to the whims of Amazon. Currently Amazon is paying more than the market demands for your genre. It is wonderful for you because it gives you time to write and develop a following, but it's nothing you can base a long term career on.

One book read costs more than that person is paying for a month to read it. Amazon is losing money on your books. As a reader I prefer longer books and if well written even like stuffed books. (If i had my way every book an author has ever written would be linked together. Allowing me to easily read all of your books.) My guess is there are many people like me and that's why Amazon has continued to allow stuffing. One thing a company doesnt like is losing money. Once KU accomplishes all its goals set by Amazon, they will change it to be more profitable for them. As others have suggested that might be through a curated list or they might get rid of it all together.

In order to save this system, which many people love, the system must be fixed. As others have stated the cost and effort need to be minimal for Amazon otherwise they just wont listen. The only other way to enact change is offer them something that will make them large amounts of money in a short period of time. Then they might be willing to spend money.

It does sound reasonable that the cap would help in many genres. Making an exception for Boxed Set and traditionally long genres might be an option, or it might decimate those genres just like it already is doing to others.



jckang said:


> I don't have much to add beyond what has already been said, but I wanted to add my support to the following points that have been brought up:
> 
> 1. Lowering the KENP max to 1k isn't going to punish the scammers. It will just make them work a little harder as they add more books for their KU clickfarms to readthrough.
> 
> ...


I dont think there is any one thing that will fix scammers. As soon as you fix one hole they will find or create another. The only one that can get rid of scammers is Amazon and it will be a constant and expensive battle. Will lowering the KENP get rid of stuffers for the most part yes.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

idontknowyet said:


> No one is discounting the costs of your books


Actually, that's exactly what's being proposed. That the writer of a long book should earn less per page than the writer of a short book.



idontknowyet said:


> One book read costs more than that person is paying for a month to read it. Amazon is losing money on your books.


That's a widely assumed idea, but it is incorrect. Amazon earns a specific dollar amount based on the number of subscribers to the program. The total pool of revenues, minus whatever margin they set for themselves, is divided by the number of pages read. Authors are rewarded a share of the pool based upon the volume of entertainment - pages read - they provide to the customers of the program. You are also assuming that a reader of an epic fantasy book consumes the content faster than a reader of, say, a romance book, and therefore reads more pages per month, simply because the books are longer. That is an assumption without statistical support, and in fact, runs contrary to what would seem logical. Epics are not easy reads, generally. They are extraordinarily complex tales with huge casts of characters, plots within plots within plots... and a learning curve just to get the feel for the world being created. Many readers spend weeks or months, maybe a chapter or scene per night a few nights per week - reading through an epic story. The theory that Amazon loses money on any KU book, as popular as that theory is, is contradicted by data.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Becca Mills said:


> Are you sure those differences aren't at least in part about the cost of paper and shipping, Sean?


Very little. Just check the prices for 10000 copies of an offset-printed hardback at a reputable book printer. Costs a couple bucks for even a huge book. Shipping might be a factor, but even all together, we're only talking about 10% of retail cost. 90% of retail cost is middlemen, profit, royalties, marketing, overhead, etc.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

jckang said:


> 1. Lowering the KENP max to 1k isn't going to punish the scammers. It will just make them work a little harder as they add more books for their KU clickfarms to readthrough.
> 
> 2. It will harm authors with larger books: at 150k words, my largest single book is 1015 KENP; a box set of mine is 2900 KENP. There are plenty of authors with 200k+ books in KU, and I agree with others who've said that if you support a lower KENP limit because it doesn't affect you, that is pretty selfish.
> 
> 3. Multi-Author box sets ads value to KU subscribers, and can help newer authors with discovery.


1. It's not about punishing them. It's just one more layer of difficulty for them to fight. If the cap didn't matter at all, we'd still have no cap and the scammers would be publishing 100,000-page monstrosities.

2. Minimal harm to a minimal number of people, compared to the benefit. Every regulatory change to any system always trims a little at the edges. No fix is perfect, but this one would be helpful.

3. Those box sets for discovery could still be published for discovery. They just wouldn't pay $14 for a read in KU. Remember the days of 99-book box sets making $150 per read? See #1.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

I write epic fantasy but I'm not sure I want to be in KU, so I don't necessarily feel I have a big personal stake in this.

I have great respect for romance writers.  Most of them work very hard, are very savvy business people and give great advice here and in other writing forums.  They have a huge pool of voracious reader that no other genre comes close to.  As great as we think our books are I think most romance readers would probably be yelling at their Kindle readers to get to the point already and would be bored to tears. Don't get me wrong, I love epic fantasy, but not everyone does.  So yes the books take longer to write but we all have our own audiences.  And we don't get paid based on how long it takes to write something or how much we spend to produce it.

In theory, being paid by page count sounds great because if people actually are reading the pages then they have an interest.  If it's bots or incentivized then it's not real readers enjoying the book.

Trying to level the playing field through a page count limit makes zero sense to me.  Those who are doing things unethically have economies of scale and way too much firepower to overcome it by just instituting a page limit.  I don't like bonus content because I think it's deceptive, but if people actually read it then I do think the writer should get paid for it.  And if people want to hire ghostwriters and cover designers and pay lots in advertising then that's not illegitimate either - they are acting as a publishing company.  Many legitimate writers spend thousands of dollars a month on advertising.  We are self-publishers.  The issue is whether it's real readers reading the stuff or not.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

JulesWright said:


> Trying to level the playing field through a page count limit makes zero sense to me. Those who are doing things unethically have economies of scale and way too much firepower to overcome it by just instituting a page limit.


I don't think anyone's suggesting ONLY a page payment cap is the answer. Not a page limit, by the way--you should still be able to publish whatever size. You just won't get paid more than the cap allows. Combine that with other measures and we will all be better off.

The second argument, that scammers can overcome it, doesn't mean we shouldn't fight. Crime will always be with us, but we do lots of things to minimize it, even though we know we can't stamp it out entirely.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Why would we be better off if it doesn't stop the scammers?


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

SeanHinn said:


> Actually, that's exactly what's being proposed. That the writer of a long book should earn less per page than the writer of a short book.


I don't say your books costs less than what your saying. I believe you when you say it costs 10s of thousands to produce.

I do point out that reader market value is different than KU value. A reader will not pay many people $14 per ebook. I can understand why you want to continue making $14 per read rather than the $4-6 you would make otherwise. I would not want to lose that money.



SeanHinn said:


> That's a widely assumed idea, but it is incorrect. Amazon earns a specific dollar amount based on the number of subscribers to the program. The total pool of revenues, minus whatever margin they set for themselves, is divided by the number of pages read. Authors are rewarded a share of the pool based upon the volume of entertainment - pages read - they provide to the customers of the program. You are also assuming that a reader of an epic fantasy book consumes the content faster than a reader of, say, a romance book, and therefore reads more pages per month, simply because the books are longer. That is an assumption without statistical support, and in fact, runs contrary to what would seem logical. Epics are not easy reads, generally. They are extraordinarily complex tales with huge casts of characters, plots within plots within plots... and a learning curve just to get the feel for the world being created. Many readers spend weeks or months, maybe a chapter or scene per night a few nights per week - reading through an epic story. The theory that Amazon loses money on any KU book, as popular as that theory is, is contradicted by data.


I will use myself as an example. I love and hate KU. Daily I read 5 books not novellas books. I try to find ones in the 300 page range or higher which is around 100k words. Daily I cost Amazon money to pay for my reads. $10 doesn't cover the amount I read in a month. $10 doesn't cover one read of your book. What amazon is doing if they are making a profit on KU is using other readers to subsidize my reading and your books. Or if what you say is true one person is pay $10-20 maybe even 30 for the privilege of borrowing your book for 3 months or more. I think many borrowers are a little more cash savvy then that. They might be reading something else in between your book. I know I would just buy your book outright if I knew it would take me 3 months to read rather than renting it.

We dont know if amazon is making or losing money on KU or not.

I just did the math though on what i read in a year. I will admit there are weeks I dont read anything.
Assuming that i read just 15 days out of a month 
.00445x15x2500KENP= Im reading almost $166 a month in books for $10. That sounds insane to me.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

idontknowyet said:


> Daily I read 5 books not novellas books. I try to find ones in the 300-page range or higher which is around 100k words.


That's quite a reading pace. You must be a speed-reader in Howard Berg's league. The average human reads 200 words a minute, or 12,000 an hour, or about sixty KENP pages (200-word count -- funny how that matches up). The average book on Amazon is 60k, or about five hours worth of reading. Reading five in a twenty-four hour day would be a challenge for the average reader.

I'm not questioning your reading speed. I wish I shared it. An ex-wife read in Berg's league. This was pre-Kindle, and the page flipping "swoosh" every thirty seconds became extremely annoying.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

Dpock said:


> That's quite a reading pace. You must be a speed-reader in Howard Berg's league. The average human reads 200 words a minute, or 12,000 an hour, or about sixty KENP pages (200-word count -- funny how that matches up). The average book on Amazon is 60k, or about five hours worth of reading. Reading five in a twenty-four hour day would be a challenge for the average reader.
> 
> I'm not questioning your reading speed. I wish I shared it. An ex-wife read in Berg's league. This was pre-Kindle, and the page flipping "swoosh" every thirty seconds became extremely annoying.


Pages on a kindle don't always match up, but for trade paperbacks I read 200 pages an hour. I've been reading this way since I was young. If I have a headache I read slower, but yeah just the rate I've always read. Don't know who Howard Berg is though. I'm at the point I've read so much I have a hard time remembering what I have and haven't read. It is quite often that I rebuy (even in paperback) books I've already bought or borrowed. I wish KU had a flag for already read books.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

JulesWright said:


> Why would we be better off if it doesn't stop the scammers?


It won't stop them entirely, but it would greatly cut into their profits, because they would have to triple their advertising expenditures to make the same amount.

It does seem that aside from romance authors, a lot of people aren't terribly bothered by the fact that you can make more on a borrow than on a buy. In fact, for some authors, this appears to be working wonderfully.

Personally, I'm leaning toward petitioning Amazon to lower the romance cap to 1,000 or even 500. In romance, a 500-page cap would cover 99% of the books. it's true that the scammers would move on to other areas, but I guess at that point, it would be up to the authors in those particular genres to handle it or petition Amazon however they see fit.

A similar solution is to ask Amazon to cap the amount you can earn per-borrow at the amount you can earn per-buy. No doubt, fantasy authors would object to that, too. So once again, I'd be happy to propose that for romance only and see how this shakes out.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

idontknowyet said:


> I do point out that reader market value is different than KU value. A reader will not pay many people $14 per ebook. I can understand why you want to continue making $14 per read rather than the $4-6 you would make otherwise. I would not want to lose that money.


The figures you're providing aren't accurate. For example, the one book I have that would breach the suggested cap earns me close to the same royalty whether by page reads or sales. Page reads is $6.74 and royalty for a sale is $5.46.

I think many of the supporters of the suggested cap underestimate how many legitimate authors would be negatively impacted. And they overestimate the benefits of a "solution" that scammers would laugh at.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

It cuts into everyone's profits, not just the scammers and they have more resources.

I do think it's a problem that people can charge 99 cents and make so much more on a borrow. There are legitimate reasons for pricing a book at 99 cents - first in series, getting established as a new writer, promo price. I would be more in support of limiting earnings based on sales price than pages.



MmmmmPie said:


> It won't stop them entirely, but it would greatly cut into their profits, because they would have to triple their advertising expenditures to make the same amount.
> 
> It does seem that aside from romance authors, a lot of people aren't terribly bothered by the fact that you can make more on a borrow than on a buy. In fact, for some authors, this appears to be working wonderfully.
> 
> ...


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

SeanHinn said:


> If your objective is to ONLY punish the wrongdoers, to the benefit of the community at large, I assume, then, that you would be open to carving out an exception for writers of legitimate epics, yes? Your answer to that question will expose your motive.
> 
> I can't help but shake my head at how folks don't see how this wouldn't work at all, and would probably screw things up even worse. Do any of you guys use AMS? You know how it works, right? The more titles being advertised, the more expensive the bids become. When these stuffers/scammers start chopping their books into 1k chunks, you're gonna have a problem FAR worse than what you have now. Yeah, they will lose some margins, and they'll still print money. Your stuff will become INVISIBLE. Fine, forget whether it's fair or not, or whether it will severely harm good, honest people - clearly, many of the people in this thread don't care a whit about harming other authors, so long as they benefit - at least use common sense. It's a bad idea that won't work, and could make things a hell of a lot more awful.


_Expose my motive_? I'm not deliberately proposing a solution to the rampant exploitation of the Kindle Unlimited program by targeting epic fantasy writers.

But to answer your question--no. I would not ask Amazon to make exceptions for fantasy _as they wouldn't do it_. The more cravats we put on a proposed solution, the less likely they'd be to institute it.

I apologize if this isn't what you wanted to hear. You're free to disagree. But there's a problem with the store now, and demanding Amazon eliminate the bonus books as a whole is not working. We need a different plan of attack, and some innocent writers will be swept up in the fallout. I am sorry about that, but limiting the cap would be a net benefit to the majority of writers in the program.

And, if we limit the amount of pages these people can earn per file, we will dramatically reduce their advertising budgets. Yes, I use AMS ads. And yes, I'm seeing the costs creep higher and higher. What used to be a $.15 click is now $1.50. The ones grossly exploiting the system have moved half of their advertising to AMS ads and are spending $5 or $6 a click. The longer we allow those who exploit to profit from this system, the higher those ad costs will become.

They *cannot * launch double or triple the amount of books per month on a third of their income. The worst offenders would be dramatically limited in what they could do with any new release.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

JulesWright said:


> Why would we be better off if it doesn't stop the scammers?


Because life is not binary. It's incremental. Lowering the payment cap would cut into the abuse.

It's like why you put a lock on your door. People can still break in--it just makes it harder.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

I don't believe it would cut into the abuse in any measurable way, so I guess that is where we differ.

I get that no single measure will entirely eliminate a problem.



David VanDyke said:


> Because life is not binary. It's incremental. Lowering the payment cap would cut into the abuse.
> 
> It's like why you put a lock on your door. People can still break in--it just makes it harder.


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## Lu Kudzoza (Nov 1, 2015)

idontknowyet said:


> One book read costs more than that person is paying for a month to read it.


To get paid one person's KU subscription requires the person to read 2,230 KU pages. That's probably 40 to 60 hours of reading for the fast to average reader. So, it's likely that book is the only book the subscriber read that month.

The math works for everyone fairly because authors are paid per page read. The amount of entertainment each author gives to readers is given back evenly.


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## Lu Kudzoza (Nov 1, 2015)

P.J. Post said:


> To the epic fantasy folks -
> 
> So what's your solution here, all hail Hydra?
> 
> ...


I've said it twice already, but it looks like it needs to be said again.

1. Identify duplicate content and eliminate it from KU
2. Identify botted borrows and don't count them towards rank
3. Identify botted page reads and don't pay authors for them


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

P.J. Post said:


> To the epic fantasy folks -
> 
> So what's your solution here, all hail Hydra?
> 
> ...


Can't speak for others, but from my perspective, the answer is this:

1. Clearly define the enemy. Is it people who are uploading content that has been duplicated over and over, or legitimate one-volume collections of a series?
2. Collaboratively determine ways these kinds of publications can be identified and limited in a manner that is cost-neutral to Amazon (otherwise they won't listen). Not others, just the ones who are offending.
3. Whatever solution presents itself, make sure it doesn't sweep up innocent parties. Prune it until it meets that criteria.
4. Make sure whatever solution we come up with actually solves the problem, and doesn't create more problems. Read: stuffers changing strategy and clogging up the charts and AMS with even more inferior titles.
5. Start a movement based on 1-4 above that everyone can get behind, and make Amazon listen. 
5a. Encourage our peers to write in to make the needed changes.
5b. Encourage our fans to do the same.

We haven't even managed to agree on step 1 yet. That's where we start.

I will be happy to take a leadership role in helping to make this happen. I legitimately and sincerely care that authors in the romance genre are being hosed, and incrementally, all of us. I will dedicate time, skill, and resources to help - provided that we all agree to target the bad actors only, not legitimate artists.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Not Lu said:


> I've said it twice already, but it looks like it needs to be said again.
> 
> 1. Identify duplicate content and eliminate it from KU
> 2. Identify botted borrows and don't count them towards rank
> 3. Identify botted page reads and don't pay authors for them


This would be a lovely solution, except Amazon is supposedly already doing these things, the last two in particular. It's not working, whether because Amazon isn't trying hard enough, or because they are simply unwilling to dedicate additional resources. This is why we need a simpler solution.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

MmmmmPie said:


> This would be a lovely solution, except Amazon is supposedly already doing these things, the last two in particular. It's not working, whether because Amazon isn't trying hard enough, or because they are simply unwilling to dedicate additional resources. This is why we need a simpler solution.


Simpler does not equal better. I will repeat this, because I think it needs to be established as a foundation for any efforts on this front:

1. Clearly define the enemy. Is it people who are uploading content that has been duplicated over and over, or legitimate one-volume collections of a series?
2. Collaboratively determine ways these kinds of publications can be identified and limited in a manner that is cost-neutral to Amazon (otherwise they won't listen). Not others, just the ones who are offending.
3. Whatever solution presents itself, make sure it doesn't sweep up innocent parties. Prune it until it meets that criteria.
4. Make sure whatever solution we come up with actually solves the problem, and doesn't create more problems. Read: stuffers changing strategy and clogging up the charts and AMS with even more inferior titles.
5. Start a movement based on 1-4 above that everyone can get behind, and make Amazon listen. 
5a. Encourage our peers to write in to make the needed changes.
5b. Encourage our fans to do the same.

We haven't even managed to agree on step 1 yet. That's where we start.

I will be happy to take a leadership role in helping to make this happen. I legitimately and sincerely care that authors in the romance genre are being hosed, and incrementally, all of us. I will dedicate time, skill, and resources to help - provided that we all agree to target the bad actors only, not legitimate artists.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

The argument seems to be cut the KNPC to 1/3 so their profits are slashed and that will drive them out of business.

If someone is paying for advertising they are looking for real readers.  Otherwise, they would spend their money on something else - like bots or incentivizing readers.  And if they are advertising to get readers then that's totally legitimate.

I seriously do not get this argument at all.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

P.J. Post said:


> I propose a 750 Cap, that's 160K or about 650 print pages.


Any solution that penalizes legitimate authors is unacceptable, and I will personally organize a counter-movement against it. I want what you want: to eliminate abuse. I will align with you and help you make that happen (read above) and help rally people to the cause. But if your solution aims to enrich yourself at the cost of other legitimate authors, it is unsupportable, and the result here will be two competing camps, and most likely, total inaction by Amazon.

We find something we can all agree is fair to all legitimate authors, or we end up in a war that helps no one. Let's work together. This can be solved without harming people whose work is no less valuable than your own.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

P.J. Post said:


> See, the problem with all of this is that the enemy is, in large part, us - Indies, self publishers. We find every loophole and crack and squirm through, manipulating everything imaginable to make a few extra bucks, because it's not about Art or writing or craft, it's about the money. If the TOS doesn't forbid it, we do it, hell, even if it does forbid it, we do it anyway. We need a suggestion that address scammers AND keeps honest people honest by removing the gray/black hat incentive.
> 
> We're never going to cure disease, we have to manage the symptoms.


Without meaning to sound harsh, speak for yourself, please. I just write books. I don't pad my page count. No one I know does, and I work intimately with many authors, day in, day out. Do you do the above things? I am sure you do not. Do you know anyone who does? I would assume if you did, you would report them.

The enemy is unscrupulous publishers. We're all very, very smart. We can come up with a way to identify them programatically. Please, don't give up on the idea of an ideal solution in favor of an easy one, especially when it will harm good and honest people.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

P.J. Post said:


> This isn't the argument at all.
> 
> I'd start by cutting the cap by 75%. It's not that their profits are slashed, it's that their ROI takes a hit. Some will move on to easier pursuits, but some won't. But now it takes 4 books to get the same return as they were getting with 1, that's a 400% increase in visibility. Multiply that by the remaining participants and it becomes untenable for Zon. It's the Al Capone strategy.
> 
> ...


I thought people were concerned about illegitimate page reads. If someone advertises they are looking for readers, otherwise they wouldn't spend a lot of money on Facebook ads, AMS ads, etc. So no, it still doesn't make sense to me.


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## GP Hudson (Sep 16, 2013)

I think the cap should be left at 3,000 pages. That is reasonable. A cap at 1,000 is going to get in the way of box sets and that is not something I am willing to support.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

So, make publishing a single book and enrolling it in KU less profitable and those with the deepest pockets are the ones who are going to be pushed away?

I think black hat tactics and gray hat business models that people don't like are getting mixed up, and those with the most money are the least likely to suffer and can quickly switch over to a more volume-based model (in terms of number of books).

Black hat tactics don't rely on advertising and getting real readers.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

JulesWright said:


> I thought people were concerned about illegitimate page reads. If someone advertises they are looking for readers, otherwise they wouldn't spend a lot of money on Facebook ads, AMS ads, etc. So no, it still doesn't make sense to me.


These regular readers can jump around in the TOC, resulting in payment for pages that aren't actually read. Plus, these genuine borrows boost the ranks further, which brings in more borrowers, who also click around and rack up page reads in the process. Add in some botting, and the regular readers also serve as a nice camouflage for the more nefarious things these authors do to get borrows, not to mention "purchases"made possible only through gift cards. Also, because many of these stories are duplicates of previously published stories, they're getting paid multiple times for the same work.

If you write long, continuous stories, it might be hard to imagine the many ways they can arrange 3,000 pages to result in fraudulent page reads, duplicate page reads, page reads for skipped pages, etc. But they're using this as a convenient way to claim money, bonuses and visibility that they didn't earn.


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## Phxsundog (Jul 19, 2017)

This group is not legitimate and there's mountains of evidence to support it. In short, they're caught constantly doing things no author would ever try, much less get away with. That's because this is a group of abusive internet marketers. Not authors. I'll list a few examples below.

A few months ago this group was caught running tons of stolen images as Facebook ads. They simply ripped off fitness images from photographers and even used a couple's a private engagement photos without their consent to promote their crappy books. They were called out repeatedly and it took weeks for the ad manager they use to finally stop running the stolen images.

Ghostwriting is always walking a grey line, sure. In some cases it's perfectly fine. However I consider the bottom of the barrel rates this group is paying exploitation. Paying $0.01 per word results in material that's qualitatively worse than the average romance author. Some ghosts working for such low rates take shortcuts and plaigarize content from other authors. Their books have been caught several times ripping off others. The authors  affected don't want the expense and hassle of enforcing their copyright so it hasn't burned them to date. This is a race to the bottom and tidal wave of crap that's crushing solo romance authors.

Their ARC teams stack up more five star reviews than any other run by normal authors. There's a reason for this. The blackhats harshly govern these teams and pressure reviewers to leave five stars. Many who leave less than four are removed. Some of these reviewers are also incentivized to upvote five star reviews with giveaways. I've never heard of an ordinary author who treats their own reviewers this aggressively.

Then they have deceptive email marketing practices. Many of these marketer pen names spam daily, include fake mailing addresses for Canspam if there's one listed at all, and run giveaways for clicks in their newsletters. They promise instant gift cards if you'll just click their book. There's never any way to verify winners or whether these giveaways are real. Worse, they put something like FREE BOOKS/FREEBIES in almost every single subject line. More than half the time, the "free books" they're constantly announcing only refer to the bonus books stuffed inside their new releases.

No proof they use click farms but it can't be ruled out either. Many of their books were rank stripped last summer during the crackdown. With so many ads and huge email lists running, what wonderful cover to hide bots for higher ranks and more pages.

Their bonus techniques have already been discussed in the book stuffing thread. These are the same guys who used click to the end tricks last year to get page reads. They hide their bonus books constantly. They still put exclusive stories behind other bonus books.

I could go on at length. It isn't until you dig into them that you begin to realize how weird,  blackhat, and deceptive this group really is. They're internet marketers. Not authors. I'll keep saying it because the difference between the two is the root of what's soured KU across the board.

One thing they do right that is legitimate is building a massive email network. Most of them have 50-100k subscribers on each list. Mostly scraped from giveaways over the past year and sometimes illegally shared among them to make their lists even bigger. This huge email network is what allows them to bury most authors and hit the Top 100 constantly besides their ad spends.

I think you can point to a lot of things with a sideways glance. When you put it all together, a long pattern of dirty tricks, abusive marketing, and exploitation emerges. In the end it comes down to one thing: blackhat internet marketers and not authors are controlling Kindle Unlimited romance. How is any romance author losing money hand over fist to these scammers supposed to be okay with this?

If that isn't a broken system then I don't know what is.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

I agree multiple things can be going on, but if I was using advertising as a cover and somehow it became less profitable to advertise then I would just switch over to more black hat tactics and less advertising.



MmmmmPie said:


> These regular readers can jump around in the TOC, resulting in payment for pages that aren't actually read. Plus, these genuine borrows boost the ranks further, which brings in more borrowers, who also click around and rack up page reads in the process. Add in some botting, and the regular readers also serve as a nice camouflage for the more nefarious things these authors do to get borrows, not to mention "purchases"made possible only through gift cards. Also, because many of these stories are duplicates of previously published stories, they're getting paid multiple times for the same work.
> 
> If you write long, continuous stories, it might be hard to imagine the many ways they can arrange 3,000 pages to result in fraudulent page reads, duplicate page reads, page reads for skipped pages, etc. But they're using this as a convenient way to claim money, bonuses and visibility that they didn't earn.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

JulesWright said:


> I agree multiple things can be going on, but if I was using advertising as a cover and somehow it became less profitable to advertise then I would just switch over to more black hat tactics and less advertising.


Maybe. But those things are riskier. Without the flood of advertising that persuades genuine readers to buy/borrow/click on their books, their scamming becomes even more obvious. These guys aren't like us. They don't love books or their readers. They love a quick buck. Once the loopholes are eliminated, these scammers will move on to greener pastures.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

I honestly don't think it would slow them down much. Based on Phxsundog's post they have massive email lists and many other things to work with.

I just really don't think it's a good solution at all, but I think my solution is to keep my books out of KU, whether the max is 1,000 or 3,000 KENPC. I don't like the letters people are getting. I don't know what solution Amazon will come up with, but I do believe there will be more crackdowns in the future and unfortunately, sometimes legit authors do lose their accounts in the process. I think I'd rather stay out of it, but I do hope KU gets better for all legit authors.



MmmmmPie said:


> Maybe. But those things are riskier. Without the flood of advertising that persuades genuine readers to buy/borrow/click on their books, their scamming becomes even more obvious. These guys aren't like us. They don't love books or their readers. They love a quick buck. Once the loopholes are eliminated, these scammers will move on to greener pastures.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Does this board have an easy poll function? It'd be interesting to see how the various solutions being kicked around here are supported by the board (or at least those who bother to vote).


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

SeanHinn said:


> Any solution that penalizes legitimate authors is unacceptable, and I will personally organize a counter-movement against it. I want what you want: to eliminate abuse. I will align with you and help you make that happen (read above) and help rally people to the cause. But if your solution aims to enrich yourself at the cost of other legitimate authors, it is unsupportable, and the result here will be two competing camps, and most likely, total inaction by Amazon.
> 
> We find something we can all agree is fair to all legitimate authors, or we end up in a war that helps no one. Let's work together. This can be solved without harming people whose work is no less valuable than your own.


In other words, "I'll go to war first, but claim you started it. Because it's my way or the highway."

A war metaphor? Over this? Among authors? Come on.

SMH.

_Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

David VanDyke said:


> In other words, "I'll go to war first, but claim you started it. Because it's my way or the highway."
> 
> A war metaphor? Over this? Among authors? Come on.
> 
> ...


David I am not saying, "it's my way or the highway." I'm saying that the way proposed here is not only patently unfair, it would very likely be ineffective - so let's all together come up with a better way. I have ideas on this, but by no means are they the only possible ideas. And yes, the result of a campaign that victimizes people who are not the cause of the problem *will* result in a war, because who's gonna just say, "hey, that's cool that my income just got slashed, I'll just sell the house!" By "war," do I mean causing others physical injury? Come on. You're a writer, the context of what I said surely cannot be lost on you. This solution will pit authors against one another, when we *should* be joining forces to solve the problem in a way that harms no innocent party.

A series of questions, for you and others to consider:

1. Would a 1k KENP cap encourage bad actors to A) give up and go home or B) adapt?
2. If they were to adapt, would they do so by A) publishing more titles or B) publishing fewer titles?
3. Would more titles in the affected charts A) help legitimate authors or B) harm legitimate authors?
4. Would more titles buying separate AMS ads A) make it easier for indie advertisers to be visible or B) make it harder for indie advertisers to be visible?

Forget the fairness of it, if you like. It would not stop the problem, and it would not make life better for those most affected. It *would* harm innocent parties, though.

The options are not "do this" or "do nothing." "Do something fair and effective" is still an option.


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

This sounds so familiar. I remember the same type of arguments between the novel and novella writers in KU1, and look how that turned out. Novels won and a lot of novella writers went to the wall. The novel writers didn't care because they got richer on the backs of others. 

If you want to petition amazon to do anything, why not try the basics first? No bonus books. Why turn on each other again?


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

P.J. Post said:


> The last 5 pages of this thread explain in detail how lowering the KU pay-out cap will greatly reduce scamming, make it easier for Zon to spot when it does happen, and reduce the incentive for gray-hat stuff, resulting in a more level playing field. It's math.
> 
> I propose a 750 Cap, that's 160K or about 650 print pages.
> 
> ...


There are plenty of fantasy authors who write more than 650 pages. You're just going to throw an entire genre under the bus?


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

writerbiter said:


> I apologize if this isn't what you wanted to hear. You're free to disagree. But there's a problem with the store now, and demanding Amazon eliminate the bonus books as a whole is not working. We need a different plan of attack, and some innocent writers will be swept up in the fallout. I am sorry about that, but limiting the cap would be a net benefit to the majority of writers in the program.
> 
> And, if we limit the amount of pages these people can earn per file, we will dramatically reduce their advertising budgets. Yes, I use AMS ads. And yes, I'm seeing the costs creep higher and higher. What used to be a $.15 click is now $1.50. The ones grossly exploiting the system have moved half of their advertising to AMS ads and are spending $5 or $6 a click. The longer we allow those who exploit to profit from this system, the higher those ad costs will become.
> 
> They *cannot * launch double or triple the amount of books per month on a third of their income. The worst offenders would be dramatically limited in what they could do with any new release.


I agree. Banning bonus content is the ideal solution but it's not one Amazon appears interested in. We have to be pragmatic.

Very few books are above 1k KENPC/ 160k words (based on my experience with KENPC. My latest book is 95k with a seven chapter sample of another book and it's 670 KENPC, so you can do the math. I write very short sentences and a lot of dialogue. The audio book is 10.5 hours).

The loss of bundles is a shame but it's not a big deal IMO. We can still make bundles. They just won't be as profitable if we put them in KU.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Atlantisatheart said:


> This sounds so familiar. I remember the same type of arguments between the novel and novella writers in KU1, and look how that turned out. Novels won and a lot of novella writers went to the wall. The novel writers didn't care because they got richer on the backs of others.
> 
> If you want to petition amazon to do anything, why not try the basics first? No bonus books. Why turn on each other again?


That's an excellent first step. A little tough to enforce and police, but not impossible. And I echo your sentiment - let's find solutions together, not raise up one camp at the expense of another.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

I'm not terribly optimistic that the "no bonus book" rule alone would change much in the long term. But it's at least a suggestion that writers in various genres seem to agree on, without either group feeling victimized by the other.

If we go this route, can i offer this related suggestion? 

No bonus books... PLUS the paperback must be the same length as the Kindle Version. (within 5% or so, to allow for back matter, etc.). This would provide much more transparency related to the length of the actual story being promoted.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Atlantisatheart said:


> This sounds so familiar. I remember the same type of arguments between the novel and novella writers in KU1, and look how that turned out. Novels won and a lot of novella writers went to the wall. The novel writers didn't care because they got richer on the backs of others.
> 
> If you want to petition amazon to do anything, why not try the basics first? No bonus books. Why turn on each other again?


I very much doubt that authors' opinions had anything to do with the switch from KU1 to KU2. I know I pulled all my stuff during that period when the whole serial/pamphlet thing was out of hand, and authors in my genre were making 6-10x what I was from the same length of actual book, just by splitting it up. At the time, I had been doing extremely well in KU, and I let KDP know I wasn't happy, as did many other novelists who pulled their stuff.

They did not care.

They cared once readers started complaining--hard--that Kindle Unlimited had become Kink Unlimited, that all they could find were pieces of books and erotica. Amazon fired warning shots across the bow--sent out an unprecedented email to KDP authors saying that readers wanted NOVELS. Authors didn't change their behavior, because it wasn't in their self-interest to do so. They could make that 6x more by splitting up their book, and they'd have had to be stupid (or be me) not to do it. Six months later, boom, there was KU2. THEN people screamed.

In my experience, having been at this since 2012, authors can write in until they're blue in the face, just as Amazon could tell authors that readers wanted novels until they were blue in the face. I can't tell you how many bestselling indies--and I mean people in the top 100 of all indie authors--have complained to Amazon about the book stuffing, the botting, the giveaways and review incentives. I have done so myself. We've all received absolutely nothing of substance in response. If Amazon cares at all (and I think recent measures show that they are finally starting to), it's because some really big names in romance have recently pulled their stuff from Select, and their READERS have told Amazon how unhappy they are about it. Or have canceled their subscriptions in enough numbers to matter. It may be that it is finally in Amazon's self-interest to care, which is the same thing that brought us KU2.

It is what it is. We don't get to choose what Amazon or any other vendor does. All we can choose is our response. We can also look at what we think is likely to happen next and choose our own next moves accordingly. But I suspect you're wasting your time trying to organize some kind of letter-writing campaign, or whatever it is. They care about their readers.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Dpock said:


> Does this board have an easy poll function? It'd be interesting to see how the various solutions being kicked around here are supported by the board (or at least those who bother to vote).


Yes, it does, though not as a reply. Instead of selecting "New Thread" at the top of the board to start a new thread, you select "New Poll."


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## joesmithx (Mar 21, 2018)

P.J. Post said:


> The last 5 pages of this thread explain in detail how lowering the KU pay-out cap will greatly reduce scamming, make it easier for Zon to spot when it does happen, and reduce the incentive for gray-hat stuff, resulting in a more level playing field. It's math.
> 
> I propose a 750 Cap, that's 160K or about 650 print pages.


Sorry, but just because you like writing tiny ol books, doesn't mean the rest of us have to suffer because of it. My first ever published book was over 200K and its sequel was 220K. According to you, I should be punished for writing long books that readers love so much they launched my career.


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## caitlynlynch (Oct 21, 2016)

writerbiter said:


> Unfortunately, that requires readers or other authors policing the store, and then it would require customer service agents on Amazon's side to verify the complaint. This adds MORE manpower to the equation, and Amazon is not a company that likes to hire MORE workers when it could simply automate a solution. Limiting the total amount of pages per file would reduce the amount of exploitative stuffing--and, when those publishers realize they aren't making the thousands of dollars required for them to publish their books and push the new releases to the top 100, they'd be forced out of the program. They won't be able to launch double or triple the amount of books on one third of their normal earnings.
> 
> This is the easiest way to make a change. Amazon won't hire people, reprogram the KU, review individual files more closely, or monitor for only original content. We have to make it easy on them. They've already lowered the cap once before. We'd be asking for them to do it again.


In terms of manpower to check on reported books, I really don't think the number is going to be all that significant. Once the new rule is announced, give authors 30 days to bring their books into compliance, and then start checking books which are reported after the 30 days is up. You could probably have a single full-time staffer handling the job, and one person could probably deal with 100 books a day. Just boot offending books from the store and send a form email to the author/publisher telling them to bring the book into compliance or else. In fact, being Amazon and the heavy-hammer type, just suspend ALL their books until fixed.

Easy fix. Store would probably be clean of stuffed books in a month. And let's be honest, doing it would probably cost less staff hours than they spend now dealing with angry authors.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

SeanHinn said:


> By "war," do I mean causing others physical injury? Come on. You're a writer, the context of what I said surely cannot be lost on you.


That's why I said "metaphor." Come on. You're a writer, the context of what I said surely cannot be lost on you.

But I stand by my original statement. A line in the sand and threats of a counter-movement, leading to a metaphorical war, are clearly designed to psychologically intimidate others into your "my way of the highway" stance. That's reprehensible.

Persuasion via argument is fine, but as soon as you say "I will start a counter-movement", you are out of line.

I'm rather shocked the mods have let it go. They're usually pretty tight about this type of thing.


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

sammie997 said:


> Why does everyone keep ignoring the elephant in the room?
> 
> This is a problem IN THE ROMANCE GENRE. And it could only ever *be* a problem in the romance genre.
> 
> ...


Wow. The argument that a whole bunch of readers, mainly women, don't love bad boy romance books is very sexist. It's also very untrue. The top 100 is full of romance books because mostly female readers borrow, buy & love them. Also, as many have said in this & other threads, these 'content mill' publishers of ghostwritten books already are in other genres, including sci fi. Perhaps those ghostwriters are better than you give them credit for, since apparently they're so unrecognizable.  But seriously- how insulting to ghostwriters.

And, yes, believe it or not, a publisher w/money to hire out the creation of books certainly can produce lots of content in all genres, not just those silly bad boy romance books. That is one of the most profitable genres since so many read it & that's why content mill publishers are there. But they are also in other genres & I don't hear anyone belittling those genres like I hear people belittling romance, a woman's genre.

Taste is subjective & a matter of opinion. I could poke fun at the books in your genre but I won't b/c I realize it's merely a matter of my own taste & bias & it's not nice. I'm not sure why you don't feel the need to show the same restraint, but it doesn't matter b/c everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But market research numbers show that many women love those stock photo ripped ab bad boy covers & the steamy stories inside. Amazon is a market that caters to what readers want.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

David VanDyke said:


> That's why I said "metaphor." Come on. You're a writer, the context of what I said surely cannot be lost on you.
> 
> But I stand by my original statement. A line in the sand and threats of a counter-movement, leading to a metaphorical war, are clearly designed to psychologically intimidate others into your "my way of the highway" stance. That's reprehensible.
> 
> ...


There's nothing reprehensible about saying, "this is wrongheaded, and I will oppose it." And I think it is important that people know that, because a war between long book writers and short book writers will benefit no one, yet that is the inevitable result of this proposal. Long book writers would have no choice but to organize against it. If you read everything else I have written it should be quite clear that my intention is to help, while defending innocent writers from harm. If there's anything reprehensible going on in this thread, it's the idea that it is OK to throw an entire genre of one's peers under the bus.

I wish you great personal success and bear you no ill will, and you can rest assured I will propose no solution that targets your livelihood. Will you agree to do the same and work with me to find a fair and effective solution? We should be allies, David, even if we are initially coming at this from different angles.


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

It's very sad to see the indie community turn on each other this way. In other communities I'm apart of it isn't this way. Authors support each other & bind together. They don't attack each other or all argue for the most selfish way to change KU. 

If KU is truly this bad then why are any of ya'all in it? Perhaps a solution that doesn't involve finger pointing & name calling is to boycott KU & sell books the old fashioned way.


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## Carol (was Dara) (Feb 19, 2011)

I have a single-author epic fantasy boxed set that's consistently earned around $500 per month in KU for about two years now. I can get behind the idea of sacrificing $500 per month of my income for the greater good if I have a strong reason to believe it will significantly improve long-term conditions throughout the Kindle store. Unfortunately, that's the trouble. I can't be certain that banning boxed sets from KU would result in a definite benefit to me or to others, while I do have a certainty it'll cost me $6k per year. It's hard to support a change with a clearly measurable cost in dollars based on a theory that it might hopefully have beneficial effects in a broad sense or that it might discourage an unknown percentage of bad apples.

As for capping page reads, it's true that only a limited number of individual titles would be effected by a 1,000 page cap. Most of the fantasy writers I know don't top 120k words (roughly 650 KENPCs) and a lot write significantly less. But aside from questions of fairness to long writers (similar to those posed by short writers before KU 2.0), we can't be sure whether capping long reads would do anything but result in the splitting of mega-long books into 3x as many short books, resulting in a more crowded Kindle store and potentially increasing ad prices. If I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to play wack-a-mole with 3x as many books, all of them harder to identify this time because their size would help them blend in.

Of course, capping by genre would be the worst possible mistake. That'll just shift the problems happening mostly in one genre into all the others, resulting in mis-categorizing on a scale not yet seen - and we already see a lot of mis-categorizing in fantasy. True scammers (and there are very few people I'd be comfortable referring to as clear scammers) are unlikely to move on from a source of easy money. That doesn't mean nothing should be done to curtail them, but I think the hopes of discouraging many of them are overly optimistic. They've adapted so far.

I don't have any great solutions to suggest, and of course it's easier to poke holes in other people's ideas than to come up with better ones. Still, I haven't heard any I could get on board with yet, other than possibly asking Amazon not to allow more than 20 % bonus content, a request they're unlikely to take seriously unless there's a cheap way to do it _and_ Amazon themselves are bothered by the content, which seems to be an uncertain point lately. One thing is sure, KU is such a sensitive system it's hard to predict the unintended consequences of any changes. Some consequences clearly catch even Amazon by surprise. That makes me reluctant to upset the whole apple barrel, even when many things are clearly not sustainable in the long term.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Carol (was Dara) said:


> I have a single-author epic fantasy boxed set that's consistently earned around $500 per month in KU for about two years now. I can get behind the idea of sacrificing $500 per month of my income for the greater good if I have a strong reason to believe it will significantly improve long-term conditions throughout the Kindle store. Unfortunately, that's the trouble. I can't be certain that banning boxed sets from KU would result in a definite benefit to me or to others, while I do have a certainty it'll cost me $6k per year. It's hard to support a change with a clearly measurable cost in dollars based on a theory that it might hopefully have beneficial effects in a broad sense or that it might discourage an unknown percentage of bad apples.
> 
> As for capping page reads, it's true that only a limited number of individual titles would be effected by a 1,000 page cap. Most of the fantasy writers I know don't top 120k words (roughly 650 KENPCs) and a lot write significantly less. But aside from questions of fairness to long writers (similar to those posed by short writers before KU 2.0), we can't be sure whether capping long reads would do anything but result in the splitting of mega-long books into 3x as many short books, resulting in a more crowded Kindle store and potentially increasing ad prices. If I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to play wack-a-mole with 3x as many books, all of them harder to identify this time because their size would help them blend in.
> 
> ...


This is the single best comment in the entire thread. You're dead right, on every point, and your tone is spot-on. The only thing I would debate to any degree is whether or not a legitimate boxed set of a serial story should be out of bounds. For lots of up-and-comers, being able to offer a steeply discounted bundle and earn some decent page read income on it is a great way to allow readers to take a chance on your work without too much of a commitment. That's a major feature of KU, for both readers and authors, and I think it's great for everyone - so long as it is not abused, and that's where we run into trouble.

I think we need to figure out exactly where the line is - what constitutes a scammy/stuffed book, and what constitutes a legitimate compilation? If we made a "no multiple titles" rule, then the REALLY short story writers would be harmed as well, as those collections are where the real income comes for them.

Is anyone here in the thread qualified to really detail what the makeup of these stuffed books looks like? Are they basically, in essence, making multiple bundles with rearranged content, in addition to the individual titles? Are they really shoving 500 pages of recipes into the books (I thought I read that somewhere). I've never read through one, but I know many of the folks here on Kboards have investigated this problem in far more detail than I have.

If anyone here can provide technical information about the architecture of the stuffed books, I'd be happy to get an organized analysis project started that we could present to Amazon to help them root these things out in an automated fashion. I would also be willing to contribute some capital towards hiring a developer to write some code, as a prototype system for flagging potential violators. If we take a project management approach to surgically removing the bad actors from the mix, we might be able to solve this thing fairly quickly, and no legitimate author suffers harm.

I can't do it all by myself, but if some of you guys are willing to get behind a fact-finding initiative to get this off the ground, I can organize the moving parts into place, and if necessary, go about raising any capital needed to develop a solution and lobby Amazon to give it a serious look.

I'm all in on making this thing happen. Would any of you be interested in joining a FB group to brainstorm and offer input, or better yet, volunteer some useful skills that might be needed for this kind of project?


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Here is a sad truth. During KU 1.0, it was glaringly obvious that the system was unsustainable. As someone who wrote full-length novels (and refused to chop them up), I was at a huge disadvantage, even as others raked in tons of cash either because they (1) wrote shorter books naturally, (2) serialized their full-length novels, or (3) produced 10-page scamlets that generated a full payment after just a couple of pages.

In the above group, some were genuine authors who benefited because their genre or writing style happened to correspond to the strengths of KU 1.0. Others were genuine authors who saw the wisdom in cutting up their books to earn five times the going rate. Still others were pure scam artists.

Anyone could've seen that KU 1.0 was unsustainable. Let's say we wanted to fix it to make it more sustainable. Under this scenario, maybe those of us who wrote longer books would've said to the authors of shorter books, "Hey, the scamming is way out of hand. Let's see if we can get Amazon to not allow anything in KU under 200 pages. At this, many of the "shorter-book writers" would've howled at how we long novel-writers were selfishly trying to cheat the short-book writers out of income, just because the system didn't work for us personally.

And maybe we would've told them, "But, don't you see? It can't go on as it is? There's no way a system can continue when people are getting paid $1.40 for a ten-page scamlet. It's not just about us. The system is going to implode at this rate." But nobody wants to hear anything like that when the system is working for them personally, when it plays to their particular strengths or genres. 

No one wants to believe this, but if you're earning way more on a borrow than on a sale, this is a pretty good sign that the system is unsustainable and that you're building your house on a pile of shifting sand.

My belief? The current KU is entering its death spiral phase, and here's why. It's gotten so bad that people who don't WANT to game the system are starting to say, "Cripes, I'm stupid if I don't. After all, I have mortgages and grocery bills, too." As more and more genuine authors decide (and perhaps rightfully so) that stuffing is the only way to compete, stuffed books will claim and bigger and bigger share of the pie, further driving down prices and payments per page. As the page-rates continue to fall, and bigger and bigger books are needed to compete, more and more people will stuff. At the same time, more and more authors who don't stuff will leave KU entirely, because they're getting hosed on all sides of the equation.

This is me. I've pulled all of my books out of KU. So it's not that I'm looking to "steal" from those who write longer books than I do. It's more that I realize that the system is crashing and burning right in front of us. It's utterly unsustainable. And I can almost guarantee you that whatever Amazon comes up with as a solution will make people howl a lot louder than if they did something basic like limit the KU pages to 1,000.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

SeanHinn said:


> Is anyone here in the thread qualified to really detail what the makeup of these stuffed books looks like? Are they basically, in essence, making multiple bundles with rearranged content, in addition to the individual titles? Are they really shoving 500 pages of recipes into the books (I thought I read that somewhere). I've never read through one, but I know many of the folks here on Kboards have investigated this problem in far more detail than I have.


I don't know if those of our members who've been investigating these books are following this thread. If they are, hopefully they'll chime in.

My (secondhand) impression is that there's a lot variety, and that the patterns of stuffing have shifted over time as Amazon has wised up to certain issues or behaviors.

Most agree that the straight-up ABCD, BACD, CABD, DABC form of stuffing (all the same books in every file, just reordered) is not something Amazon wants. Didn't bobfrost say recently that those 100% duplicated books get taken down? I think he did. Whether there are still a lot of these in the store, I don't know.

Amazon does not allow links that lure readers to click directly to the back of the book. That used to be a big thing, before Amazon fixed (supposedly) its inability to track page-reads: a link at the front would entice the reader to click for a gift-card contest or some such; they'd land at the back of the book, generating thousands of page-reads, even though they hadn't actually looked at any of the pages between the first couple and the last. Hopefully this isn't still happening outside the Cloud Reader, but it's possible.

Everyone agrees books stuffed with gibberish (machine-generated or -translated text) or plagiarized material are not okay.

Setting aside these easy examples, Amazon wants books to provide a good, enjoyable reading experience. The material in them can't be disruptive or irrelevant. Books need to be significantly enough differentiated from one another. That's the kind of language we're given; the question is how to interpret those guidelines in making specific decisions what it's okay or not okay to include.

I'd suggest taking a look at some stuffed books, as background research (we're not going to call particular books or authors out by name here). The ones I've looked at have what I assume is a new book at the front followed by five or six titles in the same or nearby romance subgenres. They're okay in terms of basic prose, though they're so not my thing that I've never finished one of the stories. Definitely not stuffed with gibberish or recipes, though. FYI, you have to actually borrow and download a book to know if it's stuffed; the authors use the fact that the paperback length overrides the ebook length to disguise the fact that the books have more than a few hundred pages.

I'd also suggest taking a look at the recent stuffing thread, if you haven't already, and especially at the answers PhoenixS and Shelley K received from Amazon. Earlier stuffing threads include the responses dgaughran has received.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Becca Mills said:


> I don't know if those of our members who've been investigating these books are following this thread. If they are, hopefully they'll chime in.
> 
> My (secondhand) impression is that there's a lot variety, and that the patterns of stuffing have shifted over time as Amazon has wised up to certain issues or behaviors.
> 
> ...


Thank you - first on my list tomorrow!


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

writerlygal said:


> Wow. The argument that a whole bunch of readers, mainly women, don't love bad boy romance books is very sexist. It's also very untrue. The top 100 is full of romance books because mostly female readers borrow, buy & love them. Also, as many have said in this & other threads, these 'content mill' publishers of ghostwritten books already are in other genres, including sci fi. Perhaps those ghostwriters are better than you give them credit for, since apparently they're so unrecognizable.  But seriously- how insulting to ghostwriters.
> 
> And, yes, believe it or not, a publisher w/money to hire out the creation of books certainly can produce lots of content in all genres, not just those silly bad boy romance books. That is one of the most profitable genres since so many read it & that's why content mill publishers are there. But they are also in other genres & I don't hear anyone belittling those genres like I hear people belittling romance, a woman's genre.
> 
> Taste is subjective & a matter of opinion. I could poke fun at the books in your genre but I won't b/c I realize it's merely a matter of my own taste & bias & it's not nice. I'm not sure why you don't feel the need to show the same restraint, but it doesn't matter b/c everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But market research numbers show that many women love those stock photo ripped ab bad boy covers & the steamy stories inside. Amazon is a market that caters to what readers want.


Yeah, I'm pretty sure the reason the scammers pick the romance genre so often is because it's so popular they want their books to be where they'll get the most eyes on them.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

SeanHinn said:


> This is the single best comment in the entire thread. You're dead right, on every point, and your tone is spot-on. The only thing I would debate to any degree is whether or not a legitimate boxed set of a serial story should be out of bounds. For lots of up-and-comers, being able to offer a steeply discounted bundle and earn some decent page read income on it is a great way to allow readers to take a chance on your work without too much of a commitment. That's a major feature of KU, for both readers and authors, and I think it's great for everyone - so long as it is not abused, and that's where we run into trouble.
> 
> I think we need to figure out exactly where the line is - what constitutes a scammy/stuffed book, and what constitutes a legitimate compilation? If we made a "no multiple titles" rule, then the REALLY short story writers would be harmed as well, as those collections are where the real income comes for them.
> 
> ...


I have some background in project management (PRINCE2 methodology), and I would be willing to assist.

The key would be getting people on board with knowledge of all genres, scoping the _exact _problem that needs fixing and developing a solution that effectively addressed the problem, with ways to measure that success, and that had no unintended consequences or that disadvantaged legitimate authors. The next step would be to pursuasively present that solution to Amazon in a unified way with the support of the bulk of the indie community. Without unified support (something drastically lacking at the moment) there is zero chance Amazon will listen.

Even with all the above in place, I suspect the comments from Usedtoposthere will prove accurate. Still, it doesn't hurt to try.


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## 97251 (Jun 22, 2017)

I think lowering the cap is a helpful solution, and one Amazon could implement. 

I know some people are complaining about how it would be unfair to writers if Epic and High fantasy, but frankly, I'd like to hear the opinion of these writers themselves. 

Are many of them on KU? Is KU a high source of income for them? I don't know. Not a lot of the best-selling fantasy books are in KU, and many of them have less than 350 pages.


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

PaulineMRoss said:


> I've been watching this and the other related threads with increasing bemusement. It's astonishing how upset people can be about KU and its ramifications. This might be a good moment to remind everyone that KU is optional. No one has to sign up to it. We all have the choice to decide whether it works for us at the moment, given the current rules, or whether it doesn't. And whether we're in or out, we still get to SELL books on Amazon (and elsewhere, if wide).
> 
> No one has the right to make money from KU. Being part of it, and making money from it, is a privilege, not a right. Let's never forget the KU1 to KU2 bombshell that destroyed lucrative careers overnight. In the build-up to that, when the long-form writers were grumbling about the short-form writers and scamphleteers distorting the system, and the short-form writers said that the long-form writers should just join the party and break those novels up, there were some rays of sanity. Some wiser heads said: don't build your business on the shifting sands of KU. Write good books that readers want to read, build your fanbase, publish steadily, don't worry about the short term. Write for your fans, not the current marketplace and trends. I think that's still good advice.
> 
> ...


You pretty much took the words out of my mouth.

Kindle Unlimited is a choice. It's often the more profitable choice, at least in the short term, but it's far from the only one.

There is no solution that's going to make everyone happy. Scammers get targeted with the Amazon ban hammer? So do plenty of innocent authors caught in the cross-hairs. 1000 KNEP cap? Authors who write longer books are going to be capped at $4.00 - $4.50 per full read.

We can petition. We can argue. But none of that is going to change what Amazon will do. It took them a very long time to even address a scamming issue, and we still don't know exactly what they are doing.

They are not going to ask authors what their solution is to the problem. They are just going to do what they think will keep customers happy. Because happy customers equals money in their pocket. Happy authors? Eh. Very, very few authors would pull entirely from Amazon in protest.


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

MmmmmPie said:


> It won't stop them entirely, but it would greatly cut into their profits, because they would have to triple their advertising expenditures to make the same amount.
> 
> It does seem that aside from romance authors, a lot of people aren't terribly bothered by the fact that you can make more on a borrow than on a buy. In fact, for some authors, this appears to be working wonderfully.
> 
> ...


If you punish romance authors by only reducing their cap (rather than everyone's), the stuffers will just move their books to other categories.

We choose our own categories. If a certain category is going to limit a person's ability to make money, they are going to work around it.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I very much doubt that authors' opinions had anything to do with the switch from KU1 to KU2. I know I pulled all my stuff during that period when the whole serial/pamphlet thing was out of hand, and authors in my genre were making 6-10x what I was from the same length of actual book, just by splitting it up. At the time, I had been doing extremely well in KU, and I let KDP know I wasn't happy, as did many other novelists who pulled their stuff.
> 
> They did not care.
> 
> ...


In my opinion, this post nails it.


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

sammie997 said:


> Why does everyone keep ignoring the elephant in the room?
> 
> This is a problem IN THE ROMANCE GENRE. And it could only ever *be* a problem in the romance genre.
> 
> ...


This reflects a very skewed view of the romance genre. And really is pretty offensive to romance readers. Books that are incomprehensible garbage (truly incomprehensible, not just bad boy romance that actually gets read) are likely being botted and not read. That can happen in any genre. And if there's a cap in one genre, they will just move to another genre.

If you mean legitimately written books that are simply stuffed, regardless of one person's perception of quality, which are not botted and actually read and enjoyed by readers, then that's insulting.

Readers like what they like. And Romance is the biggest genre there is, followed closely by thrillers. In KU, romance dominates period. And more complex genres? There is not a single genre fiction category I can think of except perhaps historical (romance and non-romance) that is as a whole more complex than romance books. There will always be pulp fiction. And most pulp fiction is not romance.

The most consumed type of fiction? At least indie wise is pulp fiction. I can write formulic novels in most genres, at least if I'm familiar with them. Even epic fantasy (which I read a lot) can be formulaic.

How much romance do you read? I'm guessing not a lot because it isn't your preference. There are plenty of people who won't read epic tomes of fantasy or science fiction because they think they are boring and the pacing is off.

I could be a jerk and say most epic fantasy is just pumped full of filler like what kind of foods they eat and such. If they were written without all that filler, they would easily be short enough not to be affected by a 1k KENP cap.

But I wouldn't say that because I understand that making assumptions about an entire genre is silly.

Many thousands and thousands of dollars more you (in general) spend on longer books compared to shorter, I question that. The only thing that's for sure more is editing. And in order to equal the same payout of page reads even with the cap is not vastly different.

Plus more books equals more covers. And top-notch covers can be expensive.

My point is that there is no universal spend for either a shorter book or a longer one. Expenses will differ by author.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

Day Leitao said:


> I think lowering the cap is a helpful solution, and one Amazon could implement.
> 
> I know some people are complaining about how it would be unfair to writers if Epic and High fantasy, but frankly, I'd like to hear the opinion of these writers themselves.
> 
> Are many of them on KU? Is KU a high source of income for them? I don't know. Not a lot of the best-selling fantasy books are in KU, and many of them have less than 350 pages.


I'm not an Epic Fantasy author, but once upon a time I had a 270K word book that made sense as a 270K book and had been thoroughly edited more than once. The length wasn't an editing issue.

Then I got scared of publishing it that way - who the hell publishes a 270K word first novel? People would think it was poorly edited - and split it up into two books. Result: readers read the first half and think it's okay, but because the second half is missing, they don't get hooked. KU readers were more likely to give book 2 a chance (and loved it), but not that many purchased it.

But yes, I made quite a bit of money from KU, mainly because readers were more willing to give me a chance that way.

The genre is 'Epic Dark Superhero Deconstruction'. Since that's not a category I can pick on Amazon, I had to go with Urban Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and Superheroes.


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## Guest (Apr 16, 2018)

Here's the thing -- scores of honest romance authors writing thoughtful, well-researched, well-developed and well-edited stories are losing their livelihoods courtesy of the "bad boy" scam ring. Many have already been driven out of business because that scam ring has effectively turned KU into their cash cow / private playground.

These authors (who don't post here for fear of retaliation) will sign a petition to limit to 500 KENPC for Romance, 650 for Romance, or 1000 for all genres, whichever proposal carries the day (a quick poll would be helpful!). Let's do it before the only "romance" left in KU is the "Dirty Daddy" kind.


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## Concerned writer (Apr 16, 2018)

In six months, this problem won't be limited to the romance genre anymore.  The group of people doing this are headed for fantasy, thrillers, and mysteries next.

If you're in a non-romance genre, and particularly if you're a comfortable mid-lister in a non-romance genre, you should be concerned.  You have a vested interest in fixing this issue, because you're vulnerable.  They *will* blow into your market and do exactly what they did with romance, and if you think your market is invulnerable because your readers are somehow more discerning than romance readers, just wait.

The "bad boy" author group isn't the only one you should be concerned about, either.

There are a *lot* of romance authors who are excellent writers, period.  Those authors have interests outside of romance.  If they start being driven out of romance in droves because it's no longer profitable, where exactly do you think they're going to go?  They're not going to stop writing.  They're going to move into your genres and niche markets.

PS - To the person who suggested a KENPC limit for romance only, I think the majority of romance authors would be 100% supportive, and the lower the KENPC limit, the better, because that would send the stuffer group fleeing out of romance and into other more profitable genres.


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## Guest (Apr 16, 2018)

Just to let everyone know we now have 2 polls: one worded in a way that I found too judgment-laden to be helpful, and a second one, neutral (trust me, it took a lot of self-discipline): https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,262608.0.html


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

caitlynlynch said:


> In terms of manpower to check on reported books, I really don't think the number is going to be all that significant. Once the new rule is announced, give authors 30 days to bring their books into compliance, and then start checking books which are reported after the 30 days is up. You could probably have a single full-time staffer handling the job, and one person could probably deal with 100 books a day. Just boot offending books from the store and send a form email to the author/publisher telling them to bring the book into compliance or else. In fact, being Amazon and the heavy-hammer type, just suspend ALL their books until fixed.
> 
> Easy fix. Store would probably be clean of stuffed books in a month. And let's be honest, doing it would probably cost less staff hours than they spend now dealing with angry authors.


Amazon will NOT hire a person for this job. It won't happen.

It's corporate culture is entirely too toxic, driven on results for LESS money and LESS manpower.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have-to-pee-into-bottles-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T

Assume they will NOT: Hire more people, Hire programmers to change the system, Fundamental alter the program in an significant way which requires human oversight.


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

writerbiter said:


> Amazon will NOT hire a person for this job. It won't happen.
> 
> It's corporate culture is entirely too toxic, driven on results for LESS money and LESS manpower.
> 
> ...


Let's face it, amazon probably have robots to change a lightbulb.


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

Here's where the program stands:

Amazon has absolutely _no problem_ with bonus material. This has been verified through Amazon reps--reps that I've personally spoken with on the phone and reps who work with other authors.

We can scream, shout, petition, and demand all we want, but the fact remains--Amazon will not eliminate bonus material. *Ever*. It is not a priority for them as customers do not complain about bonus material.

Asking for Amazon to police the bonus content is great--but it will never be implemented. We need to think of alternative solutions to solve the problem.

So what is the problem?

1) Click-Farmers: Click-Farmers will create bogus material and scan it for profit. However, Amazon DOES audit their reads at the end of every month--it's why some bonuses are awarded late. Presumably, they have a process in place in which they can identify click-farmed reads already. The onus is on Amazon to detect their own fraud, and authors can help by reporting any of those questionable books we find.

However...

2) There is a larger segment of the KU monthly pot that is consumed by authors (primarily in romance) who publish 3-4 ghostwritten books a month (under one pen name--though some have more), stuff every book to the 3k limit, drive down the price-per-page of the overall community, and steal the bonuses which SHOULD go to authors with bestselling books, not just a pen name with a vast volume of material.

So what can be done?

Let's stop wishing for Amazon to end bonus content. It won't happen. It's time to start planning alternative solutions to the program.

Lowering the cap is ONE solution which would immediately resolve a vast amount of exploitation in the program--and it is one Amazon has already done in the past. Yes, it might hurt the occasional fantasy writer who has extraordinarily long books. It may also harm those who are republishing older material (which is individually available in the store) into boxed sets. However, as MOST writers publishing in the program have written books well under the proposed 1000 KNEP cap, it seems as though it would be a net benefit for the program.

If people are opposed to the lower cap--please, propose a solution that does not involve any additional manpower, programming, or investment on Amazon's part. We're desperate for a change, and, if we highlight the problems with the program, it might resonate.

If not, email Amazon and support the idea. I've had 50-60 Top 100/Lettered authors already contact Amazon in support of the idea. More voices can only help.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Ok serious question, if Amazon is completely fine with bonus content then why would they support a lower cap?


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## writerbiter (Sep 1, 2015)

JulesWright said:


> Ok serious question, if Amazon is completely fine with bonus content then why would they support a lower cap?


The one topic that really struck the rep I talked to was the integrity of the All-Star Bonuses. He said the team was concerned that the bonuses would not be awarded to the authors who deserved it based on the merit of their brand/book. Lowering the cap would ensure the authors who don't stuff and yet hit the top 10 are still awarded the rightful bonuses for a best-seller. It fixes the spirit of the program, and that something the project managers wanted to address.

They recognize there's a problem with the program, but because Amazon is a customer driven company, the bonus books have never bothered their customers. There's no incentive to fix that aspect of the KU. However, by demonstrating the millions of dollars they're losing a month in bonuses and pages, lowering the cap--like they did before--is an easy solution to an ugly problem. It doesn't impact the customers, but it will satisfy most authors with the least amount of effort/money/etc.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Ok, thank you for answering the question. The issue over the bonuses also indicates they could be concerned about more top romance authors leaving.

I am befuddled why Amazon would want to pay out on page reads on all of the bonus content and have Romance flooded with .99 books when they would make more on higher priced books. But if customers really do like bonus content then it is kind of hard to argue against it.

I feel like those who stuff also have huge mailing lists, do big swaps and have all kinds of ways to adjust to still do fine and that is why I don't think it would really help, but I am not strongly opposed to it. I think the best course for me is to be out of KU, so probably won't affect me either way.

Best wishes.



writerbiter said:


> The one topic that really struck the rep I talked to was the integrity of the All-Star Bonuses. He said the team was concerned that the bonuses would not be awarded to the authors who deserved it based on the merit of their brand/book. Lowering the cap would ensure the authors who don't stuff and yet hit the top 10 are still awarded the rightful bonuses for a best-seller. It fixes the spirit of the program, and that something the project managers wanted to address.
> 
> They recognize there's a problem with the program, but because Amazon is a customer driven company, the bonus books have never bothered their customers. There's no incentive to fix that aspect of the KU. However, by demonstrating the millions of dollars they're losing a month in bonuses and pages, lowering the cap--like they did before--is an easy solution to an ugly problem. It doesn't impact the customers, but it will satisfy most authors with the least amount of effort/money/etc.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

Is this debate just being set up to distract us from working together to lower stuffing. I have no idea why but I decided to flip through the epic fantasy section of amazon just to see how many books would be effected by the change is KENP count. I scanned through several pages and found all of 1 book that exceeds the max 1k KENP
Epic fantasy books seem to range from 300-600 ish pages. Why is this debate even happening really are we talking about a handful or less of books that might need to be reformated?  You are talking about destroying a possible system for all readers for 5 -10 maybe 15 books?

This excludes boxed sets.


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

idontknowyet said:


> Is this debate just being set up to distract us from working together to lower stuffing. I have no idea why but I decided to flip through the epic fantasy section of amazon just to see how many books would be effected by the change is KENP count. I scanned through several pages and found all of 1 book that exceeds the max 1k KENP
> Epic fantasy books seem to range from 300-600 ish pages. Why is this debate even happening really are we talking about a handful or less of books that might need to be reformated? You are talking about destroying a possible system for all readers for 5 -10 maybe 15 books?
> 
> This excludes boxed sets.


Those aren't KENP page numbers. A 600-page book is likely well over 1000 KENP.

For example, my longest book is officially listed at 465 pages. Its KENP is about 860.

Keep in mind that this book is about 165,000 words. Many epic fantasy novels are longer than 165,000 words. It might not be as common in self-publishing, where shorter books are more the norm, but we shouldn't have our legitimate page reads being taken away because some people stuff their books.

Besides, we don't have any evidence that payout would actually increase with all the illegitimate page reads being taken away. Amazon would probably just look at it as cost savings and deliver the same payout.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Just to be clear, KB can be used to organize a push for a 1,000-KENP limit, and it can be used to organize a push against such a limit. Or to organize some other push entirely. Posts that get ... territorial on such matters? not quite sure how to put it ... have been and will be deleted.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Becca Mills said:


> Just to be clear, KB can be used to organize a push for a 1,000-KENP limit, and it can be used to organize a push against such a limit. Or to organize some other push entirely. Posts that get ... territorial on such matters? not quite sure how to put it ... have been and will be deleted.


It's one thing to organize in favor of something.

It's quite another to organize against something someone's advocating (not organizing at all). As soon as someone starts trying to collect others and organize against something another member of KBoards is advocating, that's where the problem starts--because then it's not about discussing and debate anymore--it's politics. That's already gotten threads shut down today, apparently.

That's exactly what organizing against something is--politics. Maybe that's the word you're looking for, and KBoards is no place for naked, aggressive politics--whether electoral or within the forum.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

David VanDyke said:


> It's one thing to organize in favor of something.
> 
> It's quite another to organize against something someone's advocating (not organizing at all). As soon as someone starts trying to collect others and organize against something another member of KBoards is advocating, that's where the problem starts--because then it's not about discussing and debate anymore--it's politics. That's already gotten threads shut down today, apparently.
> 
> That's exactly what organizing against something is--politics. Maybe that's the word you're looking for, and KBoards is no place for naked, aggressive politics--whether electoral or within the forum.


I guess it is "political," in that sense. Interesting point.

I think we do have to allow space for competing and/or contradictory efforts, though. Otherwise the forum becomes a first-come, first-served space, where whoever happens to begin organizing first pretty much gets sole rights to use the forum to further their effort, even if a substantial portion of the membership happens to disagree with that effort.

It is reasonable to ask competing organizers to adopt a hands-off or boundary-respecting attitude toward one another, I think, so that different efforts can use the space without coming into more conflict than is necessary. So, I'll do that now: let's keep this thread focused on the effort to build support for a KENP cap and to debate the wisdom of such a cap. Any effort to organize along different lines should get its own thread.


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## Lefevre (Feb 1, 2014)

I propose that AMZ just gets rid of KENP and makes it so people actually buy books...


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

Concerned writer said:


> In six months, this problem won't be limited to the romance genre anymore. The group of people doing this are headed for fantasy, thrillers, and mysteries next.
> 
> If you're in a non-romance genre, and particularly if you're a comfortable mid-lister in a non-romance genre, you should be concerned. You have a vested interest in fixing this issue, because you're vulnerable. They *will* blow into your market and do exactly what they did with romance, and if you think your market is invulnerable because your readers are somehow more discerning than romance readers, just wait.


This is just called capitalism. You really can't stop the inevitable. Amazon rewards fast, frequent content. Even outside of KU, Amazon's algos push new releases so much more than older books & then they fall off the cliff. One writer & their keyboard is like a hamster on a wheel trying to keep up & make a living self publishing. When people who are business-minded figure out that there is money to be made, they swoop in & create a business that provides a supply to meet the demand. Or when writers have too many ideas to write them all out, they turn themselves into publishing empires & get 'assistants' aka ghostwriters to help them keep up the pace with all the different characters, settings & series in their heads. James Patterson does it. The Nancy Drew series did it. Harlequin does it- at least if my friend's stories of being provided w/ exact outlines to write to make sure they stay in line w/ Harquelin's brand if they want to get paid for the book they write for Harlequin are any indication. Basically, expanding the business to meet the demand of hungry readers is as old as publishing itself.

Everyone who continues to demonize one group of authors/publishers is missing the much larger picture. Amazon doesn't have anything in place to limit the amount or frequency that self publishers can publish, & it's not going to put anything like that in place b/c it *likes* having lots of content available. [I am not sure why any self publisher would advocate to limit the amount of content they could publish or advocate for trad pub-like gatekeeping from Amazon. These things are not good for self publishing businesses.] Businesses have figured out how to get this content to people faster & they are always going to have an edge over an individual publisher. Therefore those of us who want to survive in this industry need to be thinking about how to produce their content faster. How to get our ideas out there in a way that keeps up w/ big business b/c this has in fact become big business. People spending $50k/month on advertising. People hiring lots of ghostwriters & editors. I personally see this as businesses being businesses & have no problem w/ that. I have friends who write for some of these 'content mills' & they make good money. Better money than my trad pub friends who get a small advance & see no other money, ever. Ghostwriting has become a viable way to make a living for a lot of authors & I see nothing wrong with that. In fact I think it's a good thing b/c it gives people jobs writing & how many people have you heard wishing there were more jobs where they could make money writing? Lots! When I read a good book I don't care if it's ghostwritten or not; I suspect a lot are. The businesses publishing genre fiction [of any type] know that & they make sure to produce well told stories that hit all the expected beats & give the readers what they want. They are never going to go out of business when they know how to give readers more & more of what they want, faster & easier than just one person writing it all.

Those who want to focus only on writing are free to do so but IMO it is short-sighted to think that it will always make good money. Self-publishing on Amazon was a gold rush & it still largely is & I for one am grateful for the chance to sell my words to readers & make any money from it at all. Sure, I'm not a huge fan of Amazon's vague & inconsistently enforced rules & it's definitely a love/hate relationship but I think blaming the platform that makes it possible & the businesses taking hold of the opportunity doesn't do a darn thing to help keep my own self publishing business sustainable. I actually like to learn about Internet marketing & business models that help me sell my words better. I don't have any hate for anyone & it pains me to read some of the vitriol on these threads; I think that we as writers & business people [which, as self publishers, all of us are] should come together to figure out ways to make our own words more competitive & our businesses sustainable. Trying to chase the big names out of top 100 romance [or any genre] publishing is not going to achieve that goal. Even if these people are doing something wrong [I don't believe it since they are consistently in the top 100 & have a lot fans & are in good standing w/ Amazon despite everyone claiming they're 'scammers' since, like, Idk, last year or so?], even if ya'all are somehow successful in getting them 'taken down' they will just resurface or others will just replace them. In all genres. Across the Kindle store & especially in KU. That is just the nature of business & capitalism. I feel ya'all are fighting a losing battle expecting it to get easier, rather than harder, for one man or woman & a keyboard to make good money self-publishing when it has now become a big business, especially if ya'all are just focused on taking down other people/businesses or making changes to the system that seem unlikely based on Amazon's own business model, rather than looking at your own business plan & deciding what you personally can do to get the content out there faster [if you're in KU or in the Kindle store in general- which clearly are systems that reward a lot of fast frequent content] or otherwise adapt to changing market conditions.


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## Gone To Croatan (Jun 24, 2011)

writerlygal said:


> This is just called capitalism.


KU, which eliminates the price mechanism in the ebook market, has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, in fact: it's basically socialism in the ebook world: 'pay us $9.99 a month in tax and we'll give you all the free books you want, comrades!'


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

As a businesswoman, I think the best way to have a long term career in the writing business lies in product and brand differentiation. In knowing the market segments you are aiming for and in satisfying them. The other way works too, obviously, but it is not really a writing career. It is a production/marketing career. I already had that career. No, thanks. 

I wrote a post a while back called “Get Off the Churn Train” about how to do this. It was well received. If folks are interested, you can google it. 

There is NOT one path to continued success. The people I know who are netting the big numbers are doing it by differentiation. By offering a unique product line and gaining author-loyal readers. That is a perfectly good and sustainable long term strategy, and the bonus is that you are unlikely to run afoul of Amazon pursuing it.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

HopelessFanatic said:


> This reflects a very skewed view of the romance genre. And really is pretty offensive to romance readers. Books that are incomprehensible garbage (truly incomprehensible, not just bad boy romance that actually gets read) are likely being botted and not read. That can happen in any genre. And if there's a cap in one genre, they will just move to another genre.
> 
> If you mean legitimately written books that are simply stuffed, regardless of one person's perception of quality, which are not botted and actually read and enjoyed by readers, then that's insulting.
> 
> Readers like what they like.


I've modified my view recently, and it's mostly because I had a look through the Romance bestseller lists. I arrived at a similar conclusion to the above quote.

The words scammer and stuffer have been thrown around a lot. I don't doubt that both exist. But what I saw was mostly authors with bonus material. And these authors are being READ and LIKED by readers. Who can blame them? Readers can buy a book for 99 cents or borrow it for free. Either way, they're getting a large volume of reading material on the cheap. Readers want that. The authors are making money. And it's working for Amazon, otherwise it would have been shut down.

The people it wouldn't be working so well for are new authors, or slow-writing authors. These people won't have the volume of material available to provide bonus content, so they're at a competitive disadvantage. A lower KENP cap would benefit them. _But not because it reduced scammers_...but because it disadvantaged their more prolific competitors.

I think the word "scammers" is getting used too much and too purposefully. It's being used to create an emotional response.

To be clear, I'm not denying that scammers exist. (They should be hunted down and eradicated). I'm just saying that many of the _supposed _scammers are actually authors offering bonus content in accordance with Amazon rules. And that readers are reading them and liking it.

I don't much like the idea of "bonus" content. But it's not stuffing either. I don't much like free or 99 cents as a price point either. But just because I don't like it, or it's not the business model that I've chosen, doesn't mean it's scamming.

In short, lowering the KENP cap would not be a legitimate solution to actual _scamming_. It would make some authors more competitive against other authors.

I'd suggest the real enemy is fake accounts and bot reads. And given what's happened recently, it seems that Amazon is taking major action on that front.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

David VanDyke said:


> It's one thing to organize in favor of something.
> 
> It's quite another to organize against something someone's advocating (not organizing at all). As soon as someone starts trying to collect others and organize against something another member of KBoards is advocating, that's where the problem starts--because then it's not about discussing and debate anymore--it's politics. That's already gotten threads shut down today, apparently.
> 
> That's exactly what organizing against something is--politics. Maybe that's the word you're looking for, and KBoards is no place for naked, aggressive politics--whether electoral or within the forum.


I just don't see the problem with organizing against something that you disagree with, or that will hurt your interest, political or not. The market place is political if nothing else. It always has been. It's set up on a foundation of political principles. People who would be hurt by this should not be expected to not voice an opposition. They have a right to be heard and considered. Then it's up to which, if either side, Amazon listens to. Seems fair.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Edward M. Grant said:


> KU, which eliminates the price mechanism in the ebook market, has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, in fact: it's basically socialism in the ebook world: 'pay us $9.99 a month in tax and we'll give you all the free books you want, comrades!'


Hear, hear.

This is something that needs to be understood. KU is the opposite of market capitalism.

Markets are organic. They are, to a large extent, self-balancing, by natural forces. Minimal intervention (such as anti-monopoly action) is needed to keep things functioning.

KU is only influenced by the controls and rules of the owner of the system, Amazon. That's authoritarianism, combined with a weird form of socialism (forced redistribution of wealth).

All such artificial systems are vulnerable to manipulation. The more rule-based a system is, the more opportunity there is for manipulation and rent-seeking (note that rent-seeking is a technical term having nothing to do with renting property--it means figuring out a way to extract money without adding any value--look it up).

So, Amazon created a system that's fundamentally vulnerable to manipulation, that's fundamentally flawed, and has to be actively managed to keep any semblance of functional fairness. This is also called negative static stability, the tendency of a thing to become unbalanced without constant corrective input, like a person on a tightrope or a car with bad steering.

Durable, robust, or better yet, antifragile systems need to be designed with positive static stability--the tendency of something to self-balance, like water in a canal or a properly designed glider.

The best we'll ever do with such a flawed system is hope they eliminate the worst of the unbalancing elements and achieve neutral static stability.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

writerlygal said:


> This is just called capitalism. You really can't stop the inevitable. Amazon rewards fast, frequent content. Even outside of KU, Amazon's algos push new releases so much more than older books & then they fall off the cliff. One writer & their keyboard is like a hamster on a wheel trying to keep up & make a living self publishing. When people who are business-minded figure out that there is money to be made, they swoop in & create a business that provides a supply to meet the demand. Or when writers have too many ideas to write them all out, they turn themselves into publishing empires & get 'assistants' aka ghostwriters to help them keep up the pace with all the different characters, settings & series in their heads. James Patterson does it. The Nancy Drew series did it. Harlequin does it- at least if my friend's stories of being provided w/ exact outlines to write to make sure they stay in line w/ Harquelin's brand if they want to get paid for the book they write for Harlequin are any indication. Basically, expanding the business to meet the demand of hungry readers is as old as publishing itself.
> 
> Everyone who continues to demonize one group of authors/publishers is missing the much larger picture. Amazon doesn't have anything in place to limit the amount or frequency that self publishers can publish, & it's not going to put anything like that in place b/c it *likes* having lots of content available. [I am not sure why any self publisher would advocate to limit the amount of content they could publish or advocate for trad pub-like gatekeeping from Amazon. These things are not good for self publishing businesses.] Businesses have figured out how to get this content to people faster & they are always going to have an edge over an individual publisher. Therefore those of us who want to survive in this industry need to be thinking about how to produce their content faster. How to get our ideas out there in a way that keeps up w/ big business b/c this has in fact become big business. People spending $50k/month on advertising. People hiring lots of ghostwriters & editors. I personally see this as businesses being businesses & have no problem w/ that. I have friends who write for some of these 'content mills' & they make good money. Better money than my trad pub friends who get a small advance & see no other money, ever. Ghostwriting has become a viable way to make a living for a lot of authors & I see nothing wrong with that. In fact I think it's a good thing b/c it gives people jobs writing & how many people have you heard wishing there were more jobs where they could make money writing? Lots! When I read a good book I don't care if it's ghostwritten or not; I suspect a lot are. The businesses publishing genre fiction [of any type] know that & they make sure to produce well told stories that hit all the expected beats & give the readers what they want. They are never going to go out of business when they know how to give readers more & more of what they want, faster & easier than just one person writing it all.
> 
> Those who want to focus only on writing are free to do so but IMO it is short-sighted to think that it will always make good money. Self-publishing on Amazon was a gold rush & it still largely is & I for one am grateful for the chance to sell my words to readers & make any money from it at all. Sure, I'm not a huge fan of Amazon's vague & inconsistently enforced rules & it's definitely a love/hate relationship but I think blaming the platform that makes it possible & the businesses taking hold of the opportunity doesn't do a darn thing to help keep my own self publishing business sustainable. I actually like to learn about Internet marketing & business models that help me sell my words better. I don't have any hate for anyone & it pains me to read some of the vitriol on these threads; I think that we as writers & business people [which, as self publishers, all of us are] should come together to figure out ways to make our own words more competitive & our businesses sustainable. Trying to chase the big names out of top 100 romance [or any genre] publishing is not going to achieve that goal. Even if these people are doing something wrong [I don't believe it since they are consistently in the top 100 & have a lot fans & are in good standing w/ Amazon despite everyone claiming they're 'scammers' since, like, Idk, last year or so?], even if ya'all are somehow successful in getting them 'taken down' they will just resurface or others will just replace them. In all genres. Across the Kindle store & especially in KU. That is just the nature of business & capitalism. I feel ya'all are fighting a losing battle expecting it to get easier, rather than harder, for one man or woman & a keyboard to make good money self-publishing when it has now become a big business, especially if ya'all are just focused on taking down other people/businesses or making changes to the system that seem unlikely based on Amazon's own business model, rather than looking at your own business plan & deciding what you personally can do to get the content out there faster [if you're in KU or in the Kindle store in general- which clearly are systems that reward a lot of fast frequent content] or otherwise adapt to changing market conditions.


This is ridiculous. It's not business being business. There only reason why these masterminds can make bank now is the 3k KENPC limit. These are not savvy business owners who are putting out a great product people want. These are marketers exploiting a loophole on the system.

I don't know anyone who takes issue with publishers who use gw. Or publishers who do a lot of advertising. Or publishers who publish a lot of books. But a group that continually decieves other authors, knocks off covers, titles, and blurbs, uses poor formatting to increase pages, hides their use of bonus content, uses click to the back/epilogue after bonus content tricks, and uses stolen images in ads--

A lot of people have a problem with that.

And that's not even touching the low quality work they put out.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

katrina46 said:


> I just don't see the problem with organizing against something that you disagree with, or that will hurt your interest, political or not. The market place is political if nothing else. It always has been. It's set up on a foundation of political principles. People who would be hurt by this should not be expected to not voice an opposition. They have a right to be heard and considered. Then it's up to which, if either side, Amazon listens to. Seems fair.


This issue I'm objecting to is organizing within KBoards, against other KBoarders. If you want to organize something that whips up partisanship, best to take it offline to a separate FB group or something--otherwise we're drifting toward tribalism.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

David VanDyke said:


> otherwise we're drifting toward tribalism.


Oh, I think that boat docked about eight pages back.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

These sound like horrible practices but they could be done by unscrupulous people no matter what the cap was.

I don't think the cap should be changed on the basis of trying to stop one group of bad internet marketers. If they are violating the terms of service in any way then yes they should be dealt with.



Crystal_ said:


> This is ridiculous. It's not business being business. There only reason why these masterminds can make bank now is the 3k KENPC limit. These are not savvy business owners who are putting out a great product people want. These are marketers exploiting a loophole on the system.
> 
> I don't know anyone who takes issue with publishers who use gw. Or publishers who do a lot of advertising. Or publishers who publish a lot of books. But a group that continually decieves other authors, knocks off covers, titles, and blurbs, uses poor formatting to increase pages, hides their use of bonus content, uses click to the back/epilogue after bonus content tricks, and uses stolen images in ads--
> 
> ...


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

ParkerAvrile said:


> Amen. I don't understand how trying to spoil other people's businesses is supposed to help my business. Right now, I'm focused on writing my own material, but if I was serious about earning big money, I would be looking around aggressively for good ghostwriters, artists, FB/social media people, etc. And I don't want to have that option taken away, if I ever do decide to expand beyond my own work. Even though I'm not a KU author, Amazon has made it clear to me that they reward frequent publication.
> 
> I should add that I have not read these books, they're not in my niche. If Crystal is correct that they're using poor quality/stolen work, that's another matter. That should be handled by Amazon enforcing their rules on copyright and quality control. Not by telling other authors they can't publish long works if they'd like to get paid.


I've always hated KU, but I still started a pen name just for it. It isn't going away and Amazon will do whatever they like. I'll ride it until the wheels fall off because it is what it is. I'll make a lot more money releasing my next book than I will worrying about putting a cap on KU, because that's not going to happen unless Amazon wants to do it, which they probably don't, because long books do well. If KU doesn't work for someone they should get out, not dictate to others how long their work should be.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

Dpock said:


> Oh, I think that boat docked about eight pages back.


I'm pretty sure we did. There are all types of writers on kboards and they all have an equal voice, so yeah, it'll come down to longVSshort writers just like in KU2. My next novel will probably be 700 pages or so and surprise, it's romance, so 650 doesn't work for me and no I'm not going to take my complaint to another board because that's not how this place works.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

I think some romance readers are definitely hungry for a nice long, quality romance novel. Size isn't everything but some people do like something with some meat to it. Best wishes!



katrina46 said:


> I'm pretty sure we did. There are all types of writers on kboards and they all have an equal voice, so yeah, it'll come down to longVSshort writers just like in KU2. My next novel will probably be 700 pages or so and surprise, it's romance, so 650 doesn't work for me and no I'm not going to take my complaint to another board because that's not how this place works.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

JulesWright said:


> I think some romance readers are definitely hungry for a nice long, quality romance novel. Size isn't everything but some people do like something with some meat to it. Best wishes!


Thanks. It's about two couples, one modern and one Victorian whose lives intertwine, so I'm telling two stories and merging them. It's a complicated plot that takes more words to tell.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

I've found that writing long is one good way to differentiate in romance. Most indies don't. (Because, obviously, you can't release as fast when you write more complex 100-150K books.) Interestingly, a fair number of big sellers in indie DO write long. It's a very different market from the quick reads. 

Lots of audiences out there.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I've found that writing long is one good way to differentiate in romance. Most indies don't. (Because, obviously, you can't release as fast when you write more complex 100-150K books.) Interestingly, a fair number of big sellers in indie DO write long. It's a very different market from the quick reads.
> 
> Lots of audiences out there.


One writer in my subcat does well with long because so few do it. I had this idea for a long one so I decided to join the party. It's a little scary because I don't write that fast compared to some, so it'll take about 4 months. I might release a novella in the meantime to feed the algos a little.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

katrina46 said:


> One writer in my subcat does well with long because so few do it. I had this idea for a long one so I decided to join the party. It's a little scary because I don't write that fast compared to some, so it take about 4 months. I might release a novella in the meantime to feed the algos a little.


I've gone as long as 7 months between releases. Usually more like 3-4. It works pretty well, as the books are quite sticky. Plus I just find it much more interesting to write things that I'd call "romance-plus." (Can be suspense, mystery, family drama, even a reality show.) Very, very different market from things like baby for the bad boy. Circles don't really intersect. Provides some insulation from trends and shenanigans.


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

Usedtoposthere said:


> As a businesswoman, I think the best way to have a long term career in the writing business lies in product and brand differentiation. In knowing the market segments you are aiming for and in satisfying them. The other way works too, obviously, but it is not really a writing career. It is a production/marketing career. I already had that career. No, thanks.
> 
> I wrote a post a while back called "Get Off the Churn Train" about how to do this. It was well received. If folks are interested, you can google it.
> 
> There is NOT one path to continued success. The people I know who are netting the big numbers are doing it by differentiation. By offering a unique product line and gaining author-loyal readers. That is a perfectly good and sustainable long term strategy, and the bonus is that you are unlikely to run afoul of Amazon pursuing it.


I agree w/ you that there are different models & paths. I have said before that if ppl don't like the KU structure or it doesn't work for them they shouldn't be in KU. My post was just meant to point out the type of content that KU rewards- from my constant research of the top 100. I agree that ppl don't have to churn to make money but if ppl can write fast & to market or pay ppl to do it for them, then at least for now they'll make money in KU. It also isn't mutually exclusive as there are many authors who do mixed stragegues, doing well w/ some series in KU & some wide. For some authors that is actually the best of both worlds. I like to hedge my bets & go for both a short term high cash & long term slower steady money approach. That way all my bases are covered & I'm constantly learning, growing & adapting.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

writerlygal said:


> I agree w/ you that there are different models & paths. I have said before that if ppl don't like the KU structure or it doesn't work for them they shouldn't be in KU. My post was just meant to point out the type of content that KU rewards- from my constant research of the top 100. I agree that ppl don't have to churn to make money but if ppl can write fast & to market or pay ppl to do it for them, then at least for now they'll make money in KU. It also isn't mutually exclusive as there are many authors who do mixed stragegues, doing well w/ some series in KU & some wide. For some authors that is actually the best of both worlds. I like to hedge my bets & go for both a short term high cash & long term slower steady money approach. That way all my bases are covered & I'm constantly learning, growing & adapting.


I make lots of money in KU. 

ETA: I also keep almost all of it. The benefit of that different path, I guess. Doesn't rely on paying marketers or ghostwriters or Facebook or AMS, let alone coordinating and incentivizing review teams or other sketchy things, or require lots of management.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

Usedtoposthere said:


> As a businesswoman, I think the best way to have a long term career in the writing business lies in product and brand differentiation. In knowing the market segments you are aiming for and in satisfying them. The other way works too, obviously, but it is not really a writing career. It is a production/marketing career. I already had that career. No, thanks.
> 
> I wrote a post a while back called "Get Off the Churn Train" about how to do this. It was well received. If folks are interested, you can google it.
> 
> There is NOT one path to continued success. The people I know who are netting the big numbers are doing it by differentiation. By offering a unique product line and gaining author-loyal readers. That is a perfectly good and sustainable long term strategy, and the bonus is that you are unlikely to run afoul of Amazon pursuing it.


Very interesting read. Thank you. 
It's a good approach to writing. I do think as a want to be writer its important to think this way rather than chasing a quick dollar. 
I'm wondering now if Ive read any of your books. I probably have. Off to check my kindle.


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I make lots of money in KU.


I know you do. That was my point exactly. And good for you, congrats. I feel like for some reason you're taking my posts personally. I have no issue w/ you. I know your books & think they're great. I agree w/ a lot of what you say in your posts. Obviously not everything but everyone has their own opinions. I was saying that you have a model that works for you & that's great. There are lot of different businesses models & paths, as I said...

Not sure why you're taking issue w/ what I said but I apologize for any unintended offense my posts may have caused you. I was actually trying to agree w/ you but I guess I didn't make myself clear enough.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

writerlygal said:


> I know you do. That was my point exactly. And good for you, congrats. I feel like for some reason you're taking my posts personally. I have no issue w/ you. I know your books & think they're great. I agree w/ a lot of what you say in your posts. Obviously not everything but everyone has their own opinions. I was saying that you have a model that works for you & that's great. There are lot of different businesses models & paths, as I said...
> 
> Not sure why you're taking issue w/ what I said but I apologize for any unintended offense my posts may have caused you. I was actually trying to agree w/ you but I guess I didn't make myself clear enough.


If people aren't doing shenanigans, i don't have a problem with them hiring ghostwriters or whatever. I just don't think they're in the same business I am. If they're relying on an artificially profitable system like a 3000 KENPC cap, especially if they ARE doing shenanigans, I don't think it's a long-term formula for success. More a take-the-money-and-run formula.

My offense was caused by the idea that people who don't use ghostwriters and all the rest of it are somehow not business savvy. I know lots of by-the-book (so to speak) authors who do fantastically (much better than me) and do none of the above. They just write consistently strong books, have great work ethics, produce a reliably satisfying product, and present it well. Pretty much the gold standard of a publishing career, and there's surely nothing unbusinesslike about that.

If somebody wants to go into the production/marketing business, of course they can. It's not a writing career, though, in any way that I'd define it, and it's not the only way to get rich and stay rich.


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

Jack Krenneck said:


> I've modified my view recently, and it's mostly because I had a look through the Romance bestseller lists. I arrived at a similar conclusion to the above quote.
> 
> The words scammer and stuffer have been thrown around a lot. I don't doubt that both exist. But what I saw was mostly authors with bonus material. And these authors are being READ and LIKED by readers. Who can blame them? Readers can buy a book for 99 cents or borrow it for free. Either way, they're getting a large volume of reading material on the cheap. Readers want that. The authors are making money. And it's working for Amazon, otherwise it would have been shut down.
> 
> ...


I agree. Some ppl here on Kboards sometimes like to conflate everything as scamming & it starts to sound like crying wolf after awhile. I think it all started by saying ppl were botting & clickfarming. Everyone seemed convinced that certain ppl were 'obviously' doing it but I never saw any evidence. I mean, yeah, there were obviously botted books like the spaceship one who admitted to using some botting service but nothing showing me that bad boy romance books were hitting top 100 by botting. Now no one even talks about that anymore & books by those same authors are still up there regularly hitting top 100- even top 10. To me it really seems like ppl couldn't believe these books were doing that well on their own & they just had to be botting.

Now it seems the new thing is going after them for stuffing when even Amazon has said it's a grey area & the TOS the way I interpret them not only condone it but even seem to encourage it or why else would they have changed it to say that descriptions disclose if there are bonus books, instead of just prohibiting bonus books altogether. Plus ppl start accusing them of botting w/ their stuffing & to me it just sounds like more of the same wishful thinking & wild accusations w/out any proof behind them. As a skeptic I don't believe things that don't make sense or have at best circumstantial evidence. It seems much more likely to me that some ppl just don't want to accept it is just that so called scammers know how to package their books in a way that a lot of KU readers want & spend money to advertise them.

If I saw something clearly saying bonus books aren't allowed I could understand the hate but to me it just sounds like ppl on both sides reading into things what they wish or think should be there. I am not going to take sides about it b/c I'm not God aka Bezos. I am just one person w/ opinions like everyone else & I start to wuestion the reason or logic behind some of these charges being lead. It seems like grasping at straws to try to take out competition & I don't think that sounds very ethical or purely motivated either.

So- I don't agree w/ the scamming label either. If someone admits to botting then okay but otherwise, even if ppl accuse them of it I remain skeptical if it looks to me like they have a normal pattern of sales & ranking jumps. I've researched Kindle books a lot & I can tell when something looks weird. Honestly, though, even if there are weird patterns I don't assume the person behind the book is a scammer anymore b/c I have read all the posts here about ppl being rank stripped & receiving emails from Amazon saying they have been accused of rank manipulation. Unless I assume all these Kboarders are lying scammers [which I don't], then, I also have to believe that innocent ppl can get caught up in Amazon's net of robots. Therefore I don't judge other ppl & I just concentrate on doing the best that I can. When people continue to scream scammer at every little thing I just can't take it seriously. I think it's sad that indie authors turn on each other like this & also that they advocate for things that limit their own opportunity just to try to get rid of so called 'scammers.'


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

katrina46 said:


> I've always hated KU, but I still started a pen name just for it. It isn't going away and Amazon will do whatever they like.


What's for sure is KU will be ever evolving. The internet is the wild west with fresh outlaws arriving daily, and today's fixes won't work tomorrow.

I'm dating myself, but years ago I worked for a website named Themestream. It paid "writers" ten cents a page to write about their passions. That meant three hundred page reads would put $30 in your pocket (imagine getting $30 for every book you sold). The site grew quickly, and soon there were Yahoo boards or forums like this one where contributors shared their links. A writer would post that they'd written an article on kayaking, and the board would rush off to pretend to read it then leave glowing reviews. People would post an article in the morning, then sit on boards all day (imagine) posting their links.

Soon, the real outlaws arrived. They learned they could steal articles from other sites, put them up on Themestream, then post their links to porn topsites with deceitful titles. Twenty thousand or more would follow the link, registering twenty thousand page reads, putting $2000 in the outlaw's pocket. Soon the site was overwhelmed with junk or stolen articles.

Forced to react, Themestream cut the pay per page read. The "writers" were outraged, and endless debates consumed the forums. Six months or so later the site closed. To their credit, Themestream paid all that was owed. But the scammers had won, clearly and decisively. In hindsight, there's a lot Themestream could have done to stay in business, none of which would have pleased their contributors. Other sites popped up to mimic Themestream's model, such as Webseed and Vines, and they also failed to defeat the scammers. Epinions was another site based solely on product reviews that also fell victim.

So, it's not surprising KU has had growing pains. It some ways it's surprising it still exists.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

David VanDyke said:


> It's one thing to organize in favor of something.
> 
> It's quite another to organize against something someone's advocating (not organizing at all). As soon as someone starts trying to collect others and organize against something another member of KBoards is advocating, that's where the problem starts--because then it's not about discussing and debate anymore--it's politics. That's already gotten threads shut down today, apparently.
> 
> That's exactly what organizing against something is--politics. Maybe that's the word you're looking for, and KBoards is no place for naked, aggressive politics--whether electoral or within the forum.


One person says, "Hey, let's all write in to Amazon to get them to do A"
Another person says, "Hey, that's not a good idea at all, and here's why. Let's all write in to amazon to get them to do B"

You think one argument is more valid, and deserves more daylight than the other, because it was presented first?

Being reductive and calling it "politics" is a meaningless label. This thread was posted to organize people to take a position, and write Amazon about it. Opposing viewpoints are allowed to exist, and be voiced, whether you agree with them or not. Organizing for a thing is no more valid than organizing against a thing.

_Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

ParkerAvrile said:


> Amen. I don't understand how trying to spoil other people's businesses is supposed to help my business. Right now, I'm focused on writing my own material, but if I was serious about earning big money, I would be looking around aggressively for good ghostwriters, artists, FB/social media people, etc. And I don't want to have that option taken away, if I ever do decide to expand beyond my own work. Even though I'm not a KU author, Amazon has made it clear to me that they reward frequent publication.
> 
> I should add that I have not read these books, they're not in my niche. If Crystal is correct that they're using poor quality/stolen work, that's another matter. That should be handled by Amazon enforcing their rules on copyright and quality control. Not by telling other authors they can't publish long works if they'd like to get paid.


Right on. I hear you. I think that even the very best writers w/ established brands & following could only stand to make even more money by hiring ppl to help them produce those works or other works faster. It's why I likened this to business strategies used by James Patterson & big publishing houses etc. And it's why I've printed out a crab bucket mentality. I know writers who still write & edit & have also started new lines w/ ghostwriters or have ghostwriters help them write their series. They are making more money now than they were on their own. There are also writers who have started publishing companies & shifted into more of a publishing role than a writing role. I feel the message being sent by some here is 'how dare a writer or individual person try what a big publishing company does or expand & become businesses themselves. Let's stop them by limiting indies' rights to publish as frequently or as long or market too much etc.' That's why I say whoever wants to stay one person & a computer is free to stay that way & whoever wants to grow & publish more frequently w/ the help of other ppl is also free to do that. The arguments always seem to boil down to wanting to stop competition & I truly think that attitude is more harmful than helpful to one's own business. I think an attitude such as your own is much smarter.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Dpock said:


> Oh, I think that boat docked about eight pages back.


Yes, but I'm trying to understate the case, because generally when I state the case in plain language, my posts get modded or deleted.

(See below)


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

SeanHinn said:


> One person says, "Hey, let's all write in to Amazon to get them to do A"
> Another person says, "Hey, that's not a good idea at all, and here's why. Let's all write in to amazon to get them to do B"
> 
> You think one argument is more valid, and deserves more daylight than the other, because it was presented first?


Nope. You're not organizing alongside other authors and lobbying a third party. You're "organizing a counter-movement," your words. You're [not] discussing things and presenting a case for people to decide for yourself.

Your goal did not seem to be to present your own case or change minds--your goal seemed to be able to gather supporters and form a partisan group, "organizing a counter-movement."

_Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I've gone as long as 7 months between releases. Usually more like 3-4. It works pretty well, as the books are quite sticky. Plus I just find it much more interesting to write things that I'd call "romance-plus." (Can be suspense, mystery, family drama, even a reality show.) Very, very different market from things like baby for the bad boy. Circles don't really intersect. Provides some insulation from trends and shenanigans.


I have to say I'm very excited to be writing something with a more complicated plot. There's a book with a similar premise doing well right now, but not in my category, so it'll be interesting to see how my readers like it. It's quite a departure from what I usually give them, so I will have to see. It's good to know you have luck without churning because this one will definitely take some time.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

David VanDyke said:


> Nope. You're not organizing alongside other authors and lobbying a third party. You're "organizing a counter-movement," your words. You're [not] discussing things and presenting a case for people to decide for yourself.
> 
> Your goal did not seem to be to present your own case or change minds--your goal seemed to be able to gather supporters and form a partisan group, "organizing a counter-movement."
> 
> _Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


So, just so I get this right (I'm trying to learn, please be patient with me): Organizing for a thing, and gathering supporters for a movement (that harms innocent parties) is A-OK. Organizing against a thing, and gathering supporters against it (in defense of innocent parties) is [not]. Have I got that right?

We're not going to see eye to eye. Again, I wish you all the success in the world. I'd be grateful if you stop labeling me. Thanks much.

_Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

David and Sean, let's move on. I'll be making some edits.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

ParkerAvrile said:


> Amen. I don't understand how trying to spoil other people's businesses is supposed to help my business. Right now, I'm focused on writing my own material, but if I was serious about earning big money, I would be looking around aggressively for good ghostwriters, artists, FB/social media people, etc. And I don't want to have that option taken away, if I ever do decide to expand beyond my own work. Even though I'm not a KU author, Amazon has made it clear to me that they reward frequent publication.
> 
> I should add that I have not read these books, they're not in my niche. If Crystal is correct that they're using poor quality/stolen work, that's another matter. That should be handled by Amazon enforcing their rules on copyright and quality control. Not by telling other authors they can't publish long works if they'd like to get paid.


Lowering the cap will only hurt legitimate authors who publish books over 150-200k words. That's a vanishingly small percentage of authors.

It will hurt people who are making money because of a loophole on the system that is supposed to reward quality content (bonus books with or without various shenanigans).

That's all win IMO.


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## SeanHinn (Aug 5, 2016)

Crystal_ said:


> Lowering the cap will only hurt legitimate authors who publish books over 150-200k words. That's a vanishingly small percentage of authors.
> 
> It will hurt people who are making money because of a loophole on the system that is supposed to reward quality content (bonus books with or without various shenanigans).
> 
> That's all win IMO.


If you're right, that we're vanishing, there's a reason for that, and it certainly isn't because our work isn't popular. It's because of the exorbitant costs and effort associated with publishing large, complex works of fiction. Trads don't want to take the risk. The entire industry is moving towards a low-cost, mass-production model, and that is not a good thing for the value of the written word.

But we're not vanishing. In fact, our numbers are growing, and KU is a big part of the reason why. It's now, finally, becoming profitable for an author (who writes well) to produce long works. It's now becoming profitable for writers to produce serial works as well, and offer them in affordable collections - which is our _only_ competitive advantage against the trads.

One would think that, as a society, we've reached a place where it's finally becoming important to consider the minority when overarching decisions are made. Transgender individuals are finally being treated with a bit of humanity. Religious minorities are becoming more and more institutionally protected from hate. We have a long way to go, but we're moving in the right direction, because people of good conscience have banded together and said "no" to the idea that because a group is small, they are irrelevant.

I understand that it is frustrating to have lost your All Star bonuses. But you would not be in the running for All Star bonuses if you were not already making an excellent living as a writer. This proposal would make it harder for others to reach your level of success, and for MANY who write long works or publish serial collections who are finally now becoming able to write for a living, this proposal could prevent their art from ever seeing the light of day - because if one can't make a living at something, one can't continue doing it forever.

It is starting to seem like the "bookstuffer/scammer" argument is no more than a thinly-veiled attempt at a money grab. If that's not the case, then go after the predators in the business, and leave legitimate authors alone. As it's been stated before, many of us would become your staunch allies in such an endeavor. But as the argument stands, I would submit that it's not your place to decide how many authors are OK to put out of business so that you can increase your income.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

No matter how much writerlygal protests otherwise, no one in the circles I run in is against legitimate business practices. Legitimate sales, borrows and reads based on legitimate customer behavior? What's not to like? A. G. Riddle's books hung in the Top 100 for double-digit months. I had the pleasure of briefly working with him. Did anyone ever cry foul about his books or methods of advertising? Did romance or SF writers point jealous fingers his way? Of course not. Good writing and good premise coupled with smart, _legitimate_ marketing: THAT was capitalism in action.

Practitioners have told us no author who stuffs have had action taken against them. That's wrong. Books and catalogs have been removed, not just from Select, but from KDP. There have been wholesale sweeps of these catalogs in periodic purges.

They claim that certain groups of books are making it into the Top 100 purely on the back of readers' delight. And that no proof exists otherwise. They ignore the folk here who know first-hand who've point out the several tactics being used that are violations -- not just of Amazon TOS but of copyright, the CAN-SPAM Act, and myriad others. Yet just because they refuse to acknowledge that there's proof doesn't mean it doesn't exist.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

P.J. Post said:


> All of these threads about KU lately have been dishearteningly disappointing.


Yup. I was thinking the same exact thing. But I've also gotta say, P.J. Post, that some of your warm and wonderful posts have been a really bright spot in what has been a mostly depressing conversation. So THANKS for that!!!


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

In the end, it comes down to readers. If readers complain about stuffed books and terrible books that are being read by bots, then Amazon will do something about it. If readers complain about the quality of titles in KU suffering because too many good authors are leaving KU, then Amazon will do something about it. If it's just a small group of self-published authors complaining on Kboards, Amazon might consider keeping an eye on things, and obviously there has been some of this, but in the end, it's about the customer. That's the way businesses operate these days.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Well, I am sorry if some romance writers feel they are not being supported.  I just don't think it will fix the problem. It has nothing to do with not supporting anyone or another genre. 

There was advice given to epic fantasy writers to chop up their books. In some cases, it might make sense and some cases it wouldn't

If I was a romance writer I would do everything I could to write books that the cheaters cannot easily replicate through hiring ghostwriters or taking shortcuts.  UsedToPostHere's article on her website is excellent. 

If the cap gets lowered, I don't think it would eradicate all the unsavory people who want to cheat the system, and if does this particular group, the 100 KENPC work around group will be forming shortly.  Romance is the most likely genre to be targeted by those who want to take shortcuts or take advantage of loopholes, and that will always be the case because it is the most profitable genre.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

JulesWright said:


> Well, I am sorry if some romance writers feel they are not being supported. I just don't think it will fix the problem. It has nothing to do with not supporting anyone or another genre.


I don't think it has so much to do with not being supported (not a romance writer BTW), as it does the tone struck by some of the folks in this thread and others (not you, BTW). I disagree with your point - I think a page cap would solve many of the issues by greatly reducing the incentive for bad/questionable behavior and because Amazon's Top 100 algos are not friendly toward splitting an ad spend between three titles at once instead of one. These will make that strategy far less profitable.

Regardless of what we think, of course, everyone can respectfully discuss the issue (as you and others have done) - indeed, there have been some comments in this thread that have made me consider the various angles, which I have demonstrated in my earlier posts. But when I see folks accuse others who merely propose opposing viewpoints (this is just an idea thread, not even a formal proposal!) of being immoral, selfish, greedy, jealous of others' success, trying to get one up on the backs of other authors, or making false equivalencies to the historical persecution of minority groups (which this would not be; it is an impartial rule aimed at making the system sustainable), it leaves a distasteful flavor in one's mouth. Particularly to neutral parties, such as myself, willing to make sacrifices (e.g. giving up box sets) for the overall health of the KU ecosystem.

Now, it's almost certain we were wasting our time to begin with - since Amazon cares far less about authors than customers - but it seemed worth a shot. After this thread, and others, however, it seems the best move - for my sanity, at least - is to let the chips fall where they may and get back to writing. And that, I think is unfortunate, because if the early rumblings are any indication, way more authors are going to get caught in that particular net. But there is no other alternative at this point. Although, perhaps there never was.

Nick


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

I personally have seen accusations flying from both sides of the aisle.

I will have to respectfully disagree, but I do have great respect for you and all of the helpful posts that you share. I am new posting here but have lurked for a while.

I would be happy to be wrong and for the problem to be solved. I do think the workaround group would form and that everyone should be aware that as long as ebook publishing and KU, in particular, are profitable that there will be those looking to take advantage of the system, and that romance especially will always be the most likely target. That doesn't mean things shouldn't be done to try to solve it, but it is the environment we are working in.

I guess I also do want room for publishing longer works too, because it is something that matters to me, and not just have KU be shorter works, but that is just a personal preference. I do write epic fantasy, but don't have anything projected to go over the proposed new limit. I do tend to like longer, involved books. But if it needed to be cut for the sake of KU's viability then I could see where sacrifices should be made. I'm just not convinced of it.

Thank you again for all your helpful posts, and yes best to just get back to writing!



Nicholas Erik said:


> I don't think it has so much to do with not being supported (not a romance writer BTW), as it does the tone struck by some of the folks in this thread and others (not you, BTW). I disagree with your point - I think a page cap would solve many of the issues by greatly reducing the incentive for bad/questionable behavior and because Amazon's Top 100 algos are not friendly toward splitting an ad spend between three titles at once instead of one. These will make that strategy far less profitable.
> 
> Regardless of what we think, of course, everyone can respectfully discuss the issue (as you and others have done) - indeed, there have been some comments in this thread that have made me consider the various angles, which I have demonstrated in my earlier posts. But when I see folks accuse others who merely propose opposing viewpoints (this is just an idea thread, not even a formal proposal!) of being immoral, selfish, greedy, jealous of others' success, trying to get one up on the backs of other authors, or making false equivalencies to the historical persecution of minority groups (which this would not be; it is an impartial rule aimed at making the system sustainable), it leaves a distasteful flavor in one's mouth. Particularly to neutral parties, such as myself, willing to make sacrifices (e.g. giving up box sets) for the overall health of the KU ecosystem.
> 
> ...


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

If they did lower the cap to 1000 KENP and I had a book longer than that, I suppose it wouldn't be the hardest thing to find a workaround.

I'd just have different titles published. I would sell the full book but keep it out of KU, and then I would have to offer it in parts in KU. I guess it would be kind of the opposite of doing a box set. In this scenario, you'd pretty much eliminate box sets. It's funny. I always thought you couldn't put box sets in KU if the individual books were already in it, but apparently you can.

I don't know if it would ever effect me, though. My longest book is 860 KENP. I'll probably hit a little higher than that for the final book of my World in Chains series, but it still shouldn't hit 1000.

Most of my other stuff falls more in the 500 to 600 range as far as KENP goes.

Maybe I'm actually coming around to the idea.


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

How would people feel about a cap of 1500? Cutting it in half instead?

That way, you can still write books up to about 300,000 words, and I don't see myself ever exceeding that word count (I'm no Brandon Sanderson or Robert Jordan in that regard).


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## KelliWolfe (Oct 14, 2014)

NOTHING that we can propose is going to fix KU. *It isn't fixable.* As long as it is possible to generate more money from a KU subscription than the subscription itself costs, the system is going to be perpetually scammed. That's simple math, and the scammers are quite aware of it. KU as it stands is a slot machine that always pays out. It's free money. That's tremendous incentive to every scumbag scammer on the planet, and the black hat forums are all over it. And they can adapt one hell of a lot faster than Amazon can shut them down with their day late and a dollar short responses.

Amazon doesn't care because it isn't about making a profit. It's purely about getting people through the front door so they'll buy more stuff while they're in the store. KENPC has already been capped once, and it did nothing. Cutting it back a little more is pointless. The scammers will just find other ways to game the system because the system is set up to be gamed. There are dozens of scamming systems going on, most of them automated with turnkey systems that the black hats are buying on private forums for a couple of hundred bucks. As always, the only ones who really get hurt by all the attempts to "fix" KU are the legitimate authors. The scammers just move on to something else.


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## JWright (Apr 10, 2018)

Yes, I agree Kelli.  I have been an internet marketer myself.  Not a black hat one, but I am aware of them and some of their forums and the software they sell.    They can easily adjust.  And even those who are using a lot of advertising can too.


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

KelliWolfe said:


> NOTHING that we can propose is going to fix KU. *It isn't fixable.* As long as it is possible to generate more money from a KU subscription than the subscription itself costs, the system is going to be perpetually scammed. That's simple math, and the scammers are quite aware of it. KU as it stands is a slot machine that always pays out. It's free money. That's tremendous incentive to every scumbag scammer on the planet, and the black hat forums are all over it. And they can adapt one hell of a lot faster than Amazon can shut them down with their day late and a dollar short responses.
> 
> Amazon doesn't care because it isn't about making a profit. It's purely about getting people through the front door so they'll buy more stuff while they're in the store. KENPC has already been capped once, and it did nothing. Cutting it back a little more is pointless. The scammers will just find other ways to game the system because the system is set up to be gamed. There are dozens of scamming systems going on, most of them automated with turnkey systems that the black hats are buying on private forums for a couple of hundred bucks.


I can see the reason in this point. Above all, KU is a funnel meant to get customers into the overall Amazon ecosystem. It's a loss leader. As long as the quality of KU titles keeps readers coming, Amazon won't do anything to address the underlying issue.

And despite its issues, I still think it's good for those of us just getting started. Readers can download a book with no reviews or mixed reviews, and there's no financial setback for them. They may just read a few pages before deciding it's not for them, but I still get paid for those pages.


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

Edward M. Grant said:


> It was much easier for a new writer to make money before KU. Whether that's because of KU or because of the ever-increasing number of books is another question.


Yeah, I have heard that it's much harder to break into the business these days. The early movers had the advantage of getting their stuff out there in a market that wasn't saturated. Now, you pretty much can't find a genre that doesn't already have hundreds (or even thousands) of quality self-published books to compete with.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

kw3000 said:


> In my opinion, making KU into a place where readers come to expect generally longer, deeper offerings across the board is a step in that less-game-able direction. If we do that as a community I think we could reshape the store and maybe even indie publishing in general.


It wont work.

Because too many authors jump at the chance of adding their book into a 99c 20+ authors megabook.

They already changed the way KU readers read. And in the wrong direction, imo.

As a 'collective author', we already shot our foot off. You're going to have to rebuild the foot, before you can change things back the other way.

Edit: Oh..... Maybe this is where some of the opposition is coming from? If you reduce to 1000, 2/3 of the KU income from a 99c 20+ authors book, suddenly vanishes, and all hope of getting serious rank goes with it. Food for thought.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

More than one kind of audience in KU, in whatever genre. "Readers" aren't one monolithic segment. You seem to be doing all right in KU, so I don't know quite where the gloom is coming from.

Joining a boxed set or having periodic sales or free books are all perfectly compatible with having the bulk of your stuff priced high and aiming at a long-book market, in KU or out of it. Readers have all sorts of ways to discover new authors. I've found most of my readership through free books. Price promos have always been my most effective and cheapest way of acquiring new readers.

KU readers from what I've seen aren't all that different from other voracious Amazon readers in my genre. I've had about the same results pre- and post-KU on Amazon, although it's definitely more competitive now for a number of reasons, including the Mastermind folks.

P.S. You can't put multi-author sets into KU anymore, with a 3000 KENPC cap or any other. Not allowed.



TimothyEllis said:


> It wont work.
> 
> Because too many authors jump at the chance of adding their book into a 99c 20+ authors megabook.
> 
> ...


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## caitlynlynch (Oct 21, 2016)

Usedtoposthere said:


> P.S. You can't put multi-author sets into KU anymore, with a 3000 KENPC cap or any other. Not allowed.


You most definitely can. I have books in several at the moment which are perfectly legit. The books just can't be published individually as ebooks, unless they are all under the same publishing account, while the set is in KU.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

caitlynlynch said:


> You most definitely can. I have books in several at the moment which are perfectly legit. The books just can't be published individually as ebooks, unless they are all under the same publishing account, while the set is in KU.


I stand corrected. And I do not see that multi-author sets per se are any sort of threat, any more so than free book promos or any other legit promotional method. We all have to get visibility somehow.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

kw3000 said:


> Many authors see the content-mill/internet marketers as a dragon in need of slaying and I think Usedtoposthere's hit upon how to do just that above, i.e. writing long, satisfying novels (in her case, in Romance, but I believe this applies to all genres). Usedto: I love your approach. You're playing a different game, and I think it's helping all of us.
> 
> Following her lead, I think focusing on producing longer, more complex, more involving works across all genres could be a great way to change customer expectations and drive demand in the opposite direction away from the mass-produced stuff. There are enough of us in KU to bring this about much more so than is already being done.
> 
> ...


I don't think it really works like that. UsedTo's books are much more the "Book Bub contemporary romance" type wheras the masterminds are "Book Bub New Adult." If you write the latter, you're screwed no matter what, because the genre has been flooded with mediocre content and they typical genre signals (hot shirtless guy with bold font) make it hard for readers to differentiate between quality content and mediocre content.

I'm actively trying to change my branding because of this and it's been a huge headache. Cover designers are really confused. They keep trying to steer me back to what's all over the NA charts. If I step too far from that, I'm going to give readers the wrong impression of my books.

Everybody has issues like this sometimes--genres get flooded, we have to change course. But you can't say the solution is to write longer, more evergreen books. Plenty of NA authors already do that (well, mine are more like 80-100k, not 100-150k, but that's still pretty long) and we're still suffering from the loss of visibility. It's hard to compete with .99 titles when you're not charging .99, no matter how good your quality is.


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## rcullison (Apr 12, 2018)

I can't support a change in the cap because the arguments for it are not compelling. I don't think lowering the cap to 1000 will work.

It would only inconvenience the botters while they tweak their systems, but it would knowingly hurt innocent writers, which I consider unethical.

Some questions for thought:

If 1000 would supposedly fix the problem, why not 1500? If people are willing to hurt a small percentage of writers, why not an even smaller percentage?

There are plenty of mentions in this thread that lots of stuffed books are already under 1000, but I haven't seen anyone address this or attempt to refute it. If this is true, then lowering the cap to 1000 wouldn't even tickle those books.

Band-aid solutions will not work. The real problem is Amazon and its unwillingness to expend resources to solve problems. They COULD solve this problem by hiring someone to specifically target the biggest botters (and start working their way down the list), but history tells us they prefer to wait until the ship is sinking before they act. The way things are going, I think the best we can realistically hope for is for things to get so bad that they are forced to act.


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## rcullison (Apr 12, 2018)

> If we collectively offer an entirely different product


My book is 251k words (1233 kenpc) so whether I meant to or not, I'm in your boat on this river.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

kw3000 said:


> If the masterminds are in a seemingly impenetrable castle, you have to starve them out. If we collectively offer an entirely different product than what they're putting out, maybe we can turn enough readers' heads to create our own market that slowly drowns the other one out.


I'm not sure that would work. Readers do want sexy romance. I think they generally want good sexy romance but there is a contingent of readers who are more concerned with sexiness and less concerned with quality. There's a perception that it's easy to sell sexy, so people flock to romance thinking it's an easy buck.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

kw3000 said:


> Well, that's kinda sad.


Lots of readers DO care, though. That's why Crystal and I both make good money writing sexy books that sell for more than 99 cents and have a shelf life longer than a month. 

What's the alternative, giving up and leaving them the field? No. Ever forward.


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