# Amazon's fake book problem



## ilamont (Jul 14, 2012)

I might have missed this if it was on KBoards earlier, but I think it's worth posting here as some of us have seen some of the tactics described in the article:

*Amazon Has A Fake Book Problem*

Excerpt:



> For over fifteen months now, scammers have been raiding the Kindle Unlimited pot using a well-worn trick. They usually pilfer the content first of all - often by stealing an author's original work and running it through a synonymizer - and then upload it to Amazon, thus avoiding the automatic plagiarism detectors. They make sure the "book" is as long as possible, but as they are enrolling the title in Kindle Unlimited, they keep it under the program's limit of 3,000 pages.
> 
> These thieves make the book free for a few days, and then use a variety of banned methods to generate a huge and immediate surge in downloads - generally suspected to be bots or clickfarms or dummy accounts, or some combination thereof. These fake books then suddenly jump into the Top 20 of the free charts, displacing authors who have gone to considerable effort to put together an advertising campaign for their work.
> 
> As the Amazon staff tasked with dealing with reports of suspicious activity don't seem to work weekends, when authors and readers report these fake books to Amazon, no action usually gets taken until the following Monday. By then it's often too late, and these titles have returned to the paid listings, and the subsequent boost in page reads (which normally follows a free run), enables them to grab a huge chunk of the Kindle Unlimited pot - the same shared pot that all authors get paid from.


(there is a lot more at the source post, including how this trend affects certain BookBub campaigns)

I assumed ... perhaps wrongly ... that Amazon support does have staff working weekends. But maybe not for this type of issue.


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## 39416 (Mar 18, 2011)

I've always heard because there is such a long lag time between racking up the page reads and actually getting paid, the scammers who do this often get nothing but a nasty email from Amazon when payday rolls around.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

I often search through the top listings in my erotica genre - all subs.

80% of the "books" are collections that have nothing to do with the niche. Most of the rest are suspiciously absent any reviews and have blurbs that sound like they were strangled from an asphyxiated chimpanzee.

In other words, almost the entirety of the top listings don't add up.

This is a direct result of Kindle Unlimited's function within the algorithms.

I know a ton of Kboarders will disagree with me, but I see what I see and I stand by it.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

ilamont said:


> I assumed ... perhaps wrongly ... that Amazon support does have staff working weekends. But maybe not for this type of issue.


I mean...there's gonna be spam books in there when they clock out on Friday night and there's still gonna be spam books in there when they clock in Monday morning. Working nights and weekends won't change that. Not at their current pace.



Laran Mithras said:


> This is a direct result of Kindle Unlimited's function within the algorithms.
> 
> I know a ton of Kboarders will disagree with me, but I see what I see and I stand by it.


I don't disagree that spam exists. I just don't care. Like Lorain said, just because you're seeing scamphlets, and just because they're getting botted up the charts doesn't mean that the bad guys are getting their piece of the KU pie in the end.

Either way, honest writers are still earning great money and visibility in KU, and that's the bottom line. Ask whether KU is a good fit for your catalog. Don't get bogged down in whether or not it's _fair_. Business doesn't work like that. Last thing you need is to drive yourself nuts worrying about a problem you can't fix, or to make a poor business decision based on emotion and cognitive bias.


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## nikkykaye (Sep 24, 2016)

My impression is that what bothers authors is the fact that these scam books are using click farms to boost their ranking, thereby making it harder for the "real" books to gain visibility. Someone correct me if I'm wrong?


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

nikkykaye said:


> My impression is that what bothers authors is the fact that these scam books are using click farms to boost their ranking, thereby making it harder for the "real" books to gain visibility. Someone correct me if I'm wrong?


That's a part of it too, but the KU royalties are typically what I hear emphasized. I don't think either one is a significant or actionable concern (at least not for us).


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Dolphin said:


> That's a part of it too, but the KU royalties are typically what I hear emphasized. I don't think either one is a significant or actionable concern (at least not for us).


It seems to me we don't really know. Maybe Amazon takes the uncaught scammers into account and raises the KU pot sufficient to keep page-read payments where there'd be if the scammers weren't there. Or maybe they catch almost all of them before payouts. Or maybe neither of these things is happening. Back when Phoenix first wrote about this issue, I saw at least one scammer account with a KU All-Star tag, so at that time, payouts were happening, and big ones at that.

The visibility effects are real. If there are four botted books in the Top 100 free, that means four legit books are being denied the visibility they would've had without the scamming -- a real bummer if you happen to be one of those four.

I'm sure KU is, overall, a very good deal. But I think many of us find it galling for a company with such huge resources to ignore so obvious a problem for so long.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

Silly me for caring. 

I run a ton of free books, and yes, I see this as a significant issue on the free side (beyond just on weekends, though, and I happen to be someone who emphasizes the visibility factor). I also see books routinely botted up into the Top 10 on the paid side -- in fact, two in succession within the past few days. Yes, that's the TOP 10 OVERALL PAID. Are these folk not only stealing visibility but getting their KU dollars and All-Star bonuses? You bet. At least the ones that have been doing this for 3 months plus are. And there are certainly some bad actors I've personally seen still botting along happily after 1.5 years. Is it an actionable concern? Depends on what your definition of actionable is. But yeah, I action within the things I can actionate about.

I can also multitask. I can fully utilize KU (I manage 90 books that are KU right now, and I always see several of our freebies each month rubbing shoulders with the scambooks) *and* I can advocate against the scammers *and* still find time to write and market. How I choose to allocate the time devoted to each activity, however, is totally my prerogative, thank you very much. 

Just because our catalog makes decent money in KU doesn't mean I have to -- or should -- muzzle my ethics and not speak out. Is it a losing fight? Probably. But so is homing homeless dogs and feeding starving children. Does that mean I should turn a blind eye to all of it and not reach out to home and feed the ones that cross my path? 

The other big factor is that these aren't all scamphlets enjoying the ride up via the botmobile. Authors who started out semi-legit are finding how much easier it is to bot their way to the top. Last week, a botted book with 2500 reviews hit #3 on the Free list. A book Amazon has been promoting everywhere for months. The same book that back in September was one of the titles that would go free at 2am and be #1 on the overall list by 8am. I screenshot the Top 9 last week and asked a few savvy folk to tell me which was the scambook among them. Every single person got it wrong.

The main problem is no longer with the easy-to-spot scambooks that most folk will simply pass over. It's that these black-hat authors/publishers have been visibly getting away with it for so long that gray-hatting authors easily tempted have been going darkside in astonishing numbers. Soon, the only way to compete will be to join them.


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## AllyWho (May 16, 2015)

PhoenixS said:


> The main problem is no longer with the easy-to-spot scambooks that most folk will simply pass over. It's that these black-hat authors/publishers have been visibly getting away with it for so long that gray-hatting authors easily tempted have been going darkside in astonishing numbers. Soon, the only way to compete will be to join them.


This is what is making me sad. I'm seeing it already in a number of other groups I'm in. Authors saying, "well X, Y and Z are doing it, so it must be ok." 
We've seen it here on the k-boards. Boxed sets promoted as legit, cause it must be ok to engage in a giant buy circle or gift thousands of copies if it means you get those letters to add to your covers.
It's totally ok to throw money at marketers who use incentivised secret groups, where people download your KU title to boost rank even though we all know they'll never read it and only clicked the link to go in the draw to win a prize.
It's fine to spend a couple of grand to pay people to buy your book to boost its ranking.
It's totally legit to pay a click farm 2k/month to borrow and click to the end of your book so you can storm the charts, collect All Star bonuses and boast how you're a bestseller.

As a small author who doesn't think any of that stuff is even remotely ok, it's a concern to see the number of authors flocking to black hat techniques because of the belief, "it's the only way to get visibility."

It makes me wonder what happened to focusing on legitimate readers in the lolly scramble for letters, bestseller status, All Star bonuses and bragging rights about ranks?


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

Laran Mithras said:


> I often search through the top listings in my erotica genre - all subs.
> 
> 80% of the "books" are collections that have nothing to do with the niche. Most of the rest are suspiciously absent any reviews and have blurbs that sound like they were strangled from an asphyxiated chimpanzee.
> 
> ...


To you and the original poster: You mean this is only happening to authors enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, and not to those publishing out of it? Important to me, because at the moment I don't have a single book in KU.

Thanks.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

There was a recent thread where someone who looked an awful lot like one of those opportunistic grey hats got called out, deleted her KBoards account, and headed for the hills. She was a top Author Rank name at the time, and wondered why some of her books were disappearing from her KDP dash. Now none of her books even have a Sales Rank. Both her pen names were affected.

I suspect most of the people who're lured by these exploits will wind up getting what they deserve--especially the ones who're doing it in public. May not happen as quick as we'd like, but Amazon's not idle.


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## AllyWho (May 16, 2015)

Dolphin said:


> There was a recent thread where someone who looked an awful lot like one of those opportunistic grey hats got called out, deleted her KBoards account, and headed for the hills. She was a top Author Rank name at the time, and wondered why some of her books were disappearing from her KDP dash. Now none of her books even have a Sales Rank. Both her pen names were affected.


It's happening more often. There was another one just a day or two ago, new user turned up to complain that Amazon had removed his books from the paid ranks. Book was top 100 paid, author getting All Star bonuses and... only took a quick sniff to see he was paying a click farm to download and flick to the end. While it was a genuine book, let's just say it wasn't top 100/All Star bonus material. Interesting thing was he admitted that *everyone *in his FB group was paying the same "marketer" 2k/month so they too could receive All Star bonuses. When we started asking questions he got huffy and left. It seems people using scam/black hat services don't like it when others point out they are using scam/black hat services!

I'm hoping Amazon starts banning accounts.


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

AliceW said:


> It's happening more often. There was another one just a day or two ago, new user turned up to complain that Amazon had removed his books from the paid ranks. Book was top 100 paid, author getting All Star bonuses and... only took a quick sniff to see he was paying a click farm to download and flick to the end. While it was a genuine book, let's just say it wasn't top 100/All Star bonus material. Interesting thing was he admitted that *everyone *in his FB group was paying the same "marketer" 2k/month so they too could receive All Star bonuses. When we started asking questions he got huffy and left. It seems people using scam/black hat services don't like it when others point out they are using scam/black hat services!
> 
> I'm hoping Amazon starts banning accounts.


Is seemed to me that that poster honestly didn't realize his advertising dollars were going to a click scam. I mean, otherwise he wouldn't post here, would he (or she)? That seems to be a twist, where relatively new authors are unawares that the service they've employed are using tactics that could get their account banned. A cautionary tale for everyone that the services they use should be carefully vetted.


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## AllyWho (May 16, 2015)

AlecHutson said:


> Is seemed to me that that poster honestly didn't realize his advertising dollars were going to a click scam. I mean, otherwise he wouldn't post here, would he (or she)?


I disagree. There have been a few posting here over the last few months, sometimes just to poke k-boarders but most of the time it's bait to see who will pm for more details. The person *absolutely* knew he was paying for a dodgy service, had been warned by Amazon previously about it, and chose to continue his course of action. There are numerous examples where authors are willfully blind because the results justify the means. I have zero sympathy if his account is banned.


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## Gentleman Zombie (May 30, 2011)

PhoenixS said:


> The other big factor is that these aren't all scamphlets enjoying the ride up via the botmobile. Authors who started out semi-legit are finding how much easier it is to bot their way to the top. Last week, a botted book with 2500 reviews hit #3 on the Free list. A book Amazon has been promoting everywhere for months. The same book that back in September was one of the titles that would go free at 2am and be #1 on the overall list by 8am. I screenshot the Top 9 last week and asked a few savvy folk to tell me which was the scambook among them. Every single person got it wrong.
> 
> The main problem is no longer with the easy-to-spot scambooks that most folk will simply pass over. It's that these black-hat authors/publishers have been visibly getting away with it for so long that gray-hatting authors easily tempted have been going darkside in astonishing numbers. Soon, the only way to compete will be to join them.


All of this is true. It's really bad in romance and erotica. And less so in other genres. Indie publishing is moving from a merit system to 'buy in' system. Throw enough cash and engage in a few gray hat tactics -- and you too can buy yourself a best seller. That's something we all should care about. It's not sustainable and like any bubble (remember the mortgage lending crisis?) its going to implode if something isn't done. I know of writers who are busting their asses churning out a book (or more) every month. Just because they don't want to lose visibility under a tsunami of gray-hat new releases. That should worry all of us, whether we are hobbyists, 100k authors, or book lovers!


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

AliceW said:


> I disagree. There have been a few posting here over the last few months, sometimes just to poke k-boarders but most of the time it's bait to see who will pm for more details. The person *absolutely* knew he was paying for a dodgy service, had been warned by Amazon previously about it, and chose to continue his course of action. There are numerous examples where authors are willfully blind because the results justify the means. I have zero sympathy if his account is banned.


I read his tone differently, then. Also I checked out his Amazon profile at the time and glanced at some of his blog posts (which were pretty frequent), and he seemed genuinely excited about the activity his book was getting. There were even musings if his sudden popularity and high Amazon rank would entice an offer from traditional publishing or Hollywood. I don't believe a scammer would bother making up fake blog posts that showed his excitement over the amount of books he was moving. But maybe I'm just a more trusting (read: naive) person.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

AliceW said:


> I disagree. There have been a few posting here over the last few months, sometimes just to poke k-boarders but most of the time it's bait to see who will pm for more details. The person *absolutely* knew he was paying for a dodgy service, had been warned by Amazon previously about it, and chose to continue his course of action. There are numerous examples where authors are willfully blind because the results justify the means. I have zero sympathy if his account is banned.


And the female mentioned had previously set herself up as some sort of forum 'expert' on kdp forums, despite having very few posts and just repeating the general consensus.


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## thesmallprint (May 25, 2012)

Amazon must be the only company whose PR approach to these problems is 'no comment'. If Amazon told us what effect this was having and what they were doing to combat it we could make decisions based on reliable information. But, as far as KDP goes, we have to guess at how to run our businesses. Amazon have been pursuing this line for so long we simply swallow 'no comment' and keep doing what we're doing. They've effectively brainwashed us.

The only thing any business understands, even one the size of Amazon, is the effect on bottom line/customer satisfaction.  If all genuine authors withdrew from KDP, this scamming business would be fixed in a week.

Indie publishing is sorely in need of a global Society of Authors.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

> As a small author who doesn't think any of that stuff is even remotely ok, it's a concern to see the number of authors flocking to black hat techniques because of the belief, "it's the only way to get visibility."


Sometimes I feel like I'm bashing my head against the wall, trying to tell good stories and find readers. I want to make money from my writing, but doing business the way some do it is not me. I just can't. And so I'm watching people with crap get bonuses and making money hand over fist while I struggle. I'm not alone, but that doesn't make me feel better.

One thing I think Amazon should do is stop the All Star Bonuses. Books enrolled in Select should have a trained human eye on them. Something any one with any old pile of crap can join isn't really select, is it? If they did just those two things, I think we'd seen a huge reduction in the scamming. They don't have to check every book uploaded, just the ones going into Select. Heck, even announcing this was going to happen would probably eliminate most of the bad stuff.

Amazon isn't innocent in all of this. I think they know darn well what's happening, and could fix it, but until it costs them good will (the confidence of a customer in a business's practices) or a boatload of money, nothing will be done.


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

she-la-ti-da said:


> One thing I think Amazon should do is stop the All Star Bonuses.


I can't see the point of the All Star bonus. If a book is selling well and earning loads of money how will the writer be able to increase their sales even more? The bonus is almost an incentive to do something underhand to increase sales .


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## Germanikus (Nov 14, 2016)

ilamont said:


> I assumed ... perhaps wrongly ... that Amazon support does have staff working weekends. But maybe not for this type of issue.


Which shouldn't be the big problem here. As Amazon pays out 60 days later. Just some readers who get a bad book. But if the scammers are doing this anyway, Amazon seems to need a lot of time to find them.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

she-la-ti-da said:


> Sometimes I feel like I'm bashing my head against the wall, trying to tell good stories and find readers. I want to make money from my writing, but doing business the way some do it is not me. I just can't. And so I'm watching people with crap get bonuses and making money hand over fist while I struggle. I'm not alone, but that doesn't make me feel better.
> 
> One thing I think Amazon should do is stop the All Star Bonuses. Books enrolled in Select should have a trained human eye on them. Something any one with any old pile of crap can join isn't really select, is it? If they did just those two things, I think we'd seen a huge reduction in the scamming. They don't have to check every book uploaded, just the ones going into Select. Heck, even announcing this was going to happen would probably eliminate most of the bad stuff.
> 
> Amazon isn't innocent in all of this. I think they know darn well what's happening, and could fix it, but until it costs them good will (the confidence of a customer in a business's practices) or a boatload of money, nothing will be done.


I do so agree with this. When they introduced the all star bonus my first thought was that books with that many page reads are making enough money; they don't need more. It would be much fairer to spread that money around and perhaps increase the page read amount.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Since KU is a zero-sum game, every dollar to those gaming the system is a dollar out of my pocket. .0045 instead of .005 is significant. But even if you're not in KU, the loss of visibility, the interference in searches, the bad taste left for anyone who buys a scam book hurts all legitimate authors. Amazon has a problem with counterfeit goods in areas other than books. They just don't pay enough attention to those, like us, who market our goods through their platform. It will bite them eventually, and more from bad publicity.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Doglover said:


> I do so agree with this. When they introduced the all star bonus my first thought was that books with that many page reads are making enough money; they don't need more. It would be much fairer to spread that money around and perhaps increase the page read amount.


Let's call the bonuses what they really are, a bribe to top sellers to stay exclusive.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Dolphin said:


> She was a top Author Rank name at the time, and wondered why some of her books were disappearing from her KDP dash. Now none of her books even have a Sales Rank. Both her pen names were affected.


The sales ranks may have gone, but those books are still there and still in KU.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

brkingsolver said:


> Let's call the bonuses what they really are, a bribe to top sellers to stay exclusive.


Yep. Not that I'm immune to that sort of bribery! Seriously, it is a daft idea, especially as it is a scam waiting to happen. And I'm not just saying that because I don't sell enough to get there.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

brkingsolver said:


> Let's call the bonuses what they really are, a bribe to top sellers to stay exclusive.


Sticking with a lucrative business partner isn't corrupt. It's rational. There's no such thing as a "bribe" outside of the context of corruption.



PaulineMRoss said:


> The sales ranks may have gone, but those books are still there and still in KU.


They are indeed, and I wonder how that's working. We don't know whether she's earning anything off of them, and she may not know either for another month or two. I don't see why Amazon would've gone out of their way to pull her books from her dash and pull her ranks, only to turn around and pay her anyway. We know they'll take steps like halting payments and canceling accounts.


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Richardcrasta said:


> To you and the original poster: You mean this is only happening to authors enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, and not to those publishing out of it? Important to me, because at the moment I don't have a single book in KU.
> 
> Thanks.


It's happening to everyone. KU is a huge boost to visibility. It simply can't be denied. And that boost helps/hurts those within and without KU as rankings consider both.

So even outside of KU, scammers inside are hurting those on the outside.

I'm not sure there's a single thing we can do about it. Being in KU is a boost. Being out garners nothing except the ability to go wide. In fact, I'd say being out of KU hurts the author seeking visibility. Other than "wide," being out is nothing more than a protest Amazon won't hear.

It's up to Amazon to fix KU's scamming problem. But so far they don't seem particularly caring.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

Laran Mithras said:


> It's up to Amazon to fix KU's scamming problem. But so far they don't seem particularly caring.


I would really like it if everybody could get a sense of how big the problem is, from Amazon's perspective. I certainly don't know. None of us properly know.

My suspicion is that they've actually marshaled considerable resources to deal with this stuff. I mean they must be spending millions upon millions annually just to combat the _real_ barbarians at the gates--the people who want your credit card info and your social security numbers or EIN/TINs. They are up against technical challenges and a volume of attacks that I literally cannot imagine.

That's another big part of my ambivalence about all of this: I suspect they're already doing all they can justify. They will never defeat this threat entirely, I assure you of that. You're going to have to annihilate humanity altogether if you want to stamp out internet scammers. Might make a good motivation for your next genocidal villain.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

Don't tell me that Amazon are doing all they can, because they're not even remotely trying. In fact, they're doing as little as they can get away with. They will only do something (and do it haphazardly, without much of a systematic approach) when a lot of people complain. Because they're "all about customer satisfaction" and all that BS.

I wonder how much "customer satisfaction" they're going to get from the hands-off approach that they've touted for so long, from the total 100% lack of transparency in dealing with just about anything. We can't even get some sort of CEO to make a frigging *statement* about this to us. Or even acknowledge that it happens. Or heaven forbid, that they're doing something about it.

Customer complains? Oh yeah, the customers get their money back, because that seems to be Amazon's only solution to customer complaints. But you know what, that's a pretty shallow excuse for decent customer service, because as a business, your income is generated not only by your customers, but also by your suppliers. If the suppliers supply you with scams, the customers won't be happy. Word of mouth is extremely powerful and can, over time, destroy a company. Mostly, they're just too big to care. They need to employ people who communicate and who display that they care to protect their suppliers as well as their customers. 

For the customer, there comes a time that just refunding money is not good enough. Because if you buy something, get scammed and get your money back, you may stop complaining loudly on Facebook, but you sure as hell won't buy there again.

As for myself and my author business, I'm kinda surprised that no one has even mentioned working hard to be less dependent on KU payouts, because yano, it seems like the obvious solution for long-term income protection and stabilisation.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Dolphin said:


> Sticking with a lucrative business partner isn't corrupt. It's rational. There's no such thing as a "bribe" outside of the context of corruption.


Excuse me? What dictionary are you using? Bribes are certainly used in many instances where no corruption is involved.

From Webster:

Definition of bribe

1
: money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust police officers accused of taking bribes

2
: something that serves to induce or influence - offered the kid a bribe to finish his homework

While the first definition fits your constrained definition, the second does not. And even with the first, politicians the world over have declared that taking campaign contributions is not a corrupt practice.

Whether you call the KU bonus payments bribes, incentives, or inducements, they amount to the same thing. I didn't say it was wrong, or a poor business practice. Get off your high horse.


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## ivyquinn (Mar 23, 2017)

There are three types of scams at least:

1) Gibberish books
2) click farm purchase
3) cabals of marketers hiring ghosts to create romance books every 2-3 weeks

In the third type of scam, the marketeers are all using the same arc list of reviewers to guarantee 100s of five star reviews their first day of release and stringing the new book together with old books in one mega 1000-page file with incentive to "skip" TJ the end for bonus material like epilogue to first book to up page reads. They all even theme the same, using the last two months teal lettering on covers. But they are also flooding keywords and subcategories of romance (sports, psychological, holidays) where they can gain traction as top 100 authors. They're flooding out the romance by real authors with the omnibuses and "just click to the end" angle. 

So, really, Amazon has at least three levels of scammers who are ruining KU and visibility and earnings for real authors and they don't seem to care


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## H.C. (Jul 28, 2016)

Did they never take down "Smart man" or "boy and horse"?


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

I've been watching a book that's been top 10 of scifi now for about 5 months. Clearly a botted book. Horrible cover. Questionable writing skill. Never any new reviews (despite its visibility I don't think anyone was reading it because of its cover and topic).

Finally, the book seems to be gone.  It's nowhere in the top 100 anymore of either scifi or small sub cats. So looks like they finally got caught. I'm not sure it's even on amazon (it had a strange name that I can't remember, so I can't search for it).

There was also another book that was top 20 of scifi for about two months. It too seems to have been caught and has recently disappeared.

*Amazon eventually catches these people, but it takes a LONG time. 
*
We all know after the PR disaster Amazon had last year with the guy scamming $3M they went overkill and started banning a few honest authors.

So I think all this basically comes down to a threshold issue with the algo. If they turn the threshold up too much, they catch innocent people. They turn it down too much, scammers sneak through for a long time. So they constantly have to tweak and refine it trying to find that sweet spot where they nail the scammers, but not honest authors.

The problem, obviously, is the scammers turn around and try to confuse the algos. We've seen that recently with them botting legitimate authors, making the bot accounts that much harder to identify.

KU is a model begging to be scammed, and so it is. I don't see this ever changing. But the scammers *do* get caught eventually, it might just take months or years.


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## H.C. (Jul 28, 2016)

Seneca42 said:


> I've been watching a book that's been top 10 of scifi now for about 5 months. Clearly a botted book. Horrible cover. Questionable writing skill. Never any new reviews (despite its visibility I don't think anyone was reading it because of its cover and topic).
> 
> Finally, the book seems to be gone.  It's nowhere in the top 100 anymore of either scifi or small sub cats. So looks like they finally got caught. I'm not sure it's even on amazon (it had a strange name that I can't remember, so I can't search for it).
> 
> ...


Funny that they flag our books if it has the word "KU" but can't catch a book full of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" for a thousand pages. AFTER WE ALL report it for months!


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Seneca42 said:


> Clearly a botted book. Horrible cover. Questionable writing skill. Never any new reviews (despite its visibility I don't think anyone was reading it because of its cover and topic).


I see what you mean. You're talking about that George Orwell guy, right? Covers look like his kids drew them with crayons. Ya just can't ever tell what will sell.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

brkingsolver said:


> I see what you mean. You're talking about that George Orwell guy, right? Covers look like his kids drew them with crayons. Ya just can't ever tell what will sell.


Nope. One was a religious-themed book of some kind.

Interesting...i had forgotten the name, but did some digging and found the book. It's still on Amazon and in KU. But it has no rank now. Actually, all four books in the series no longer have a rank.

So who knows, maybe I'm wrong, maybe they didn't catch them but rather the book is experiencing a rank glitch.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

For those who think scammers aren't taking money out of our pockets, the May KU payout comes to $0.0043. I think that's the lowest ever.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

brkingsolver said:


> For those who think scammers aren't taking money out of our pockets, the May KU payout comes to $0.0043. I think that's the lowest ever.


It's the second lowest ever. It was $0.0041 in January 2016, just before Amazon started cleaning up some of the scammers.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Seneca42 said:


> Nope. One was a religious-themed book of some kind.
> 
> Interesting...i had forgotten the name, but did some digging and found the book. It's still on Amazon and in KU. But it has no rank now. Actually, all four books in the series no longer have a rank.
> 
> So who knows, maybe I'm wrong, maybe they didn't catch them but rather the book is experiencing a rank glitch.


It's not a glitch, Amazon has taken those books out of the ranking system. They've done this to a bunch of botted books. It cleans up the bestseller lists nicely, but those books are still live and still in KU and presumably still botting their way to a fortune every month.


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## Elizabeth Barone (May 6, 2013)

In my previous life, I was a web designer. My constant battle was creating organic SEO and competing with people using black hat methods. This was especially a problem with people using Google Ads, which was the best way to monetize your website or blog. People who got in early were making good money and were playing by the rules. People who came in later still made money but significantly less. Then there were the black hat marketers who raked in the cash.

Whenever there's a way to make money, there will always be people cheating. I'm not saying so to excuse the behavior; eventually, the field evens out. Google changed their algorithms and lots of honest people lost a huge chunk of monthly income. It leveled out the number of people who were cheating the system. Of course, people adapt. Google had to keep employing updates that almost always took out honest people along with those abusing the rules.

I don't think Amazon is impassive on this. There's a difficult balance between keeping out scammers and keeping honest people happy. Some more transparency would be nice, but think about it: Amazon has to keep their cards close because if everyone knows what they're doing, it'll be that much harder to weed out the scammers. Amazon is also a business; they're always going to put their best interests first. Only Amazon can decide what that means.

I know people hate hearing this, but it's just another reason to not keep all of our eggs in one basket. KU can be great, but like Google Ads, it's super competitive. Not only are you fighting for a piece of the pie, but you're also fighting people who don't play by the rules. For a long time, Google Ads was really the only way to make money. We're fortunate because that's not the case. There are other retailers. It does take time to gain momentum with them, but once you do, they're very good to you. (Just don't lose that momentum, because then you're a hamster on a wheel like me right now, sigh.)

Don't rely on just Amazon. Use KU strategically rather than dumping all of your eggs into that basket. Set up plenty of honeypots so that when Amazon updates their algorithms or more scammers pour in, you're not hit as hard. Think like a business; look ahead for the long game rather than the immediate moneymaker.

Amazon's gonna do what Amazon's gonna do. Scammers gonna scam. Don't play their game. Play _your_ game; do you and what's best for your business.


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## Gone To Croatan (Jun 24, 2011)

KU is a license to scam, because you can make an almost infinite amount of money by paying $9.99 a month for a bot to read your books.

I don't see how it can be fixed, because it's broken by design. Any change they make to restrict bots (e.g. you can only read $9.99's worth of books each month) will hurt legitimate customers.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Edward M. Grant said:


> KU is a license to scam, because you can make an almost infinite amount of money by paying $9.99 a month for a bot to read your books.


You're going to have to explain that one to me. I'm having a very difficult time figuring it out.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

PaulineMRoss said:


> It's not a glitch, Amazon has taken those books out of the ranking system. They've done this to a bunch of botted books. It cleans up the bestseller lists nicely, but those books are still live and still in KU and presumably still botting their way to a fortune every month.


I hadn't thought of it this way, but yeah, stripping the books of their rankings but leaving them on the site and in KU just makes the scamming invisible to us.



Edward M. Grant said:


> KU is a license to scam, because you can make an almost infinite amount of money by paying $9.99 a month for a bot to read your books.


I wonder if click-farms even pay the $9.99/month. The first month of membership is free, so maybe they just continually open new accounts.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Just to throw another wrench in the scam talk, there is another scam. This one doesn't promise page reads. It just promises a ranking jump. That way the authors aren't risking their accounts with money changing hands. The theory behind it is that, if the authors get the rankings jump, they will get organic sales because of the new visibility and those sales would be considered "legitimate." How well it's working, I don't know. I think some of these books (although clearly not all) are doing that scam. My guess is, Amazon is stripping rank until they can figure out who is doing what. We will have to watch and see.


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## KevinMcLaughlin (Nov 11, 2010)

brkingsolver said:


> Since KU is a zero-sum game, every dollar to those gaming the system is a dollar out of my pocket. .0045 instead of .005 is significant. But even if you're not in KU, the loss of visibility, the interference in searches, the bad taste left for anyone who buys a scam book hurts all legitimate authors. Amazon has a problem with counterfeit goods in areas other than books. They just don't pay enough attention to those, like us, who market our goods through their platform. It will bite them eventually, and more from bad publicity.


I completely agree that this sort of thing is a major problem - mostly because it negatively impacts visibility.

But it's important to recognize that KU is *not* a zero-sum game. Amazon sets the per-page payment each month, based on what *they* want to pay. It has little to do with how many pages are actually read, although they certainly go to great lengths to make it *seem* that way.

If Amazon wants to pay out $0.043 per KENPC in May (growl), then they will do so. Doesn't matter how many pages were read. They simply set the payout. So no - these scammers are not *directly* impacting the per page payout at all. Amazon is constantly tinkering with that number to see how little they can pay us and have us still stick around in KU. The scammers do have a large *indirect* effect via loss of visibility for legitimate books, though, and in some cases they win all-star bonuses (which means some legit book did not).


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Edward M. Grant said:


> KU eliminates the pricing mechanism that makes economics work. The bot costs $9.99 a month, and earns $0.004 every time it 'reads' a page. So it can trivially generate far more income than it costs.
> 
> Giving scammers the ability to print money is not something that can be fixed. KU is broken by design, as anyone could have told Amazon before they created it.
> 
> You can't do the same by having bots buy your books, because Amazon takes a 30% cut.


Makes sense. You upload 100 "books" of 1000 pages. Open a "trial account" and have your bot click through the pages. $5 per book X 100. Open another trial, have your bot do the same. Endlessly. Even if they pay the $9.99, it's still far worth the effort of the scam. $500 per month for a $10 investment?


And while the payout gets smaller and smaller, aren't the Amazon infusions getting larger and larger?


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## anniejocoby (Aug 11, 2013)

Seneca42 said:


> Nope. One was a religious-themed book of some kind.
> 
> Interesting...i had forgotten the name, but did some digging and found the book. It's still on Amazon and in KU. But it has no rank now. Actually, all four books in the series no longer have a rank.
> 
> So who knows, maybe I'm wrong, maybe they didn't catch them but rather the book is experiencing a rank glitch.


Taking away rank seems to be the way that Amazon is dealing with scammers these days. I noticed it on some romance books that I've been following - crappy homemade covers, few reviews (10 reviews at the most on any one book), yet the author has been ranked in the top 100 OVERALL authors for months. Her books ranged from ranking in the 200s to the 1,500s, yet they didn't get hardly any reviews. Her books now have no rank. I'm not sure why the books aren't being pulled, but if they're not ranked, they're as good as gone, if you think about it.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

anniejocoby said:


> Taking away rank seems to be the way that Amazon is dealing with scammers these days. I noticed it on some romance books that I've been following - crappy homemade covers, few reviews (10 reviews at the most on any one book), yet the author has been ranked in the top 100 OVERALL authors for months. Her books ranged from ranking in the 200s to the 1,500s, yet they didn't get hardly any reviews. Her books now have no rank. I'm not sure why the books aren't being pulled, but if they're not ranked, they're as good as gone, if you think about it.


If those books are botted for the KU payouts, ranking wouldn't matter to them as they would still be botting the book, rank or not.

There must be another factor involved that I'm not seeing.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

anniejocoby said:


> I'm not sure why the books aren't being pulled, but if they're not ranked, they're as good as gone, if you think about it.


One of this guy's books actually got pulled, but in ebook format only. The paperback version is still there. So some of his series was simply deranked, and some of it was pulled in ebook format.

If I had to guess it probably all comes down to legality (as these things almost always do). As far as I'm aware there's no stipulation, and definitely no way to prove, that a read was a bot and not a human. Yes, you can suspect with 99.999% assurance, but not 100%.

So Amazon is probably afraid that if they delist a book that opens themselves up to a lawsuit, as technically they can't prove with 100% certainty that someone is abusing their system.

Case in point, the guy who scammed them for $3M, as far as I know never went to jail or was even charged. If he had been I'm sure Amazon would have publicized that to the end's of the earth to scare off other scammers. And that was someone *massively* gaming the KU system (ie. thousands of bots).

Ultimately, the system is broken. Amazon hasn't thrown in the towel on it, so who knows what will happen. But if the scammers keep beating them, eventually they'll have to shut it down. If they can figure a way to identify and deal with the scammers in a timely fashion, then it will continue into the future.


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## 77071 (May 15, 2014)

Edward M. Grant said:


> I don't see how it can be fixed, because it's broken by design. Any change they make to restrict bots (e.g. you can only read $9.99's worth of books each month) will hurt legitimate customers.


Scribd has made changes to their model a couple of times. They pay royalties for books read (to publishers), and subscribers can read a certain set amount of books per month. It takes away the "all you can eat buffet" quality, but it's not a bad model, and it's probably a lot more sustainable.

Prime Reading might be the future of KU. It has a limited pool, although you can read unlimited amount of books from that pool (10 at a time), and the books are curated. I suspect the current KU model is going to end at some point. It does not seem to be providing a good customer experience, for readers or writers, in my opinion. If it has not reached the tipping point of "bad experience for everyone (legitimate)" yet, it certainly seems to be heading that way.


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## anniejocoby (Aug 11, 2013)

Laran Mithras said:


> If those books are botted for the KU payouts, ranking wouldn't matter to them as they would still be botting the book, rank or not.
> 
> There must be another factor involved that I'm not seeing.


I'm thinking it must be that other scam that Amanda was talking about - botting for rank, not page reads. Amanda said on another site that the page-read bots are being cracked down on, but the ranking bots are alive and well. I know that there was a guy on here the other week complaining about losing his rank. He made it sound like if he lost his rank, he lost his income. So that tells me that, at least with his scam (he was apparently paying somebody $2,000 a month to do this) he was only getting rank, not page reads.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Laran Mithras said:


> If those books are botted for the KU payouts, ranking wouldn't matter to them as they would still be botting the book, rank or not.
> 
> There must be another factor involved that I'm not seeing.


So my view on what's creating confusion.

I do not believe the bots are reading the books. They are just borrowing the books, to create the rank bump - which creates visibility and they hope, actual sales. The moment the bots start page reading, then amazon I think is in a legal position to pull the books. This is why these books sitting at #10 or whatnot are getting zero reviews other than from the occasional sucker that buys them.

So simply deranking them basically removes that aspect of the scam. Then the scammer has to decide, do they want to go a step further and start using the bots for actual reads (and if they get caught doing that, then they risk getting delisted, not just deranked).


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## jcalloway (Jan 10, 2014)

ivyquinn said:


> 3) cabals of marketers hiring ghosts to create romance books every 2-3 weeks
> 
> In the third type of scam, the marketeers are all using the same arc list of reviewers to guarantee 100s of five star reviews their first day of release and stringing the new book together with old books in one mega 1000-page file with incentive to "skip" TJ the end for bonus material like epilogue to first book to up page reads. They all even theme the same, using the last two months teal lettering on covers. But they are also flooding keywords and subcategories of romance (sports, psychological, holidays) where they can gain traction as top 100 authors. They're flooding out the romance by real authors with the omnibuses and "just click to the end" angle.


The 900+ page romance books really tick me off. I would never normally wish for Amazon to make one of their scorched-earth, bring-down-the-hammer moves, as that usually wounds all of us to some degree. But boy howdy, do I wish they'd come down on the bonus books nonsense. I know plenty of authors (authors I always thought of as "legit") who do this now, and it turns my stomach to know they've stooped to using black hat methods for the sake of upping page reads every month.

So many have gotten away with it for so long, it's become the norm in many circles. They can defend the practice as 'giving extra value to readers,' but let's not dance around the truth: it's double/triple/quadruple-dipping into the pot each month, depending on how many times they've recycled the same books into their new releases. It's stealing money from all KU authors by dragging down the rate via artificial inflation.


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## MissingAlaska (Apr 28, 2014)

brkingsolver said:


> Since KU is a zero-sum game, every dollar to those gaming the system is a dollar out of my pocket. .0045 instead of .005 is significant. But even if you're not in KU, the loss of visibility, the interference in searches, the bad taste left for anyone who buys a scam book hurts all legitimate authors. Amazon has a problem with counterfeit goods in areas other than books. They just don't pay enough attention to those, like us, who market our goods through their platform. It will bite them eventually, and more from bad publicity.


I so agree with you. I'm increasingly tempted to go wide. The sad thing is how little manpower it would take to screen the worst offenders out.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Oh, derp. Forgot the KU "All Star" bonus for being a consistent best seller. So yes, they may not necessarily need the page reads, but definitely the ranking.


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## Gone To Croatan (Jun 24, 2011)

HSh said:


> Scribd has made changes to their model a couple of times. They pay royalties for books read (to publishers), and subscribers can read a certain set amount of books per month. It takes away the "all you can eat buffet" quality, but it's not a bad model, and it's probably a lot more sustainable.


But it's not Amazon's model., which is to use KU as a lure to bring in customers to buy more toilet paper.

If KU had to pay for itself, they'd have changed things around long ago. But they can take a lot of scamming so long as KU is a loss-leader for their real sales. It's the readers and writers who get hurt.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Laran Mithras said:


> Oh, derp. Forgot the KU "All Star" bonus for being a consistent best seller. So yes, they may not necessarily need the page reads, but definitely the ranking.


Bonuses are based on page reads, not rank or sales.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Laran Mithras said:


> Oh, derp. Forgot the KU "All Star" bonus for being a consistent best seller. So yes, they may not necessarily need the page reads, but definitely the ranking.


The All Star bonus is for page reads, not for sales.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Page reads. Ok. 

So it seems to me the botters should be having the bots flipping pages. Other than crowding out for visibility what profit is pushing the top 20 or so if the books are so poorly packaged few people want to read them? Seems like they're hoping rather than making the profit.

Something still isn't connecting the dots.


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## KevinMcLaughlin (Nov 11, 2010)

Edward M. Grant said:


> KU eliminates the pricing mechanism that makes economics work. The bot costs $9.99 a month, and earns $0.004 every time it 'reads' a page. So it can trivially generate far more income than it costs.
> 
> Giving scammers the ability to print money is not something that can be fixed. KU is broken by design, as anyone could have told Amazon before they created it.
> 
> You can't do the same by having bots buy your books, because Amazon takes a 30% cut.


This is all very accurate. But it's operating under the assumption that Amazon cares about whether or not KU makes them money. Flatly: it does not. Amazon itself as an entire company operates at *just barely* above a break-even profit margin. No other large corporation in the world operates on such thin margins. No other company could. Stockholders would demand the Board, CEO, and other key people be removed if they ran most companies in such a way. By maintaining an almost-controlling interest in Amazon stock, Bezos is able to run Amazon as (effectively) the world's largest sole proprietorship (in that he never has to answer to stockholders).

Now, once we see that Amazon as an entire corporation is OK with making a net profit of less than 1% on over $100 billion in sales - we can quickly see why they simply *don't care* if KU makes them money or not. The entire KU program costs them perhaps $200 million a year. A drop in the bucket. If they lose a few million a year on the service, it's irrelevant to them in the long run.

There are several reasons why KU exists:

1) Amazon has realized that entertainment is moving to the subscription model. Netflix now has more US subscribers than *all US cable TV providers put together*. Apple Music is huge, with over 40 million users. Spotify and Pandora have another 70 million between them. Amazon Music has millions more. Music, movies, TV - and books - are all moving to a subscription system. This is the future of how entertainment is going to be delivered to most customers.

2) Locking people into your infrastructure is good.  The more subscriptions someone has with Amazon, the more likely they are to buy all their other things with Amazon. Thus Prime, Amazon Music, Kindle Unlimited, and Amazon Fresh all have subscription services to help lock consumers into their business in multiple ways.

They're really not bugged if they lose a few hundred thousand dollars a month to scammers.

Now, where they WILL take action is if those scammers are hurting the customer experience. They're big on that, and this is the point we need to emphasize when alerting Amazon about this issue.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Laran Mithras said:


> Page reads. Ok.
> 
> So it seems to me the botters should be having the bots flipping pages. Other than crowding out for visibility what profit is pushing the top 20 or so if the books are so poorly packaged few people want to read them? Seems like they're hoping rather than making the profit.
> 
> Something still isn't connecting the dots.


Amazon started catching botters flipping pages last fall and started yanking accounts. That's why people are botting simply for rank now, and why Amazon is removing rank for those doing it.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Also, before it's all said and done, I look for all omnibuses to be yanked from KU. It will be a "one title, one time" ecosystem. One book per title, one title in the program. No bonus books. Period. When it happens, we're going to hear crying and screaming. The people determined to scam Amazon are creating the situation, though. It's just like with KU1. The people crying loudest when the switch was made to page reads were the ones breaking up books and purposely creating books that opened at 10 percent to trigger a full payout. Now bonus books and omnibuses will be next to go, and we'll hear more screaming. I don't know what people expect, though. They're purposely trying to game the system and it's going to come back to bite them.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

KevinMcLaughlin said:


> This is all very accurate. But it's operating under the assumption that Amazon cares about whether or not KU makes them money. Flatly: it does not. Amazon itself as an entire company operates at *just barely* above a break-even profit margin. No other large corporation in the world operates on such thin margins. No other company could. Stockholders would demand the Board, CEO, and other key people be removed if they ran most companies in such a way. By maintaining an almost-controlling interest in Amazon stock, Bezos is able to run Amazon as (effectively) the world's largest sole proprietorship (in that he never has to answer to stockholders).
> 
> Now, once we see that Amazon as an entire corporation is OK with making a net profit of less than 1% on over $100 billion in sales - we can quickly see why they simply *don't care* if KU makes them money or not. The entire KU program costs them perhaps $200 million a year. A drop in the bucket. If they lose a few million a year on the service, it's irrelevant to them in the long run.
> 
> ...


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Anarchist said:


>


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

anniejocoby said:


> I'm thinking it must be that other scam that Amanda was talking about - botting for rank, not page reads. Amanda said on another site that the page-read bots are being cracked down on, but the ranking bots are alive and well. I know that there was a guy on here the other week complaining about losing his rank. He made it sound like if he lost his rank, he lost his income. So that tells me that, at least with his scam (he was apparently paying somebody $2,000 a month to do this) he was only getting rank, not page reads.


My *guess* is that that's not right. Think about it: if you're paying $2K/month just to boost rank in pursuit of visibility, but visibility doesn't lead to legit sales, how long will you keep paying $2K/month? Not long, right? And if the boost in rank were leading to enough legit sales to justify spending $2K/month, the review totals would've been much higher.


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## AllyWho (May 16, 2015)

Laran Mithras said:


> So it seems to me the botters should be having the bots flipping pages.


The guy in the other thread admitted he was paying the click farm "marketing firm" 2k/month and receiving All Star bonuses. He was warned back in January about it by Amazon, obviously decided the payout was worth it, kept using the service and came here all innocent and surprised that Amazon yanked his ranks. Let's hope the bonuses and his account disappear as well.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

Becca Mills said:


> My *guess* is that that's not right. Think about it: if you're paying $2K/month just to boost rank in pursuit of visibility, but visibility doesn't lead to legit sales, how long will you keep paying $2K/month? Not long, right? And if the boost in rank were leading to enough legit sales to justify spending $2K/month, the review totals would've been much higher.


As Alice said, that particular guy was getting All-Star bonuses. Yet it was clear few real readers were engaging with the books. Same for another author who was riding high in the US and Canada paid charts (8 titles in the Top 20 in Canada -- someone there REALLY wasn't paying attention). Minimal reviews. Facebook pages with next-to-no engagement.

Another way these guys work -- and there was a service company that came here to tout this very thing not so long ago, and a second service that dropped by asked us to watch them at work in real time a couple of months back -- is:
* The service provides 1000, 2500, 5000 or 10,000 free downloads
* On the same day the book is free (or separately if you don't want it free), you can also purchase 100, 300, 500, 1000 or 5000 borrows.

Now, these might actually be pay-per-actions (PPAs) rather than non-human bots. There are likely pools of folk in these mechanical turk type companies who maintain their own KU accounts and bid on the work as it comes in. The borrows cost more, so it might even be those with their own KU accounts can command a higher click price, say 10 cents per click vs 5 cents. PPAs actually open up the field to "brokers" (the service providers) who don't have all the tech equipment needed. Which means just about ANYBODY can set up this kind of a scam operation easily enough.

Not only that, but the menu prices are really attractive. If I felt lucky and was willing to abandon my ethics and my good sense, I would happily pay the prices I saw for the visibility they afford. I'm certainly paying A LOT more than that to not get visibility that good doing it legitimately. 

Read that last again: It costs LESS to scam the system these days to achieve the same results as doing it* legitimately costs.

Well, it costs less until Amazon shuts down your account.

_ETA: * it = legitimately gaining visibility and rank, not, you know, legitimately scamming..._


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

PhoenixS said:


> As Alice said, that particular guy was getting All-Star bonuses. Yet it was clear few real readers were engaging with the books. Same for another author who was riding high in the US and Canada paid charts (8 titles in the Top 20 in Canada -- someone there REALLY wasn't paying attention). Minimal reviews. Facebook pages with next-to-no engagement.


Yeah, so I'm thinking the service that person hired must also have provided page-reads, not just visibility through ghost borrows.



PhoenixS said:



> Another way these guys work -- and there was a service company that came here to tout this very thing not so long ago, and a second service that dropped by asked us to watch them at work in real time a couple of months back -- is:
> * The service provides 1000, 2500, 5000 or 10,000 free downloads
> * On the same day the book is free (or separately if you don't want it free), you can also purchase 100, 300, 500, 1000 or 5000 borrows.
> 
> ...


That's shocking. 

Do you think KU's vulnerability stems in large part from the fact that Amazon can't really trace page-by-page progress through a book, as they said they'd be able to when they announced KU2? If they could really do that, it seems like it'd be relatively easy to weed out fake reads. Reader paged though inhumanly fast? Out. Reader skipped directly to the end? Out. But apparently there's no difference in the data they get from my having read a book over the course of five hours and from a click-farmer's having jumped straight to the last page.


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## AllyWho (May 16, 2015)

PhoenixS said:


> Another way these guys work -- and there was a service company that came here to tout this very thing not so long ago, and a second service that dropped by asked us to watch them at work in real time a couple of months back -- is:
> * The service provides 1000, 2500, 5000 or 10,000 free downloads
> * On the same day the book is free (or separately if you don't want it free), you can also purchase 100, 300, 500, 1000 or 5000 borrows.


I've heard that titles promoted by Genius Media (which is the one that turned up here touting their service) are having their ranks pulled as well, but haven't done any digging to confirm.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

A bot program for page reads could simply have a delay encoded. That's a simple mechanism to put in place.

So a bot could certainly be programmed to flip the page every 60 seconds, rather than every second.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

AliceW said:


> I've heard that titles promoted by Genius Media (which is the one that turned up here touting their service) are having their ranks pulled as well, but haven't done any digging to confirm.


I have the names of a few more titles and authors they've promoted, but can't confirm that. What I can confirm is that one of their titles *right now* is in the Top 20 Free. 

ETA: That title is showing up on a couple of other legit ad sites, the way others have as well. That gives them an ad footprint, which helps in the legitimacy department. But as we saw with other freebies we were invited to watch, the ads they have in aggregate are still about 10K short of the numbers needed for the ranks the books achieve.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Laran Mithras said:


> A bot program for page reads could simply have a delay encoded. That's a simple mechanism to put in place.
> 
> So a bot could certainly be programmed to flip the page every 60 seconds, rather than every second.


Yeah, you're right. *Duh* on my part.


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## Learning by lurking (Jan 17, 2016)

Some of you may wish to edit your posts to not directly reference a company that you suspect is involved in this. Just saying.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Also, before it's all said and done, I look for all omnibuses to be yanked from KU. It will be a "one title, one time" ecosystem. One book per title, one title in the program. No bonus books. Period. When it happens, we're going to hear crying and screaming. The people determined to scam Amazon are creating the situation, though. It's just like with KU1. The people crying loudest when the switch was made to page reads were the ones breaking up books and purposely creating books that opened at 10 percent to trigger a full payout. Now bonus books and omnibuses will be next to go, and we'll hear more screaming. I don't know what people expect, though. They're purposely trying to game the system and it's going to come back to bite them.


Writing short in KU1 wasn't "scamming" Amazon and neither is writing long in KU2, it's just working with what you've got. Not to mention that erotica authors were writing short way before KU1 even came along. I assume novelists wrote novels even before KU2 came along? Omnibuses aren't gaming the system either. Those have been around before KU2 came along too.

As far as bonus books, I don't like them as a reader or a writer. It doesn't make sense to me to stack on another book at the end of another just because and I don't think highly of those who do that. But if they're upfront about it and don't do shady linking within the book, it's not scamming either. They're just working within a system that Amazon came up with (pages read).


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## AllyWho (May 16, 2015)

Learning by lurking said:


> Some of you may wish to edit your posts to not directly reference a company that you suspect is involved in this. Just saying.


Nope. I have no issue saying Genius Media are using click farms to achieve their results. They have a thread on here where Phoenix went to some length to dissect their results and ask questions. Are you affiliated in some way that you don't think they should be named? If we don't openly discuss "marketers" using black hat techniques how on earth do we ever educate naive authors on red flags to look out for before handing over thousands of dollars?


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## Learning by lurking (Jan 17, 2016)

AliceW said:


> Nope. I have no issue saying Genius Media are using click farms to achieve their results. They have a thread on here where Phoenix went to some length to dissect their results and ask questions. Are you affiliated in some way that you don't think they should be named? If we don't openly discuss "marketers" using black hat techniques how on earth do we ever educate naive authors on red flags to look out for before handing over thousands of dollars?


No, not affiliated. If I was I would be thanking you for the free advertising.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

NeedWant said:


> Writing short in KU1 wasn't "scamming" Amazon and neither is writing long in KU2, it's just working with what you've got. Not to mention that erotica authors were writing short way before KU1 even came along. I assume novelists wrote novels even before KU2 came along? Omnibuses aren't gaming the system either. Those have been around before KU2 came along too.
> 
> As far as bonus books, I don't like them as a reader or a writer. It doesn't make sense to me to stack on another book at the end of another just because and I don't think highly of those who do that. But if they're upfront about it and don't do shady linking within the book, it's not scamming either. They're just working within a system that Amazon came up with (pages read).


I didn't say writing short was scammy. I said that purposely breaking up books and designing them to open at 10 percent just to trigger a payout was scammy. There's a difference ... and that's the reason we have the page read system. I don't doubt some people aren't bundling just for more money. It's the ones who do who will force the change on everyone, though, just like it was the writers purposely gaming the system under KU1 who forced KU2. I'm not talking about legitimate authors. The legitimate authors will get hurt because of the scammers again, though. It's only a matter of time.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

Learning by lurking said:


> No, not affiliated. If I was I would be thanking you for the free advertising.


Honestly, that might be the only thing that's accomplished in these threads. Black hatters get validation, encouragement, and advertising. What else changes? Can we point to any correlation between our complaints and Amazon's anti-fraud efforts?

I may have been underselling the point earlier when I said that I don't think it's productive to fret. It may be actively destructive instead of merely wasteful.


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## anniejocoby (Aug 11, 2013)

Becca Mills said:


> My *guess* is that that's not right. Think about it: if you're paying $2K/month just to boost rank in pursuit of visibility, but visibility doesn't lead to legit sales, how long will you keep paying $2K/month? Not long, right? And if the boost in rank were leading to enough legit sales to justify spending $2K/month, the review totals would've been much higher.


I agree, that doesn't sound great. I would think that, if your book becomes visible by being in Top 100 lists, it will lead to sales. But, then again, that guy that came on, come to think about it, didn't have great sales. I think he said that he only was getting like 200 sales per month, which, for him, was "skyrocketing." He did say that he was getting amazing page reads, so, you're right, come to think of it. He must have been part of a page-reading scam. At any rate, he lost all his ranks, but his books are still up to this day.


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## AllyWho (May 16, 2015)

anniejocoby said:


> But, then again, that guy that came on, come to think about it, didn't have great sales. I think he said that he only was getting like 200 sales per month, which, for him, was "skyrocketing." He did say that he was getting amazing page reads...


He was getting All Star bonuses every month, which is what now - 4 million pages read for the bottom payout?

Less then 200 sales and more than 4m+ pages read. Anyone else see the disconnect?


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I didn't say writing short was scammy. I said that purposely breaking up books and designing them to open at 10 percent just to trigger a payout was scammy. There's a difference ... and that's the reason we have the page read system. I don't doubt some people aren't bundling just for more money. It's the ones who do who will force the change on everyone, though, just like it was the writers purposely gaming the system under KU1 who forced KU2. I'm not talking about legitimate authors. The legitimate authors will get hurt because of the scammers again, though. It's only a matter of time.


There will always be those who game the system Amazon comes up with. That's a given. I'm not sure I agree that splitting a book into parts is scamming, though. Under KU1, it was actually a smart thing to do. If it was a real book and not gibberish, I don't think there's anything wrong with it as long as it was labeled properly for the readers. Those publishing scamlets (shorts that opened at 10% and were basically gibberish) were scamming IMO. Real writers deciding to write shorter because KU1 rewarded shorts? Not so much.

As for the one title, no bonus books idea, I'd welcome it. I make more from my individual titles than the one bundle I have anyway. The bundle is just there for readers who prefer having the first three books at a lower cost or as one file. I know that as a reader, I prefer individual titles as well.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

NeedWant said:


> Under KU1, it was actually a smart thing to do.


Which is exactly why we have KU2 and the imprint authors are still paid when someone reads 10 percent of a book.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

NeedWant said:


> There will always be those who game the system Amazon comes up with. That's a given. I'm not sure I agree that splitting a book into parts is scamming, though. Under KU1, it was actually a smart thing to do.


I'm sorry, but if I take a 300 page novel and break it up into 30 chapters that I post for 99 cents each, and then get paid $1.30 for each of them because opening the book hits 10%, that is a scam taking advantage of the system. You can rationalize it any way you want, it's ethically flawed, and it caused Amazon to come down on the practice with a sledge hammer.

"What I can get away with" does not equate with ethical. No matter how people attempt to justify such practices to themselves, it hurts the overall ecosystem. You can't justify murder just because you didn't get caught.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Which is exactly why we have KU2 and the imprint authors are still paid when someone reads 10 percent of a book.


And I put the blame for that squarely on Amazon. Interesting about the imprint authors, did not know that.



brkingsolver said:


> I'm sorry, but if I take a 300 page novel and break it up into 30 chapters that I post for 99 cents each, and then get paid $1.30 for each of them because opening the book hits 10%, that is a scam taking advantage of the system. You can rationalize it any way you want, it's ethically flawed, and it caused Amazon to come down on the practice with a sledge hammer.
> 
> "What I can get away with" does not equate with ethical. No matter how people attempt to justify such practices to themselves, it hurts the overall ecosystem. You can't justify murder just because you didn't get caught.


I've never seen anyone splitting a novel into 30 parts under KU1. Maybe 5-6 parts? Which was usually 10,000-15,000 per installment.

And if they did? So what? Splitting a novel into a hundred parts won't magically make that novel make a hundred times as much. Will readers want to borrow a short chapter? Most prefer a whole book. As long as the readers know what they're getting, it's not a scam. Would I do it? No. Just like I don't add bonus books to my books now, but as long the readers know what they're getting, I don't think it's scamming anyone. And it's certianly not akin to "getting away with murder."

At the end of the day, I place the blame on Amazon. They're the ones who came up with a faulty system in the first place. If they don't want people doing certain things, they shouldn't allow them in the first place.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Amazon warned people what was going to happen. They sent out that email and told authors what readers preferred in KU. Whether or not they should've recognized how unethical some people would become is a moot point. It's the people who intentionally set out to scam the system who forced the change. The writing was on the wall when Amazon sent that email about longer works. People didn't listen and now we have KU2. The writing is also on the wall for KU2. When the next change comes, people are going to complain just as loudly even though it's clear that it's coming. It comes back to that saying "this is why we can't have nice things." Well, both of these instances are examples of why we can't have nice things.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Seneca42 said:


> Nope. One was a religious-themed book of some kind.
> 
> Interesting...i had forgotten the name, but did some digging and found the book. It's still on Amazon and in KU. But it has no rank now. Actually, all four books in the series no longer have a rank.
> 
> So who knows, maybe I'm wrong, maybe they didn't catch them but rather the book is experiencing a rank glitch.


That was the naive guy who came asking WTH was going on. Clearly, they had shut him down.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Just to clarify, I *DO* have a problem with actual scammers. Those that manipulate rank, reviews, borrows, pages read, etc. People who split their novels up in KU1 or those adding bonus books in KU2? They're not scammers, unless they engage in black hat methods to get those books moving. They're just working within a faulty system Amazon created.

I think actual scammers have more to do with the changes Amazon makes to KU, than authors taking advantage of the loopholes in their faulty KU system.



Amanda M. Lee said:


> Amazon warned people what was going to happen. They sent out that email and told authors what readers preferred in KU. Whether or not they should've recognized how unethical some people would become is a moot point. It's the people who intentionally set out to scam the system who forced the change. The writing was on the wall when Amazon sent that email about longer works. People didn't listen and now we have KU2. The writing is also on the wall for KU2. When the next change comes, people are going to complain just as loudly even though it's clear that it's coming. It comes back to that saying "this is why we can't have nice things." Well, both of these instances are examples of why we can't have nice things.


When KU1 came around, a lot of people (including me) jumped on the erotica shorts bandwagon. Some quit jobs based on the money they were making, and then Amazon took it all away with, what, a 15 day notice or something like that? Sorry, but people had a right to be upset. I can't say I was surprised when it happened, I was just surprised it happened so damn fast. "Oh by the way, next month we're introducing KU2! Good luck!" People had a right to be upset. You're free to think that people were foolish to think it would last, but legitimate authors had a right to be upset when Amazon screwed them over without much warning. You don't have to sympathize, but there's also no need to belittle.

And yeah, sending out a letter of what readers prefer is hardly a warning. It's not a heads up. They were just saying what kind of content they preferred in KU.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> The writing was on the wall when Amazon sent that email about longer works. People didn't listen and now we have KU2. The writing is also on the wall for KU2.


How do you think KU3 will be different from KU2?


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Dolphin said:


> How do you think KU3 will be different from KU2?


No bonus books. No omnibuses. No anthologies. No samplers. Each title can only be in one time and only one title can be in a "book" (whatever the length). As for payment, I'm sure there will be a tweak. I have no idea what that tweak will be.

Oh, and edited to add, I think there will be a smaller cap.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

NeedWant said:


> When KU1 came around, a lot of people (including me) jumped on the erotica shorts bandwagon. Some quit jobs based on the money they were making, and then Amazon took it all away with, what, a 15 day notice or something like that? Sorry, but people had a right to be upset.


Now we come down to it. You were working the system and you're upset that the gravy train ended. Thank you for coming clean. Despite what your rose-colored memories tell you, there were a lot of people publishing "serials" of 10 pages each designed to trigger a payment when they were opened. Authors of longer works stayed completely away, and readers were voting with their feet. When Amazon saw they had a non-viable revenue model, they ended the program and put something in place that had a chance at making them money.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

brkingsolver said:


> Now we come down to it. You were working the system and you're upset that the gravy train ended. Thank you for coming clean. Despite what your rose-colored memories tell you, there were a lot of people publishing "serials" of 10 pages each designed to trigger a payment when they were opened. Authors of longer works stayed completely away, and readers were voting with their feet. When Amazon saw they had a non-viable revenue model, they ended the program and put something in place that had a chance at making them money.


I don't have to "come clean" about anything. That would imply that I was doing something wrong. I also don't have to "come clean" about writing novels now because they pay better under KU2. (Not to mention that writing novels was always the plan anyway, so the change from KU1 to KU2 wasn't personally upsetting to me. It was an opportunity to focus on doing what I've always wanted to do.)

So no, I'm not upset the "gravy train" ended. I'm making about the same money with novels now that I did writing shorts under KU1, and I'm enjoying it more to boot. Oh, and I work less hours now!

*Edit:* Also, feel free to look at my early post history. I've talked about my "dark past" of writing erotica shorts during KU1 before. The fact that you judge me for writing erotica for money says more about you than me, frankly.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

NeedWant said:


> *Edit:* Also, feel free to look at my early post history. I've talked about my "dark past" of writing erotica shorts during KU1 before. The fact that you judge me for writing erotica for money says more about you than me, frankly.


I haven't judged you at all. I freely admit that I have erotic shorts published under a pen name. The ones still for sale were written after KU2 started, but that's beside the point. Oh, and I wrote them solely for the money. No guilty conscience here.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

brkingsolver said:


> I haven't judged you at all. I freely admit that I have erotic shorts published under a pen name. The ones still for sale were written after KU2 started, but that's beside the point. Oh, and I wrote them solely for the money. No guilty conscience here.


So you're judging me for daring to write them when they were more profitable (under KU1)?


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

NeedWant said:


> So you're judging me for daring to write them when they were more profitable (under KU1)?


Yeah. Somehow I don't think anybody's going to say "Thank you for coming clean" about somebody who chose to write novels during KU2, since longer books were best the way to "Work the system."


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

brkingsolver said:


> Now we come down to it. You were working the system and you're upset that the gravy train ended. Thank you for coming clean.


I'm actually a fan, but to be fair, whether you meant it to be or not, the phrasing does come across as judgmental.

And this isn't aimed at you, but something people seem to forget is that many of us were already writing erotica shorts, and doing DANG WELL, when KU1 hit. We didn't ask for the 10% payout, didn't demand it, but there it was.


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## thesmallprint (May 25, 2012)

> Just to clarify, I DO have a problem with actual scammers. Those that manipulate rank, reviews, borrows, pages read, etc. People who split their novels up in KU1 or those adding bonus books in KU2? They're not scammers, unless they engage in black hat methods to get those books moving. They're just working within a faulty system Amazon created.


Based on your last sentence, there are no scammers. Even those working click farms aren't scammers.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

thesmallprint said:


> Based on your last sentence, there are no scammers. Even those working click farms aren't scammers.


Based on your last sentence, you don't think those working click farms are scammers. 



Shelley K said:


> And this isn't aimed at you, but something people seem to forget is that many of us were already writing erotica shorts, and doing DANG WELL, when KU1 hit. We didn't ask for the 10% payout, didn't demand it, but there it was.


I just looked back at my historical data and I actually started publishing erotica in 2013 when the only borrows came from Prime members. I did take it a lot more seriously when KU1 came along and it's always been about $$$ for me. If someone wants to judge me for that, judge away!


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## thesmallprint (May 25, 2012)

NeedWant said:


> Based on your last sentence, you don't think those working click farms are scammers.


I'm in two minds now. You made a point that KU1 featured ultra-shorts which took advantage of the system. That's what click farms are doing. If those gaming the KU1 system weren't scamming, how are those gaming the current system scamming? If click farms are scamming, then KU1 gamers were scamming. You, me, whoever, cannot have it both ways.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

thesmallprint said:


> I'm in two minds now. You made a point that KU1 featured ultra-shorts which took advantage of the system. That's what click farms are doing. If those gaming the KU1 system weren't scamming, how are those gaming the current system scamming? If click farms are scamming, then KU1 gamers were scamming. You, me, whoever, cannot have it both ways.


Sorry, not sure I get what you're trying to say. Writing shorts when shorts are more profitable is not scamming. Writing long when longer works are profitable is not scamming.

Publishing gibberish copy and pasted from the internet is scamming. Using click farms that borrow your books is scamming.

What's confusing you here?


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

thesmallprint said:


> I'm in two minds now. You made a point that KU1 featured ultra-shorts which took advantage of the system. That's what click farms are doing. If those gaming the KU1 system weren't scamming, how are those gaming the current system scamming? If click farms are scamming, then KU1 gamers were scamming. You, me, whoever, cannot have it both ways.


That makes no sense. Someone writing short stories was tailoring their fiction to the ecosystem as it existed. It may have been gaming, in a certain sense, but it was in no way against the TOS or in any other way shady behavior. I say that as someone who only writes novel length work and has benefited from the changes.

A click farm, on the other hand, is most definitely against the TOS, and is nothing short of fraud. I'm surprised you don't see the difference.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

The thing is, Amazon didn't say that "they" preferred longer works. They said customers preferred longer works and went into great detail about what customers wanted. They gave authors a chance to correct themselves, and it didn't happen. Since customers always get what they want on Amazon, they were trying to steer people to create the ecosystem that they needed to sustain KU. Authors were warning more than six months before the change came down that page reads were going to be the new thing. People heard rumblings. I told people that a good three or four months before the switch and people told me I was crazy. It was right here and I got called every name in the book.
Now, I don't equate "writing short" with bot scamming in the slightest. I'm a firm believer in writing something for what it's worth, not padding for length. HOWEVER, people were publishing ten-page scamphlets that opened at 10 percent. People were breaking apart books into chapters just to get more in payout. People were purposely writing 20-page serials with no ending and no story structure just in the hope that people would open it so they could get a payout. Be very honest. Do you think that's what Amazon had in mind for the program? How did anyone think that was sustainable? It wasn't. Everyone knew it. Authors could've corrected themselves and saved the previous payout but they didn't. Why do you think that is?
I'm not saying that everyone who writes short is scamming by any stretch of the imagination. I have shorts in my most popular series (although my idea of a short is 28K words). What happened with KU1 was indeed a big scam on SOME people's parts. I can't make you remember what was happening at the time, but it was as big a deal as the link scammers.
So, yeah. People abusing KU1 got us KU2. Now, people abusing KU2 will get us KU3 at some point (probably sooner rather than later). When that happens, we'll here more screaming. If people would simply conduct themselves in an ethical manner, though, it wouldn't be necessary. People won't, though, so the hammer will come again ... and again ... and again.


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## Gentleman Zombie (May 30, 2011)

I think people are lumping KU1 shorts writers together with KU1 scammers - and that's not really fair. I wrote shorts back then. Mine were in a very small erotica niche (Transgender). I had great reviews and was even featured on a transgender erotica blog. Sure small potatoes.. but it was very reliable. Plus, at the time I felt like I  served an unmet need. I certainly didn't consider myself a scammer. Nor did I break up novels or any some such. I knew of other people who were raking it in with Paranormal & Romance Serials. I don't consider them scammers either. 

But Amanda is right, there others who were publishing gibberish books just to get the 10% payout. But please don't lump all shorts writers into that boat, because it's not fair. And yes. Amazon was very clear that readers wanted longer books in KU. Which is how we got KU2 - it devastated a lot of authors while pushing others into the stratosphere. 

Now we have people writing long as possible. Hell - I'm throwing my hat into the fantasy ring because I see it as a win-win. I love fantasy. Fantasy readers love long books & KU loves longs books. If I manage to pull this off, it could be a boost to my writing career. But just as in KU1 you have people taking advantage. Most of these scammers are from the IM crowd. They just publish 1,000-page gibberish books and then click-farm their way to a massive payout.  

I don't consider them in the same class as the Fantasy or SciFi writer putting out 90,000-word epics. Or bundling up massive omnibus releases. Heck, even the romance and erotica writers are bundling up their work and including bonus stories. As long it's quality fiction (not spun gibberish) that the reader enjoys, no harm no foul. 

But as long as KU exists - people are going to scam it.  It's a finite amount of money in a pool that authors are fighting over Hunger Games style. And just like the Hunger Games, some people are going to do anything to win. Even after KU3 arrives (and it will) this is going to be the case. It sucks, but a system like KU  gives scammers an incentive. 

But I'm no idiot. Scammers and KU are here to stay. Neither one is going anywhere.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> HOWEVER, people were publishing ten-page scamphlets that opened at 10 percent. People were breaking apart books into chapters just to get more in payout. People were purposely writing 20-page serials with no ending and no story structure just in the hope that people would open it so they could get a payout. Be very honest. Do you think that's what Amazon had in mind for the program? How did anyone think that was sustainable? It wasn't. Everyone knew it. Authors could've corrected themselves and saved the previous payout but they didn't. Why do you think that is?


I don't think lumping actual scammers publishing gibberish and using click farms with authors writing serials (however structured) is helpful. I mean, you have a right to your opinion, but I vehemently disagree with it. No, writing a serial or even dividing a novel into parts isn't abusing or scamming KU. It also doesn't magically make readers/subscribers flock to those particular authors' books. KU1 fed a voracious short erotica reader base. Popular serials became popular because the authors hooked those readers on their stories...that takes skill. There were plenty of failed shorts and serials as well.

At the end, I don't think it matters whether readers or Amazon preferred novels. It was clear to a lot of people that Amazon did not want KU to be known as Smut Central. It simply didn't fit the image they wanted to portray, even though short erotica was clearly what a lot of KU subscribers came for.

Basically, while I do think KU will continue changing, I think your blame is misplaced. I blame the actual scammers and Amazon for not thinking things through properly. I don't blame legitimate authors who are trying to do what's best for their bank accounts. This idea that if authors just behaved (how exactly? by not publishing shorts?) then we'd still have KU1 is faulty. We don't have KU1 because of click farms and Amazon's own ideas of what they wanted KU to be. KU2 will become KU3 because of scammers (no, authors publishing bundles aren't scammers) and because of whatever Amazon wants KU to look like next (or how much they're willing to spend on this venture).


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

NeedWant said:


> I blame the actual scammers and Amazon for not thinking things through properly. I don't blame legitimate authors who are trying to do what's best for their bank accounts.


The problem is that the world doesn't divide neatly into legitimate authors and scammers. There are plenty of people out there who are not using click farms or bots, but are still taking steps to maximise revenue that are less than ethical. It's one thing to say that KU1 prefers short work so you'll write shorts, or that KU2 benefits long work, so you'll switch to epic fantasy. That's fine. But adding a complete book (or several) to the back of the headline book? That gets a bit dodgy. And putting the epilogue to the headline book after the bonus books, so the author gets every possible cent of KU money? Very dodgy. It's not a black or white situation (in my view; you may disagree).


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

PaulineMRoss said:


> The problem is that the world doesn't divide neatly into legitimate authors and scammers. There are plenty of people out there who are not using click farms or bots, but are still taking steps to maximise revenue that are less than ethical. It's one thing to say that KU1 prefers short work so you'll write shorts, or that KU2 benefits long work, so you'll switch to epic fantasy. That's fine. But adding a complete book (or several) to the back of the headline book? That gets a bit dodgy. And putting the epilogue to the headline book after the bonus books, so the author gets every possible cent of KU money? Very dodgy. It's not a black or white situation (in my view; you may disagree).


I think this fits the saying: Just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean that you are right to do it .


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

PaulineMRoss said:


> The problem is that the world doesn't divide neatly into legitimate authors and scammers. There are plenty of people out there who are not using click farms or bots, but are still taking steps to maximise revenue that are less than ethical. It's one thing to say that KU1 prefers short work so you'll write shorts, or that KU2 benefits long work, so you'll switch to epic fantasy. That's fine. But adding a complete book (or several) to the back of the headline book? That gets a bit dodgy. And putting the epilogue to the headline book after the bonus books, so the author gets every possible cent of KU money? Very dodgy. It's not a black or white situation (in my view; you may disagree).


Adding a book at the end of a book and being upfront about it in the blurb? I wouldn't do it, but I don't consider it scamming. Unless Amazon actually says that's not allowed, those authors are just trying to get more page reads. The reader can stop after book 1 if they so prefer. Putting the epilogue of book 1 behind one or more extra books is scamming in my opinion. Using linking within the book ("click here if you want to see the glossary that's at the end of this book that'll help you understand stuff throughout this book!") I would also consider scammy behavior. Bundling ten of your novels (or however many to get to that 3000 cap) isn't scamming. I think it's a scam on Amazon's part that they have a cap on pages read, and I will never get even close to having a bundle that large. It's just the principle of the thing. If you're going to pay us by pages read, then pay for *all* the pages read. Don't come up with a freaking limit. *Edit:* Oh, and I would tell Amazon this: if you're going to pay us by pages read, make sure you can count an actual page when it's read. A lot of scams ("click to the back of the book first") would be solved if they actually knew how to count a damn page!

So yeah, the world isn't black and white, but I'm personally pretty clear on what I consider to be scamming or unethical behavior. I'm not sure if Amazon is clear or even cares, though. Didn't John Locke admit to buying reviews? Or it was somehow found out that he did? His books are still on Amazon.


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## Gentleman Zombie (May 30, 2011)

NeedWant said:


> At the end, I don't think it matters whether readers or Amazon preferred novels. It was clear to a lot of people that Amazon did not want KU to be known as Smut Central. It simply didn't fit the image they wanted to portray, even though short erotica was clearly what a lot of KU subscribers came for.


Oh my god thank you saying this. Even before KU was a thing - readers were happily paying $2.99 for short erotica without a complaint. The kinkier the better. Then KU came along and erotica exploded. Not because of people gaming the system - quite the opposite. Because now readers could get their erotica fix cheaply. I recall looking at the Amazon store front at one point and it was wall-to-wall erotica. Racy covers and all. I remember shaking my head and thinking there was no way Amazon was going to let this continue. Many of those authors & readers have since moved on to steamy romance with man-chest covers. And oddly enough - I bet they are still a driving force behind KU's popularity.



NeedWant said:


> Basically, while I do think KU will continue changing, I think your blame is misplaced. I blame the actual scammers and Amazon for not thinking things through properly. I don't blame legitimate authors who are trying to do what's best for their bank accounts. This idea that if authors just behaved (how exactly? by not publishing shorts?) then we'd still have KU1 is faulty. We don't have KU1 because of click farms and Amazon's own ideas of what they wanted KU to be. KU2 will become KU3 because of scammers (no, authors publishing bundles aren't scammers) and because of whatever Amazon wants KU to look like next (or how much they're willing to spend on this venture).


I don't think bundle publishers are scammers either. But I'm quietly waiting for Amazon to declare that only single titles are allowed in KU. Which wont' stop people from smashing several books together and calling it an epic saga. Or some other inventive way around the rule that I'm not clever enough to come with.

And the band plays on!


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

brkingsolver said:


> Let's call the bonuses what they really are, a bribe to top sellers to stay exclusive.


Yeah. In the beginning, there was little to entice anyone to have a book in Select and not be able to sell it everywhere. Only the "free" days each month. Then KU came along, and what was there to make that profitable? So, bonuses and having borrows count for rank.



Amanda M. Lee said:


> Also, before it's all said and done, I look for all omnibuses to be yanked from KU. It will be a "one title, one time" ecosystem. One book per title, one title in the program. No bonus books. Period. When it happens, we're going to hear crying and screaming. The people determined to scam Amazon are creating the situation, though. It's just like with KU1. The people crying loudest when the switch was made to page reads were the ones breaking up books and purposely creating books that opened at 10 percent to trigger a full payout. Now bonus books and omnibuses will be next to go, and we'll hear more screaming. I don't know what people expect, though. They're purposely trying to game the system and it's going to come back to bite them.


This is going to happen, and probably not too long from now, I'd suspect. Scamming KU has become such a huge money maker, something drastic is going to have to be done. I think we've already seen KUv3, so this will be KUv4. And man, are people going to howl.

And I agree that the whole thing with "readers prefer novels" was because erotica was burning it up in KU. It's like Scribd cutting out a lot of romance from their subscription service, because romance readers will read a lot of books. It comes down to how much money was being lost, and the reputation of being "erotica central", with all the nasty books on the front page.

I think Amazon started KU without thoroughly thinking it through. I said from the beginning that there needed to be some sort of tiered system for payouts, and some way to catch people rigging the start page, but Amazon just kept on. The person who came up with KU should probably have lost their job, but I bet they got bonuses and atta-boys.

Personally, I think reading books is different from watching TV or movies. With the latter, you have to watch when the networks said it was airing something. So being able to binge watch your fav show, or watching while on a long commute makes sense.

Books? You already can read when and where you want, even carrying a paperback or hard back book isn't that big a deal. The only thing subscriptions are good for is for those who read tons of books. They can do it cheaper with a sub. But, that doesn't work so well for the company doing the subscription. They lose money on people like that. I've seen it compared to gyms who make money on members who don't use the services, against those who go all out and come every day. Amazon can only come out ahead if people are buying other stuff from them, and if there's ever any decent competition for that, then say goodbye to KU.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

she-la-ti-da said:


> I think Amazon started KU without thoroughly thinking it through. I said from the beginning that there needed to be some sort of tiered system for payouts, and some way to catch people rigging the start page, but Amazon just kept on. The person who came up with KU should probably have lost their job, but I bet they got bonuses and atta-boys.





Jeff Bezos]
Second said:


> Amazon can only come out ahead if people are buying other stuff from them, and if there's ever any decent competition for that, then say goodbye to KU.


Yeah, I'm not worried about that anytime soon. Their biggest danger is that they become so big as to usher in a new era of trust-busting. The only threat to Amazon is Amazon.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Just to pitch in, I'm an erotica author. *I do not bundle.* I do not put out 1000 page snorefests of grouped backlist stories.

Under the current climate of KU2, _I'm hurting myself by not doing so._ But I still don't.

What's "right" and what's "wrong," except our sensibilities on ethics? If the TOS allows bundles that are good today, will we be pilloried for it tomorrow under KU3 in hindsight?

I am ruled by my ethics. If it doesn't sound right to my inner ear - to my soul - I don't do it and many say I'm not "promoting properly."


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

Laran Mithras said:


> I am ruled by my ethics. If it doesn't sound right to my inner ear - to my soul - I don't do it and many say I'm not "promoting properly."


Why does it feel like there's an ethical difference between selling _The Lord of the Rings_ instead of selling _The Fellowship of the Ring_, _The Two Towers_, and _The Return of the King_ separately?

If you're writing shorts, did you feel like that was unethical during KU1, but became ethical again during KU2?

Suppose you seek out the advice of a developmental editor, and she says that you're telling three distinct stories and should break them up into separate books to avoid confusing the reader. Is that ethical? What if her advice had been that your story was incomplete, and you need to add another 20,000 words to finish it?

Is advertising unethical? What about using a mailing list? Do you think all marketing is ethically dubious, or just the product development and merchandizing phases?

I'm not trying to badger you. The point I'm trying to make is that none of this is clearcut, and ethical arguments are difficult to sustain in this territory.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Dolphin said:


> Why does it feel like there's an ethical difference between selling _The Lord of the Rings_ instead of selling _The Fellowship of the Ring_, _The Two Towers_, and _The Return of the King_ separately?
> 
> If you're writing shorts, did you feel like that was unethical during KU1, but became ethical again during KU2?
> 
> ...


No, please don't mistake my aversion to "bundles" as an aversion to an omnibus. I actually do have a 3-book omnibus out: The Captain of Her Heart.

I meant a 40-story bundle of shorts that fits into every category of books Amazon offers. To that, I have an aversion.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Dolphin said:


> The point I'm trying to make is that none of this is clearcut, and ethical arguments are difficult to sustain in this territory.


I disagree. Those with situational ethics make this argument...the situation usually having to do with what benefits them at that particular point in time. Ethics are clear cut. You decide what your ethics are, and I decide what mine are. Skating the boundaries is something an individual has to decide for themselves. But they shouldn't be surprised when there are consequences.

What I keep seeing in this thread is that people feel they can do anything they can get away with. What happens over and over again is that Amazon comes in with a sledgehammer and a chainsaw to fix a problem, and then we listen to whining for the next two years.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

brkingsolver said:


> I disagree. Those with situational ethics make this argument...the situation usually having to do with what benefits them at that particular point in time. Ethics are clear cut. You decide what your ethics are, and I decide what mine are. Skating the boundaries is something an individual has to decide for themselves. But they shouldn't be surprised when there are consequences.
> 
> What I keep seeing in this thread is that people feel they can do anything they can get away with. What happens over and over again is that Amazon comes in with a sledgehammer and a chainsaw to fix a problem, and then we listen to whining for the next two years.


So, according to you, writing shorts under KU1 was unethical behavior?


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

NeedWant said:


> So, according to you, writing shorts under KU1 was unethical behavior?


I never said that, and you're the one who brought up erotica, not me. Go back and read what I wrote. I said that breaking novels into 10 page serials to get paid when the book was opened caused Amazon to kill KU1. And that's all I said. Stop putting words in other people's mouths.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

brkingsolver said:


> I never said that, and you're the one who brought up erotica, not me. Go back and read what I wrote. I said that breaking novels into 10 page serials to get paid when the book was opened caused Amazon to kill KU1. And that's all I said. Stop putting words in other people's mouths.


So when I said I wrote erotica shorts during KU1 and you responded with this:



brkingsolver said:


> *Now we come down to it. You were working the system and you're upset that the gravy train ended. Thank you for coming clean. *


What did you mean by this? Sounds a lot like you were saying that I was doing something morally wrong. If not, then choose your words more carefully next time or don't address me at all.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

brkingsolver said:


> I never said that, and you're the one who brought up erotica, not me. Go back and read what I wrote. I said that breaking novels into 10 page serials to get paid when the book was opened caused Amazon to kill KU1. And that's all I said. Stop putting words in other people's mouths.


NeedWant literally asked "So, according to you, writing shorts under KU1 was unethical behavior?" and you came back with "you're the one who brought up erotica, not me." You're the one putting words in people's mouths.

What you actually said was not that serialized novels killed KU1. What you said was, "Now we come down to it. You were working the system and you're upset that the gravy train ended. Thank you for coming clean." And you said it to someone who I believe--correct me if I'm wrong, NeedWant--wrote shorts before KU1, and has continued writing shorts after KU1.

The more I go back and read your words, the more vicious and unreasonable they seem.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Dolphin said:


> And you said it to someone who I believe--correct me if I'm wrong, NeedWant--wrote shorts before KU1, and has continued writing shorts after KU1.


I wrote them before and during, but stopped as soon as KU2 was announced. I'm writing novels now, which I prefer anyway.



> The more I go back and read your words, the more vicious and unreasonable they seem.


Yeah, I'm not sure what nerve I hit with BR, but when I read that "working the system/gravy train/thanks for coming clean" comment I was genuinely shocked.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

NeedWant said:


> I wrote them before and during, but stopped as soon as KU2 was announced. I'm writing novels now, which I prefer anyway.


Yeah, that sounds like a success of the system to me. KU2 has made it easier to justify the switch to novels if you'd been earning a living from $2.99 shorts and KU1 borrows before.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Definitions matter. Here's my take:

Legit: Writing to market, which includes the delivery system and the way you get paid. If novelettes on CD paid for via Bitcoin are the hot thing, write novelettes, put them on CD and sell them for Bitcoin. Presumes that what you are doing is transparent and aimed at pleasing the customer, i.e., traditional free-market competition and success. Provide the most desirable product, make money.

Gaming the system: Changing the content or presentation in such a way that it creates a worse experience for the customer or other content producers, but is beneficial for the individual author, distributor or retailer, in a way that does not necessarily violate TOS or law. Examples from the grocery world: reducing the amount of product without changing the size of the packaging, or deliberately putting high-quality fresh produce atop hidden, poorer, but not rotten, fruit inside a package. Example from the indie publishing world: breaking up a novel into pieces in order to get more payout, significantly inconveniencing the customer. Or: filling the book file with extraneous bonus content, also inconveniencing the customer and taking money from other authors via the common pot without providing the customer with anything of value.

Scamming: Anything that violates TOS or law, usually in order to make money, whether directly or indirectly, almost always resulting in a worse customer experience. Example: click farms, whether to increase rank, increase pages read, increase ad prices by make it falsely appear a website is getting more traffic than it is. Example: taking money from unsuspecting authors and using scam methods on their behalf (which scams everyone).


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## hopecartercan (Jun 19, 2015)

David VanDyke said:


> Definitions matter. Here's my take:
> 
> Legit: Writing to market, which includes the delivery system and the way you get paid. If novelettes on CD paid for via Bitcoin are the hot thing, write novelettes, put them on CD and sell them for Bitcoin. Presumes that what you are doing is transparent and aimed at pleasing the customer, i.e., traditional free-market competition and success. Provide the most desirable product, make money.
> 
> ...


THIS!!!


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

David VanDyke said:


> Definitions matter. Here's my take:
> 
> Legit: Writing to market, which includes the delivery system and the way you get paid. If novelettes on CD paid for via Bitcoin are the hot thing, write novelettes, put them on CD and sell them for Bitcoin. Presumes that what you are doing is transparent and aimed at pleasing the customer, i.e., traditional free-market competition and success. Provide the most desirable product, make money.
> 
> ...


That's a good breakdown.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

I think a lot of the visibility problem rests also on Amazon's shoulders rather than just scammers.

I went looking for Erotica>Paranormal (Angels and Demons) and came up with absolutely nothing in the top 100. Packed in 17 of the top 20 books are boxes sets that have nothing to do with angels and/or demons. Yes, a bare few were paranormal (Evangeline Anderson being legitimate) though I believe Amazon is "padding" the top 100 lists with sellers outside the category.

Under Romance>Paranormal>Angels and Demons, a slew of vampire books - which all have a different category.

Amazon really has a genre problem and I don't think it's just the authors trying to mis-label their books for more reads.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Laran Mithras said:


> Amazon really has a genre problem and I don't think it's just the authors trying to mis-label their books for more reads.


It's because I don't think they really care about categories. I don't think many books on Amazon are found that way.

Amazon expects authors to drive the traffic to their books.

If you're under the top 100 in a cat, as 99% of the books on amazon are, you basically are non-existent. This is why everyone is doing all these crazy things like launching at 99c and spending a ton of money (ie. thousands to break even or even lose) on launch marketing to leverage the HNR list... because at least there's a chance people will see it during that 30-day phase.

This suits amazon just fine as everyone then turns to AMS to try and get visibility.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Laran Mithras said:


> I think a lot of the visibility problem rests also on Amazon's shoulders rather than just scammers.
> 
> I went looking for Erotica>Paranormal (Angels and Demons) and came up with absolutely nothing in the top 100. Packed in 17 of the top 20 books are boxes sets that have nothing to do with angels and/or demons. Yes, a bare few were paranormal (Evangeline Anderson being legitimate) though I believe Amazon is "padding" the top 100 lists with sellers outside the category.
> 
> ...


You are right there. One paragraph in one of my books about Mary Queen of Scots, and my book ended up in the medieval>Scottish section.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

David VanDyke said:


> Definitions matter. Here's my take:
> 
> Legit: Writing to market, which includes the delivery system and the way you get paid. If novelettes on CD paid for via Bitcoin are the hot thing, write novelettes, put them on CD and sell them for Bitcoin. Presumes that what you are doing is transparent and aimed at pleasing the customer, i.e., traditional free-market competition and success. Provide the most desirable product, make money.
> 
> ...


Quoting for clear and understandable truth. No one who wrote erotica shorts in KU to earn money was breaking an rule, law, TOS and they weren't playing around with customer satisfaction because erotica readers were actually getting more of want they'd already been paying 2.99 for, for 9.99 a month. It was a total win for them, but Amazon realized it wasn't going the way they envisioned and so they changed it.

There are people on this very site who behaved abhorrently to short story writers, and especially to those writing erotica, among them some of the so-called top indies. It was a very gleeful thread when KUv2 was announced. You'd think their team had won a championship! Party time, baby, because those nasty short story writers were going to get what was coming to them.

This was done openly, against fellow writers who had done nothing but participate legally, morally and ethically in KU, _following the rules that Amazon themselves set up_. People tried to defend themselves, but honestly? Being an erotica writer doesn't go over well here, and romance writers aren't treated much better. We all know short story writers are scum, right?



> I'd imagine whoever implemented KU was promoted with Jeff's blessing. I'm not in a position to second-guess Jeff. Are you?


Yet, here you are, verging on being nasty and superior about every person who is expressing an opinion you don't agree with. And actually, I can second-guess Jeff Bezos all I want, every day, all day long -- here, so long as it's within forum decorum -- because so far, the First Amendment still stands. You seem to feel free to do the same. Yay. We're on the same page. The Constitution and Bill of Rights rule!


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

she-la-ti-da said:


> Quoting for clear and understandable truth. No one who wrote erotica shorts in KU to earn money was breaking an rule, law, TOS and they weren't playing around with customer satisfaction because erotica readers were actually getting more of want they'd already been paying 2.99 for, for 9.99 a month. It was a total win for them, but Amazon realized it wasn't going the way they envisioned and so they changed it.
> 
> There are people on this very site who behaved abhorrently to short story writers, and especially to those writing erotica, among them some of the so-called top indies. It was a very gleeful thread when KUv2 was announced. You'd think their team had won a championship! Party time, baby, because those nasty short story writers were going to get what was coming to them.
> 
> This was done openly, against fellow writers who had done nothing but participate legally, morally and ethically in KU, _following the rules that Amazon themselves set up_. People tried to defend themselves, but honestly? Being an erotica writer doesn't go over well here, and romance writers aren't treated much better. We all know short story writers are scum, right?


All of this.

I clearly remember how novelists acted toward erotica/shorts authors when KU2 was announced, and it wasn't pretty.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

NeedWant said:


> All of this.
> 
> I clearly remember how novelists acted toward erotica/shorts authors when KU2 was announced, and it wasn't pretty.


My only quibble with this and the previous post is that you're using past tense. A few posts in this thread are pretty good evidence against that. The fact that it's a thread about Amazon's fake book problem, and we all know what that is, and it somehow becomes a condemnation of short erotica writers in KU1, says it all. And in other threads we've got people saying using Vellum is hacking. Back to the old saw that if you're not doing it my way, you're wrong.

We all inherently know if we're doing something wrong. I've never needed anyone else to define right and wrong for me, even when I was a kid. I doubt anybody else here does either.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

she-la-ti-da said:


> Yet, here you are, verging on being nasty and superior about every person who is expressing an opinion you don't agree with. And actually, I can second-guess Jeff Bezos all I want, every day, all day long -- here, so long as it's within forum decorum -- because so far, the First Amendment still stands. You seem to feel free to do the same. Yay. We're on the same page. The Constitution and Bill of Rights rule!


That's a common misconception. The Constitution generally has no bearing on KBoards or any other private entity, and the First Amendment is an excellent example of this principle. You alluded to this very fact when you mentioned forum decorum and when you said--quite rightly--that erotica authors haven't been treated well here. Censorship is perfectly legal on a privately held forum.

Whether or not you _can_ second-guess Jeff, I think we should all be circumspect. He's done a lot for us. KDP and KU have been very good to a lot of authors and a lot of readers, foibles notwithstanding.


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## Guest (Jun 18, 2017)

> Whether or not you _can_ second-guess Jeff, I think we should all be circumspect. He's done a lot for us. KDP and KU have been very good to a lot of authors and a lot of readers, foibles notwithstanding.


I don't see it mentioned often enough, but I assume it's true that Jeff Bezos' wife is an author and that's one of the reasons he initially opened an online bookstore. I don't think he has ever had anything but good will and good intentions for authors, especially beginning and struggling authors.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

icarusxx said:


> I don't see it mentioned often enough, but I assume it's true that Jeff Bezos' wife is an author and that's one of the reasons he initially opened an online bookstore. I don't think he has ever had anything but good will and good intentions for authors, especially beginning and struggling authors.


Huh! I don't think I knew that. She has indeed published two novels (with Knopf and a HarperCollins imprint, if you're wondering).

That's got to be awkward for her, honestly. Lord knows she should be able to take as much time as she wants to write, and she could hire any help she could ever need, but Jeff's a bit of a lightning rod in the industry. Helping indies out has been a part of that.


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## Guest (Jun 18, 2017)

icarusxx said:


> I don't see it mentioned often enough, but I assume it's true that Jeff Bezos' wife is an author and that's one of the reasons he initially opened an online bookstore. I don't think he has ever had anything but good will and good intentions for authors, especially beginning and struggling authors.


She is, but neither of them have indicated that's why he started the site. She was actually just then working her first book when he started the company and they'd only been married a year. He himself said he came up for the idea after being astounded by the about the rapid growth in then fledgling Internet's use and with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that exempted mail order companies from collecting sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence. Coming up with business ideas was literally his job. So then he studied mail order companies looking for a gap, and realized there was no such thing for books, due to the obvious difficulties of making a reasonably sized mail order catalog for every book out there. Perfect match for a starter Internet business  1 2


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Seneca42 said:


> If you're under the top 100 in a cat, as 99% of the books on amazon are, you basically are non-existent.


I made a similar statement on a different thread some time ago and feedback indicated a lot of top-earning authors never made the lists and many didn't advertise much if at all. Hell if I know one way or the other but I'm hoping one can achieve reasonable success "off list."


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Dpock said:


> I made a similar statement on a different thread some time ago and feedback indicated a lot of top-earning authors never made the lists and many didn't advertise much if at all. Hell if I know one way or the other but I'm hoping one can achieve reasonable success "off list."


well if you started early days and you've released a ton of books and continue do so regularly you can make a lot of money without being in the top lists.

But also remember that everyone has a different definition of things around here. Like some people consider "I hardly do any marketing" to mean they spend less than $200 a month. Whereas others consider $200 a month to be the high-end of their marketing.

So grain of salt as always, because a lot can get lost in translation.


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## Guest (Jun 19, 2017)

Dolphin said:


> Don't get bogged down in whether or not it's _fair_. Business doesn't work like that. Last thing you need is to drive yourself nuts worrying about a problem you can't fix, or to make a poor business decision based on emotion and cognitive bias.


Very wise!


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## Lady Runa (May 27, 2012)

As a reader, I report fake books every time I come across them but I'm yet to see any action on any of the titles I reported.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Shelley K said:


> My only quibble with this and the previous post is that you're using past tense. A few posts in this thread are pretty good evidence against that. The fact that it's a thread about Amazon's fake book problem, and we all know what that is, and it somehow becomes a condemnation of short erotica writers in KU1, says it all. And in other threads we've got people saying using Vellum is hacking. Back to the old saw that if you're not doing it my way, you're wrong.
> 
> We all inherently know if we're doing something wrong. I've never needed anyone else to define right and wrong for me, even when I was a kid. I doubt anybody else here does either.


Where did anyone say anything negative about erotica writers? I've looked twice and the comments were either removed or I totally missed them.


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## H.C. (Jul 28, 2016)

This thread sure got derailed quickly by people wanting to squabble!


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Where did anyone say anything negative about erotica writers? I've looked twice and the comments were either removed or I totally missed them.


They're not the type of comments that would be or should be removed. It's the same old contention that people writing erotic shorts during KU1 were doing very bad things. *shrug* Super old at this point.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Shelley K said:


> They're not the type of comments that would be or should be removed. It's the same old contention that people writing erotic shorts during KU1 were doing very bad things. *shrug* Super old at this point.


Who has said that? I haven't seen anyone say that. I've seen people argue that breaking up full books and writing scamphets is bad, but I've yet to see anyone write anything bad about erotica.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Who has said that? I haven't seen anyone say that. I've seen people argue that breaking up full books and writing scamphlets is bad, but I've yet to see anyone write anything bad about erotica.


Saying it's something someone 'comes clean' about is implying wrongdoing in my book. If you don't see that way, then you don't see it that way.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Shelley K said:


> Saying it's something someone 'comes clean' about is implying wrongdoing in my book. If you don't see that way, then you don't see it that way.


Except you wrote that "multiple" posts came out against erotica writers and were negative about them. From what I've seen, everyone has been very careful to stress that they're not talking about erotica but other people doing unethical things, like breaking up books and uploading gibberish that opens at 10 percent.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Except you wrote that "multiple" posts came out against erotica writers and were negative about them. From what I've seen, everyone has been very careful to stress that they're not talking about erotica but other people doing unethical things, like breaking up books and uploading gibberish that opens at 10 percent.


I said "a few." It may have been a few posts from that particular exchange, I don't remember, and I don't have time to go through all six pages to find them right now. The 'come clean' post is what sprung to mind as an example that I didn't have to look up.

If I scoured back through and discovered that I was wrong, that it was one post, I'd mea culpa that. But we both know it wouldn't take much searching here to find plenty of examples of what I'm talking about.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Shelley K said:


> I said "a few." It may have been a few posts from that particular exchange, I don't remember, and I don't have time to go through all six pages to find them right now. The 'come clean' post is what sprung to mind as an example that I didn't have to look up.
> 
> If I scoured back through and discovered that I was wrong, that it was one post, I'd mea culpa that. But we both know it wouldn't take much searching here to find plenty of examples of what I'm talking about.


I've been through the thread three times searching and can't seem to find any posts bashing erotica.


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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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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Alix Nichols said:


> Given that many legit boxed sets have a flat cover and don't list the individual books in their title, how can a machine tell which is which?something... ☺


It's actually quite easy. They have plagiarism detectors. I honestly think that's why we've been hearing about an increase in copyright requests. Something is coming down the pike would be my guess. Basically the bots scan the text uploaded, and if it shows up more than once in KU, there's a problem.


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## Morgan Worth (May 6, 2017)

Dolphin said:


> That's a common misconception. The Constitution generally has no bearing on KBoards or any other private entity, and the First Amendment is an excellent example of this principle. You alluded to this very fact when you mentioned forum decorum and when you said--quite rightly--that erotica authors haven't been treated well here. Censorship is perfectly legal on a privately held forum.
> 
> Whether or not you _can_ second-guess Jeff, I think we should all be circumspect. *He's done a lot for us. *KDP and KU have been very good to a lot of authors and a lot of readers, foibles notwithstanding.


He's done a lot to grow his business. Sometimes that benefits us. That's very different from doing a lot FOR us.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Without Amazon, where would most of us be?

Hopefully it gets better.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

Morgan Worth said:


> He's done a lot to grow his business. Sometimes that benefits us. That's very different from doing a lot FOR us.


I dunno what more you can expect from a capitalist in a capitalist economy. Nobody was going to build Amazon for us purely out of the goodness of his own heart. Anybody who'd tried wouldn't have succeeded nearly as well, because we benefit from Amazon's ruthless, expansionistic agenda.

Borders never grew out of being a bookseller, and look how they ended up.


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## Morgan Worth (May 6, 2017)

Dolphin said:


> I dunno what more you can expect from a capitalist in a capitalist economy. Nobody was going to build Amazon for us purely out of the goodness of his own heart. Anybody who'd tried wouldn't have succeeded nearly as well, because we benefit from Amazon's ruthless, expansionistic agenda.
> 
> Borders never grew out of being a bookseller, and look how they ended up.


I don't expect more. It's not his job to do anything for us. That was kind of my point.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I've been through the thread three times searching and can't seem to find any posts bashing erotica.


If you don't think the one I remembered off the top of my head is doing that, then we simply have different perspectives on it and aren't going to agree about it. There's nothing to be done about that.


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## Guest (Jun 19, 2017)

Slightly off the argument on hand and back towards the first of this, my daughter downloaded a free book two days ago on her kindle. Last night she was telling me, that while she really enjoyed the second book in this book, she was annoyed that only the first chapter was at the beginning then she was directed to go to page something like 372 ( I don't remember the number) to read the rest of the first book. I've read a lot of you guys complaining about this, but it's the first time I have actually seen it. I know she downloaded it from the top 100 free list by genre  because I showed her how to find that the same day she downloaded the book, after she expressed issues finding free books. 

I personally hardly ever download free books because a few months back I ran into three or four in a row that were single chapters from a dozen different books geared at getting me to buy the full version of each. That being said I have downloaded a few that were legit books in the past that I did continue on to read and purchase  the sequels, but these experiences certainly can put a sour taste in readers mouth.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Lauriejoyeltahs said:


> Slightly off the argument on hand and back towards the first of this, my daughter downloaded a free book two days ago on her kindle. Last night she was telling me, that while she really enjoyed the second book in this book, she was annoyed that only the first chapter was at the beginning then she was directed to go to page something like 372 ( I don't remember the number) to read the rest of the first book.


Wow, that is low. Makes me angry.


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## Salome Golding (Apr 17, 2017)

NeedWant said:


> When KU1 came around, a lot of people (including me) jumped on the erotica shorts bandwagon. Some quit jobs based on the money they were making, and then Amazon took it all away with, what, a 15 day notice or something like that? Sorry, but people had a right to be upset. I can't say I was surprised when it happened, I was just surprised it happened so damn fast. "Oh by the way, next month we're introducing KU2! Good luck!" People had a right to be upset. You're free to think that people were foolish to think it would last, but legitimate authors had a right to be upset when Amazon screwed them over without much warning.


People had a *right* to be upset? "Amazon *screwed* them over?" Wow. How? Why? By not paying them money they hadn't earned yet, because it did not make financial sense to Amazon, a for-profit business? Had these people entered into a contract with Amazon whereby Amazon promised that they would forever more be able to earn their living from Amazon? Had Amazon gotten down on bended knee and whispered in their ears promises of a bed of Benjamins if only they went off into the sunset with Bezos? Or did the terms and conditions of a loose commercial relationship simply change?

I am astounded that anyone would think that Amazon owed them a living and that they were entitled to it.


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## Salome Golding (Apr 17, 2017)

Gentleman Zombie said:


> I think people are lumping KU1 shorts writers together with KU1 scammers - and that's not really fair.
> ...
> 
> But Amanda is right, there others who were publishing gibberish books just to get the 10% payout. But please don't lump all shorts writers into that boat, because it's not fair.


But see, no one did that. I saw someone post critically about those who during KU1 purposely & artificially split up a book into multiple books to produce pamphlets set to open at 10% so that each part would trigger a payout.

Then people came in the thread saying, "Are you saying that writing erotic shorts during KU1 was unethical" Which sent the discussion on a long, contentious detour littered with red herrings and straw men. Response ricocheted against response so that people did find something to argue about.


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## Salome Golding (Apr 17, 2017)

Dolphin said:


> I'm not trying to badger you. The point I'm trying to make is that none of this is clearcut, and ethical arguments are difficult to sustain in this territory.


I think Laran made it clear that he/she will do what *feels* ethical to him/her (Apologies, I'm not sure of gender). I don't think Laran is trying to make any kind of "ethical argument" or arrive at what is right by consensus or philosophical debate, so I'm not sure of the relevance of the Socratic questions in your response. Laran will listen to his / her own "inner ear".

For me personally, the test would be: Does this move benefit only me, or am I delivering value at the standard to which I hold myself, and the value that my customers have paid for?

Everyone has their own test.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Salome Golding said:


> I am astounded that anyone would think that Amazon owed them a living and that they were entitled to it.


I am astounded you're astounded at something I never said.

If Amazon suddenly announced that next month a page read will be worth 0.0005, you don't think authors will have a right to be upset and feel like they've just been screwed over? And since KU is a three month exclusivity agreement between the author and Amazon, a three month heads up to any drastic changes to the program would be nice.



Salome Golding said:


> But see, no one did that. I saw someone post critically about those who during KU1 purposely & artificially split up a book into multiple books to produce pamphlets set to open at 10% so that each part would trigger a payout.


Amanda lumped serial writers in with people doing that.



> Then people came in the thread saying, "Are you saying that writing erotic shorts during KU1 was unethical" Which sent the discussion on a long road littered with red herrings and straw men. Response ricocheted against response so that people did find something to argue about.


BR has ignored multiple questions about the "coming clean" comment after I said I wrote erotica shorts during KU1. Unless BR decides to explain what s/he meant, I'm going to take that comment as it sounded: that writing shorts was somehow unethical or shameful during KU1.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Lauriejoyeltahs said:


> Slightly off the argument on hand and back towards the first of this, my daughter downloaded a free book two days ago on her kindle. Last night she was telling me, that while she really enjoyed the second book in this book, she was annoyed that only the first chapter was at the beginning then she was directed to go to page something like 372 ( I don't remember the number) to read the rest of the first book. I've read a lot of you guys complaining about this, but it's the first time I have actually seen it. I know she downloaded it from the top 100 free list by genre because I showed her how to find that the same day she downloaded the book, after she expressed issues finding free books.
> 
> I personally hardly ever download free books because a few months back I ran into three or four in a row that were single chapters from a dozen different books geared at getting me to buy the full version of each. That being said I have downloaded a few that were legit books in the past that I did continue on to read and purchase the sequels, but these experiences certainly can put a sour taste in readers mouth.


That's something I'd report to Amazon on the book page for sure and also by complaining to kindle CS and maybe even an email to [email protected]


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

NeedWant said:


> Amanda lumped serial writers in with people doing that.


No, my exact quote was: "People were purposely writing 20-page serials with no ending and no story structure just in the hope that people would open it so they could get a payout."
I have no problem with true serials. True serials are an art form of their own. What we were getting was not true serials. Breaking a book apart just so you could get a higher payout, was not a true serial. I have no problem with erotica (I like reading it a great deal, in fact) and I have no problem with true serials. I do have a problem with scamphlets designed to open at 10 percent. I do have a problem with breaking a book apart. I have a problem with bonus books and padding titles with extra content just to squeeze more of a payment out (although I'm hearing rumblings that something seems to be in the works for that and I'm intrigued to find out more).


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> No, my exact quote was: "People were purposely writing 20-page serials with no ending and no story structure just in the hope that people would open it so they could get a payout."
> I have no problem with true serials. True serials are an art form of their own. What we were getting was not true serials. Breaking a book apart just so you could get a higher payout, was not a true serial. I have no problem with erotica (I like reading it a great deal, in fact) and I have no problem with true serials. I do have a problem with scamphlets designed to open at 10 percent. I do have a problem with breaking a book apart. I have a problem with bonus books and padding titles with extra content just to squeeze more of a payment out (although I'm hearing rumblings that something seems to be in the works for that and I'm intrigued to find out more).


See, I'm not even sure what "no ending" (cliffhangers?) and "no structure" means in this context? And what's a "true serial" anyway?

IMO, if the serials you have a problem with were popular, readers obviously thought they were good enough. If they weren't popular, then I don't really see the big deal? It's not like those authors would be getting paid anyway.

That would be akin to me saying that novelists whose novels I think are terrible are somehow scamming KU2. But if readers are borrowing/buying and liking those novels in droves, then obviously they think those novels are good enough.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

I don't think there really is a big deal about it. I'm an erotica author who hated endless chapters offered individually, so I didn't write them.

Amazon wanted to make the reader experience better and cut back on the deluge of instant royalty book openings. While it might have been within the rules at the time, I considered it shameful. Unethical.

But, that was just my conscience and opinion. Things changed and some authors who were relying on all that cash got hurt. Well, we all have to adapt.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

NeedWant said:


> See, I'm not even sure what "no ending" (cliffhangers?) and "no structure" means in this context? And what's a "true serial" anyway?
> 
> IMO, if the serials you have a problem with were popular, readers obviously thought they were good enough. If they weren't popular, then I don't really see the big deal? It's not like those authors would be getting paid anyway.
> 
> That would be akin to me saying that novelists whose novels I think are terrible are somehow scamming KU2. But if readers are borrowing/buying and liking those novels in droves, then obviously they think those novels are good enough.


A true serial may very well have a cliffhanger but it also wraps up the conflict from that particular installment by the end of the book. Authors were designing them to be so short that they opened at 10 percent. So, if a reader did have a problem, it wouldn't matter if they quit reading because they would've already triggered a payout. True serials are like episodes of television. They might have a cliffhanger but they have a full story all to themselves in that particular episode. That's not what we saw. That's not what happens when a book is broken apart in to chapters. If you don't agree, that's fine. A lot of people didn't agree, which is why we had the change. I personally found it unethical (and no, I'm not calling erotica or true serials unethical, just the scamming tactics people used under KU1 to trigger extra payouts). Clearly Amazon found it to be a problem, too, because now we have KU2. Amazon finds the bonus books to be a problem in KU2, so changes are coming. Whether that will lead to KU3 or just a tweak to KU2, who knows. I truly felt sorry for those who were taken by surprise by what happened with KU1. From Amazon's point of view, though, I understood why they did it when they did it. If they announced they were changing things say in two months, they would've gotten two months of screaming complaints and threats. By truncating the timetable they still got the complaints but it was already in motion. It was terrible for the authors being decimated. It's going to be terrible when the next change decimates bottom lines, too, including mine. It will happen, though.
For the record, I think basing your business practices on KU for the long term is a bad decision. I certainly don't expect it to be there for the long haul. It's never going to stay exactly the same way for a long period of time because people are determined to scam the system (in multiple ways). Believe it or not, Amazon is trying to build a solid ecosystem for KU and the scammers are forcing their hand and causing sweeping edicts and nuclear reactions. So, if you want to do something short term with KU in mind, that's great. That money is not a guarantee, though. That's why I focus on my books and sales and consider KU money a great bonus that I'm willing to sock away for my retirement fund. Making a long-term plan around a program like KU, though, is not something I'm doing for myself because it's too unstable.


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## notjohn (Sep 9, 2016)

> if the serials you have a problem with were popular, readers obviously thought they were good enough.


Okay, so Stephen King breaks his latest thriller into 100 parts. A reader enjoys it and downloads the episodes at the rate of ten a day for ten days. So Mr King (under the old system) got a payout of $200. The reader is satisfied, or he wouldn't have done it; Mr King obviously is satisfied. So Jeff Bezos should have been prohibited from changing the system?

If you don't like the way KU is shaping up, you can always get out of Select and sell the book only, and sell it as well through Barnes & Noble, Apple, and the lesser players. That's what I do, and I make more money that way.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> A true serial may very well have a cliffhanger but it also wraps up the conflict from that particular installment by the end of the book. Authors were designing them to be so short that they opened at 10 percent. So, if a reader did have a problem, it wouldn't matter if they quit reading because they would've already triggered a payout. True serials are like episodes of television. They might have a cliffhanger but they have a full story all to themselves in that particular episode. That's not what we saw. That's not what happens when a book is broken apart in to chapters. If you don't agree, that's fine. A lot of people didn't agree, which is why we had the change. I personally found it unethical (and no, I'm not calling erotica or true serials unethical, just the scamming tactics people used under KU1 to trigger extra payouts). Clearly Amazon found it to be a problem, too, because now we have KU2. Amazon finds the bonus books to be a problem in KU2, so changes are coming. Whether that will lead to KU3 or just a tweak to KU2, who knows. I truly felt sorry for those who were taken by surprise by what happened with KU1. From Amazon's point of view, though, I understood why they did it when they did it. If they announced they were changing things say in two months, they would've gotten two months of screaming complaints and threats. By truncating the timetable they still got the complaints but it was already in motion. It was terrible for the authors being decimated. It's going to be terrible when the next change decimates bottom lines, too, including mine. It will happen, though.


I can get how someone might think arbitrarily breaking up a book into parts is unethical. I don't get how writing serials so that they would open at 10% is seen as unethical, though.

You say you have no problem with erotica shorts but a lot of those are 5k words and I'm pretty sure open around 10% or close to it. So if writer A always wrote 5k shorts even before KU1, should they up the word count of their shorts so as not to take advantage of the 10% thing? Or can they write like they always have? And if writer B comes along and decides that 5k shorts are more profitable so they'll write those, is their behavior unethical because they specifically wrote those shorts to take advantage of the 10% payout?

All these writers have to have a good enough product to attract readers with. And if they want to keep readers coming back, they have to provide good stories as well.



> For the record, I think basing your business practices on KU for the long term is a bad decision. I certainly don't expect it to be there for the long haul. It's never going to stay exactly the same way for a long period of time because people are determined to scam the system (in multiple ways). Believe it or not, Amazon is trying to build a solid ecosystem for KU and the scammers are forcing their hand and causing sweeping edicts and nuclear reactions. So, if you want to do something short term with KU in mind, that's great. That money is not a guarantee, though. That's why I focus on my books and sales and consider KU money a great bonus that I'm willing to sock away for my retirement fund. Making a long-term plan around a program like KU, though, is not something I'm doing for myself because it's too unstable.


That's a very smart way to go about it. I agree that KU is not something writers should rely on. I think the introduction of KU2 made that clear to a lot of writers.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

notjohn said:


> If you don't like the way KU is shaping up, you can always get out of Select and sell the book only, and sell it as well through Barnes & Noble, Apple, and the lesser players. That's what I do, and I make more money that way.


You make more money than who? Do you make more than the $40,000 a month that I know one UF author makes, nearly 70% of which is from page reads? Do you make more than Amanda Lee, who also has her books in Select? I doubt it. Since you think everyone but you should disclose their books for everyone to investigate, there is no way of telling, is there?

Not everyone can make Select work for them, but those who don't make it work, don't jump on every opportunity they can to denounce the program. They keep quiet, wish the others luck and find another way. Perhaps that's a system you should try.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

notjohn said:


> Okay, so Stephen King breaks his latest thriller into 100 parts. A reader enjoys it and downloads the episodes at the rate of ten a day for ten days. So Mr King (under the old system) got a payout of $200. The reader is satisfied, or he wouldn't have done it; Mr King obviously is satisfied. So Jeff Bezos should have been prohibited from changing the system?
> 
> If you don't like the way KU is shaping up, you can always get out of Select and sell the book only, and sell it as well through Barnes & Noble, Apple, and the lesser players. That's what I do, and I make more money that way.


Serials are meant to be shorter. They're not comparable to breaking up a novel into parts.

Also, I don't think Amazon should have kept KU1 if it wasn't going as planned. I do think writers deserved a heads up. Announcing it 15 days in advance was not only shameful but unethical as well.

As a novelist, I'm fine with KU at the moment, so don't plan on going wide unless they change it for the worse again.


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## Salome Golding (Apr 17, 2017)

NeedWant said:


> If Amazon suddenly announced that next month a page read will be worth 0.0005, you don't think authors will have a right to be upset and feel like they've just been screwed over?


Being "screwed over" implies some kind of malicious intent or betrayal. The move from KU1 to KU2 was a bit different from the scenario you describe above, which is what you were talking about and what I specifically responded to. I saw Amazon's action in moving from KU1 to KU2 as simply a business decision to move from a model that was unsustainable financially for them and not delivering value to their customers. Where chopping up of books was talking place, why would they continue to make multiple payments of $1.30 on a book that they could have paid a royalty of 70% of 99 cents for a straight sale? There could be no justification for that choice in a for-profit company operating in a capitalist economy.



NeedWant said:


> Amanda lumped serial writers in with people doing that.
> 
> BR has ignored multiple questions about the "coming clean" comment after I said I wrote erotica shorts during KU1. Unless BR decides to explain what s/he meant, I'm going to take that comment as it sounded: that writing shorts was somehow unethical or shameful during KU1.


Actually, I don't think Amanda did that. You quoted her comment just before your first post, and I was left thinking, "How is this a response to what Amanda posted" 

BR's comment was out of bounds but it came *after* your initial comment defending yourself against an accusation no one had made.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

Shelley K said:


> My only quibble with this and the previous post is that you're using past tense. A few posts in this thread are pretty good evidence against that. The fact that it's a thread about Amazon's fake book problem, and we all know what that is, and it somehow becomes a condemnation of short erotica writers in KU1, says it all. And in other threads we've got people saying using Vellum is hacking. Back to the old saw that if you're not doing it my way, you're wrong.
> 
> We all inherently know if we're doing something wrong. I've never needed anyone else to define right and wrong for me, even when I was a kid. I doubt anybody else here does either.


True, past tense when it's still happening. My bad!



> Whether or not you can second-guess Jeff, I think we should all be circumspect. He's done a lot for us. KDP and KU have been very good to a lot of authors and a lot of readers, foibles notwithstanding.


OMG, really? We need to be circumspect? What's he going to do, close Amazon because people aren't being completely nice? The program is faulty, the bots are faulty, there are issues, and there's nothing wrong with talking about it. Goodness knows, it's not like the folks over at the Zon don't know this stuff is happening. We aren't sharing any state secrets here.

By the way, forum decorum is not censorship.

Amanda, the stuff about erotica authors being dissed that I was talking about wasn't in this thread, though there have been statements made that weren't really supportive. I was using it as an example for something else. Sorry for any confusion. But, ever since I've been a member, people have been down on erotica writers. It's not as bad as it used to be, but then, most of them have left kboards since there's no more linking to erotic content and the discussion of it is limited.

The truth remains that people were treated horribly, insulted and called scammers, simply for writing short fiction. Someone at Amazon set it up so the KUv1 payment started after ten percent. Should people have cheated and had books skipping to that point? No, I think it was dishonest. Why didn't someone see that it would happen? Why didn't someone realize that short fiction was going to flood KU for the flat payment? Many of us foresaw the issue. Even I did, and I'm not that savvy about such stuff.

People tried to point out that KUv2 was going to encourage people to pad books in whatever way, and to figure out other ways of getting something over on Amazon. It wasn't that hard to see it. Why didn't Amazon see it? They act like this is some surprise, or else deny it's happening, but it's obvious to us and to readers.

For the record, I never did anything scammy in KU. My books opened at the beginning, it was clear what they were, there were no bonus junk, no padding, no weird translation crap. They weren't double-spaced, formatted with huge fonts, nor any other trick to make huge numbers of KENPC. People knew what they were getting, and they could download/borrow/buy as they pleased. If they pleased.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Salome Golding said:


> Being "screwed over" implies some kind of malicious intent or betrayal. The move from KU1 to KU2 was a bit different from the scenario you describe above, which is what you were talking about and what I specifically responded to. I saw Amazon's action in moving from KU1 to KU2 as simply a business decision to move from a model that was unsustainable financially for them and not delivering value to their customers. Where chopping up of books was talking place, why would they continue to make multiple payments of $1.30 on a book that they could have paid a royalty of 70% of 99 cents for a straight sale? There could be no justification for that choice in a for-profit company operating in a capitalist economy.


There doesn't have to malicious intent for someone to _feel_ screwed over. Also, it was a deep pay cut (hence my example) because most erotica sold at $2.99 a pop not $0.99 (of which the author gets 35%) before KU1 came along.

I'm not begrudging Amazon for the change, but I am holding them responsible for the way it was made. And I am holding them responsible for paying by the page when they don't even have a way to properly count one.



> Actually, I don't think Amanda did that. You quoted her comment just before your first post, and I was left thinking, "How is this a response to what Amanda posted"


Not sure what post you're referring to here. You can look at the serial discussion above on this page. Amanda feels that there are strict rules that serials must follow. The same could be said about novels, so I don't really see that as a useful example.



> BR's comment was out of bounds but it came *after* your initial comment defending yourself against an accusation no one had made.


I'm not sure what initial comment you're talking about where I'm defending myself. Could you quote me?

For clarity's sake, my main problem when someone says people are scamming KU1 by writing shorts/serials that open at 10% is that they would never say that someone deciding to write longer books in KU2 so that they could get a higher payout is scamming.

KU1 rewarded shorts. So people wrote them.

KU2 rewards longer books. So people write them.

As long as both writers write books that readers actually want to read, I don't think either of them are scamming the system. They're working within it.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

NeedWant said:


> For clarity's sake, my main problem when someone says people are scamming KU1 by writing shorts/serials that open at 10% is that they would never say that someone deciding to write longer books in KU2 so that they could get a higher payout is scamming.


I actually think padding is equally wrong. I think we should be putting out the best product we can. That means over-writing is just as bad. I think we should be focusing on putting out a good product, whether short or long, and making that our main effort. A good product is not taking a book and breaking it down into chapters. A good product is not taking a book and adding eight bonus books at the end to increase payout. A good product is not increasing word count just to increase word count.
I think you'll find, in the end, when all of the KU hoopla no longer matters and is nothing but a memory, the people still standing will be the ones who focused on product versus trying to manipulate one system (or the other) to get as much money as possible. That's why I strictly focus on the writing and don't let the other stuff derail me. That's not my aim or goal.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I actually think padding is equally wrong. I think we should be putting out the best product we can. That means over-writing is just as bad. I think we should be focusing on putting out a good product, whether short or long, and making that our main effort. A good product is not taking a book and breaking it down into chapters. A good product is not taking a book and adding eight bonus books at the end to increase payout. A good product is not increasing word count just to increase word count.
> I think you'll find, in the end, when all of the KU hoopla no longer matters and is nothing but a memory, the people still standing will be the ones who focused on product versus trying to manipulate one system (or the other) to get as much money as possible. That's why I strictly focus on the writing and don't let the other stuff derail me. That's not my aim or goal.


That implies that those writing longer are padding. Some people are just writing longer. Just like under KU1 some people wrote shorter, but those books were still satisfying to its readerships.

As long as the readers are getting what they want, I don't see a problem with it. Fiction is subjective anyway, so while I might think someone is padding their books with boring prose, if the readers aren't complaining, then who am I to judge? For example, some people love long descriptive passages and talk of what the characters are eating and wearing on every other page. I hate those kinds of books, but as long as there are readers that like them, I don't consider that scamming.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

NeedWant said:


> That implies that those writing longer are padding. Some people are just writing longer. Just like under KU1 some people wrote shorter, but those books were still satisfying to its readerships.
> 
> As long as the readers are getting what they want, I don't see a problem with it. Fiction is subjective anyway, so while I might think someone is padding their books with boring prose, if the readers aren't complaining, then who am I to judge? For example, some people love long descriptive passages and talk of what the characters are eating and wearing on every other page. I hate those kinds of books, but as long as there are readers that like them, I don't consider that scamming.


And there are other people taking all contractions out of their books and purposely trying to artificially inflate KENPC through other means. As I said, I have no problem with people who are trying to put out a good product -- whether good or bad. My problem comes in when people decide to use "tricks" to garner more money from the KU pot.


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## ......~...... (Jul 4, 2015)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> And there are other people taking all contractions out of their books and purposely trying to artificially inflate KENPC through other means. As I said, I have no problem with people who are trying to put out a good product -- whether good or bad. My problem comes in when people decide to use "tricks" to garner more money from the KU pot.


Yeah, I can understand not being fond of bonus books and people breaking up books. I'm not arguing against that. I just don't consider writing shorter for KU1 or longer for KU2 to be tricking anyone. As long as they're putting out product readers want, I'm not going to judge them no matter what my personal opinion is of their work.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

I think most who point to scammers aren't pointing to longer writers - they're pointing to those who write an 80 page book, then stuff it to 1500 pages with other stories.

Both short and longer novel authors have seen benefit. Then there are those that "game" the system deliberately. It's the gaming none of us like.


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## Guest (Jun 21, 2017)

> I think most who point to scammers aren't pointing to longer writers - they're pointing to those who write an 80 page book, then stuff it to 1500 pages with other stories.


Is the reader harmed by getting a free anthology as a bonus? Who is harmed except authors who don't have 1500 pages of stories to give away? So-called "gaming" by authors is an old method of increasing revenue. Pulp fiction writers wrote under a half dozen or a dozen pseuodyms and the readers never knew it was not different authors. Publishers have been padding print books with excerpts for hundreds of years. At present in trade publishing, editors maximize profits by adjusting type size and margin size to get a book to 300 pages rather than 250 pages to allow a higher price bracket. In summary, I don't see anything wrong in providing an anthology as a bonus. No one is forcing the reader to read the anthology. Maybe the complaint you talk about originates in an absence of enough stories to make a bonus. If Patterson sells a book on AZ that consists only of the opening pages of the chapters in a book and readers buy the book, maybe a full legit anthology as a gift to readers is fine.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

icarusxx said:


> Is the reader harmed by getting a free anthology as a bonus? Who is harmed except authors who don't have 1500 pages of stories to give away? .... In summary, I don't see anything wrong in providing an anthology as a bonus. No one is forcing the reader to read the anthology. Maybe the complaint you talk about originates in an absence of enough stories to make a bonus. If Patterson sells a book on AZ that consists only of the opening pages of the chapters in a book and readers buy the book, maybe a full legit anthology as a gift to readers is fine.


Stuffing the entire contents of your catalog over and over into your single titles to pad them out in order to get the extra page reads is indeed gaming the system, both in intent and in undifferentiated content, which is a violation of the T&Cs. Now if you're talking about selling ONE big ebook with all your content stuffed in, and that's the only title you're selling and customers can only buy your content once and you only get paid once and you declare up front that it's an anthology or a box set, then that's fine. Stuff away. But when the same book shows up in an author's catalog of 10 titles 10 times, that's when there's an issue.

Scammers and gamers hurt the entire ecosystem with those types of shady practices.

You seem to think the people complaining are the folk short on content. Have you SEEN Amanda's catalog of titles? I myself manage 90 titles with a combined KENPC of 50,000. While 17 of those titles are single-author box sets, every one of those box sets contains between 2 and 4 books. Not one of them has more than 4. _Could _I go through and create 30, 40 or 50 more boxes, reusing the same content over and over? Sure, and I could have them all published by the weekend. I _could _have been gaming the system with 50 extra boxes for the past 2 years. But I don't and I haven't. Even though you bet I know _how _to make money gaming and scamming, screwing fellow authors, thumbing my nose at Amazon and laughing at our customers.

But a good many of us know where that ethics line is. You might be surprised to find that many of the most vocal speaking out against bad behavior are the ones who could likely make the most money at it.

Until Amazon comes along and shuts them down.


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## Guest (Jun 21, 2017)

PhoenixS said:


> Stuffing the entire contents of your catalog over and over into your single titles to pad them out in order to get the extra page reads is indeed gaming the system, both in intent and in undifferentiated content, which is a violation of the T&Cs. Now if you're talking about selling ONE big ebook with all your content stuffed in, and that's the only title you're selling and customers can only buy your content once and you only get paid once and you declare up front that it's an anthology or a box set, then that's fine. Stuff away. But when the same book shows up in an author's catalog of 10 titles 10 times, that's when there's an issue.
> 
> Scammers and gamers hurt the entire ecosystem with those types of shady practices.
> 
> ...


I don't see the logic here. I don't recall anyone complaining about "stuffed" books in KU1. In KU1 the complint was that books that were too short were gaming the system because the system paid on mere downloads. Now in KU2 the complaint is that books that are too long are gaming the system because the system pays on page reads. Of course there are authors with large backlists who choose not to give away their backlists as free bonuses. Does that make them "ethical". I think it makes more sense to consider if the reader is getting their money's worth, if they know what they are getting and if they are not forced to read anything. Everyone is free to make up their own "ethics", but that does not mean their ethics are always consistent with other people's ethics. Samuel Johnson (I think) once said that anyone who does not write for money is a fool. Yet there are many people who do not write for money and it's their privilege. But to call people who do write for money and for maximum money scammers and gamers is senseless. If you think KU2 as it now exists is unfair to some authors, get AZ to change the system of payouts. But I don't think it makes sense to call people names because their attitude about getting paid for their work differs from yours.


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## Guest (Jun 21, 2017)

We also need to remember that every title that is in KU is in Select and also being sold for royalty. Bonus material out of KU is free to the reader and free to AZ. It's one way to use a backlist, especially one that is moribund. That the title is also offered in KU is the demand by Amazon. I see no sense to call authors names because one disagrees with how they offer and sell their work.


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## 555aaa (Jan 28, 2014)

I think the KU2 padding thing's interesting and all but as far as the Free store goes, today there's a raft of tiny non-fiction books in the top twenty or so - if you go look at the alsoboughts on those, they also have shown up in the top 20 or so in free in the past few weeks. Like this book which is 12 pages long. These are not new release books either.
This book is #10 in free in the US store
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019QYW88M

I thought we were all done with all that a couple of years ago.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

icarusxx said:


> I don't see the logic here. I don't recall anyone complaining about "stuffed" books in KU1. In KU1 the complint was that books that were too short were gaming the system because the system paid on mere downloads. Now in KU2 the complaint is that books that are too long are gaming the system because the system pays on page reads. Of course there are authors with large backlists who choose not to give away their backlists as free bonuses. Does that make them "ethical". I think it makes more sense to consider if the reader is getting their money's worth, if they know what they are getting and if they are not forced to read anything. Everyone is free to make up their own "ethics", but that does not mean their ethics are always consistent with other people's ethics. Samuel Johnson (I think) once said that anyone who does not write for money is a fool. Yet there are many people who do not write for money and it's their privilege. But to call people who do write for money and for maximum money scammers and gamers is senseless. If you think KU2 as it now exists is unfair to some authors, get AZ to change the system of payouts. But I don't think it makes sense to call people names because their attitude about getting paid for their work differs from yours.


Make no mistake, customers are complaining ... and loudly. Amazon will be tackling it. When is the question, not if. Readers feel they're being lied to about book length and don't like finishing their new book at 40 percent. It's become a big deal and they're complaining a lot to Amazon.
And, yes, it's totally scamming. As for Amazon changing the method of payouts, I think it's clear that's coming, too.

On a side note, whether it's related to this problem or a series of glitches on the site, we've checked a couple of these stuffed books and they have some sort of thing where they're not registering pages after the content that's listed on the cover of the book. So, if book two is the content listed and the back is stuffed with book one and eight other books in different series, only book two is registering reads and the reads stop tallying after that. Like book two ends at page 198 and the hundreds of pages after that simply don't register when you flip through after that. It is by no means happening to every book (in fact, I've only been able to find the phenomenon in three so far) and has only been tested with a handful of books. Whether that indicates this is something Amazon has in beta and is testing or it's a glitch related to the other stuff, though, I have no idea. I was under the impression they would simply ban bonus books but they may be working on something to detect bonus books instead. Either way, I don't think they're ready to go site wide with whatever they're doing.

Amazon wants a healthy KU ecosystem. The bonus books skew payouts, which causes authors to leave, which is the last thing Amazon wants. Now that readers are screaming about the practice, too, Amazon will probably move faster to solve the problem.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

icarusxx said:


> We also need to remember that every title that is in KU is in Select and also being sold for royalty. Bonus material out of KU is free to the reader and free to AZ. It's one way to use a backlist, especially one that is moribund. That the title is also offered in KU is the demand by Amazon. I see no sense to call authors names because one disagrees with how they offer and sell their work.


I'll reiterate that if an author has ten titles out and each of those titles contains the same books, that's undifferentiated content and a violation of the T&Cs. Your ethics and mine apparently differ. What name would you call folk who intentionally violate the terms they agreed to?



555aaa said:


> I thought we were all done with all that a couple of years ago.


That's a children's book (and I've seen it and others like it more times than I'd like to think about in the Top 20 Free with no ad footprint or other promotional cues). There's a separate All-Star fund for paying out bonus money for children's books precisely because of their naturally low page counts. You'll note Betty there has managed to get several books into the Top 10 (the one linked to is #3 Free right now -- only takes about 15-20,000 DLs to hit #3 on a good day), a feat she seems to have managed every few weeks going on a year-and-a-half now at least. And one of the reasons for David's post referenced in the OP.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Doglover said:


> You make more money than who? Do you make more than the $40,000 a month that I know one UF author makes, nearly 70% of which is from page reads? Do you make more than Amanda Lee, who also has her books in Select? I doubt it. Since you think everyone but you should disclose their books for everyone to investigate, there is no way of telling, is there?
> 
> Not everyone can make Select work for them, but those who don't make it work, don't jump on every opportunity they can to denounce the program. They keep quiet, wish the others luck and find another way. Perhaps that's a system you should try.


I don't see a thing in what notjohn wrote that warrants this reply, Doglover. There is no attack on KU. He was simply rebutting NeedWant's assertion that readers must've been satisfied with the serials KU1 encouraged.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Becca Mills said:


> I don't see a thing in what notjohn wrote that warrants this reply, Doglover. There is no attack on KU. He was simply rebutting NeedWant's assertion that readers must've been satisfied with the serials KU1 encouraged.


Err, no. He was doing what he has been doing ever since he took his own books out of select - telling everyone else they shouldn't be in it. He even called one poster a liar when she stated her earnings for KU downloads. Perhaps you haven't had the pleasure.


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## Gentleman Zombie (May 30, 2011)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> *I think you'll find, in the end, when all of the KU hoopla no longer matters and is nothing but a memory, the people still standing will be the ones who focused on product versus trying to manipulate one system (or the other) to get as much money as possible. That's why I strictly focus on the writing and don't let the other stuff derail me. That's not my aim or goal.*


Right now the entire self-publishing industry is depending one company (Amazon) to keep it afloat. The people left standing will be the ones who don't rely on gimmicks, trend following, etc. Will KU last forever? I don't know. I do know that the shift from KU1 to KU2 should serve as a lesson. One policy shift devastated a bunch of writers. For myself, I didn't adapt and my writing career descended into shambles. There were other factors, but not being willing to adapt was my biggest Achilles heel.

KU isn't going to stay the way it is. It can't. And this is where Amanda is 100% right.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

LilyBLily said:


> It is not a "bonus" to falsely describe what you're selling/delivering. You're depriving me of my right to choose what enters my devices and my home. I don't see a difference between this kind of trickery and links that redirect me to p0rn sites. I don't want your huge files, and I don't want content I know nothing about in advance. Let me assure you that strictly as a reader, I would despise an author who tried to pull this sort of thing on me. The fact that I personally would not lose any money because you stuffed 10 other unnamed books--or god knows what else--into one book I opted to read, is immaterial. This is rank dishonesty.


Exactly. If you order a physical product, and a bunch of miscellaneous weird crap shows up inside the same box, some of which is still alive, rotten and perhaps disease-ridden--or even simply objectionable (Mama? What's this?"), you would not be happy. At the very least, it forces you to clean up the mess.

Nothing in life is truly free. Even free things come with a required cost in time and effort for dealing with them.

But the most important issue is, this is the Tragedy of the Commons. Overgrazing by one farmer reduces the available grass for others who are supposed to share. Anyone who defends those who steal just a little bit more for themselves is part of the problem as well.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

David VanDyke said:


> But the most important issue is, this is the Tragedy of the Commons. Overgrazing by one farmer reduces the available grass for others who are supposed to share. Anyone who defends those who steal just a little bit more for themselves is part of the problem as well.


Perfect.

And this is why KU is such a bad influence with its structure. Can it be a good thing? Can KU be the answer to author's prayers? Not so far.


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## Guest (Jun 23, 2017)

LilyBLily said:


> If I the reader also were "gifted" with your laundry list, I'd be just as unwilling. It is not a "bonus" to falsely describe what you're selling/delivering. You're depriving me of my right to choose what enters my devices and my home. I don't see a difference between this kind of trickery and links that redirect me to p0rn sites. I don't want your huge files, and I don't want content I know nothing about in advance. Let me assure you that strictly as a reader, I would despise an author who tried to pull this sort of thing on me. The fact that I personally would not lose any money because you stuffed 10 other unnamed books--or god knows what else--into one book I opted to read, is immaterial. This is rank dishonesty.


If the issue is fake books, there is maybe nothing more fake than for example an "author" calling their novel a "thriller" when once you get past the first ten per cent you find the so-called "thriller" a mundane and boring piece of garbage written by an amateur who calls himself/herself an "author" but whose knowledge of literature and of the English language and of the genre is at best sophomoric. That's a fake book. For "thriller" you can substitute any genre. On the other hand, if a publisher offers a new story by Hemingway and as a bonus includes the Collected Stories of Hemingway, and if the reader is told in the book description on the product page what is inside, and again told at the beginning of the book what is inside, and if the Look Inside/Sample includes not only the first ten percent of the new story by Hemingway but also the first 10 per cent of the bonus material (in this case the Collected Stories of Hemingway), and if the reader then borrows or buys the book, where is the dishonesty? Where is the trespass by the publisher putting the book in your pristine adorable home? The real issue with "fake" digital books is maybe that there are too many digital books that are faked by their authors, with or without any "bonus" material. Maybe the main advantage of KU is not to authors but to readers, who can borrow a book such as a "thriller" and easily delete it if they find it mundane and boring and written by an amateur.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

icarusxx said:


> On the other hand, if a publisher offers a new story by Hemingway and as a bonus includes the Collected Stories of Hemingway, and if the reader is told in the book description on the product page what is inside, and again told at the beginning of the book what is inside, and if the Look Inside/Sample includes not only the first ten percent of the new story by Hemingway but also the first 10 per cent of the bonus material (in this case the Collected Stories of Hemingway), and if the reader then borrows or buys the book, where is the dishonesty? Where is the trespass by the publisher putting the book in your pristine adorable home? ...


Although you might have simply meant this as an example, there are issues with your choice of Hemingway. A least one of his novels is not in the public domain, so is off limits to sell. Assuming you mean popping in the collected works that are public domain as bonus content, you can do that only if you differentiate the works you plan to sell somehow (annotations, illustrations, whatever). But then *you can't put them into KU* since you don't hold the exclusive rights to them. That right there takes that aspect of the gaming away from the publisher.

I'm not sure where you're going to find a "new" Hemingway story, but if one surfaces that hasn't been published, then the estate will likely own the rights and it won't be public domain. So I'm not sure what angle you would have publishing a random single story and then including the rest of the collected works.

But let's say you do market it as one of his short stories with the rest of the works included as a bonus, and that you've done the work to differentiate the stories so that you are allowed to sell them. As long as you declare the content in the title, in the blurb, in the TOC and ON THE COVER, that one title would be fine to sell. Readers get what you say is on the tin.

Keep in mind that since bonus material is required to be placed after the main content, if it's a short story, customers won't just have access to the first 10% of the main short story, they will be able to read the whole thing in the sample.

Up to now, we're good. Assuming all KDP guidelines above have been followed, that's not a deceptive book and you're providing the customer exactly what you tell them. Although, remember, it still can't be put into KU.

However, if you publish each of the stories in the collected works as its own title, and either list each title as "Story A and the Collected Works", "Story B and the Collected Works," etc ON the cover or leave off the fact of the Collected Works altogether, then that's a problem. You may have differentiated the first title you're selling, but any others that contain the same works and that are augmented in the same way the first title is, are now undifferentiated from that first title. And those subsequent titles are now in violation of the KDP T&Cs.

This is not placing any kind of judgment on the quality or lack thereof of the content. A publisher may choose to differentiate public domain content by adding amateur illustrations or anemic annotations and still publish the works within the KDP guidelines. But none of this is a discussion about quality. It is about packaging. Quality is esoteric. Packaging is concrete and rarely open to interpretation.


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## Guest (Jun 23, 2017)

PhoenixS said:


> Although you might have simply meant this as an example, there are issues with your choice of Hemingway. A least one of his novels is not in the public domain, so is off limits to sell. Assuming you mean popping in the collected works that are public domain as bonus content, you can do that only if you differentiate the works you plan to sell somehow (annotations, illustrations, whatever). But then *you can't put them into KU* since you don't hold the exclusive rights to them. That right there takes that aspect of the gaming away from the publisher.
> 
> I'm not sure where you're going to find a "new" Hemingway story, but if one surfaces that hasn't been published, then the estate will likely own the rights and it won't be public domain. So I'm not sure what angle you would have publishing a random single story and then including the rest of the collected works.
> 
> ...


Public domain or Hemingway is not relevant. I used Hemingway merely because in the hypothetical case of a new Hemingway story plus a bonus of his collected stories the reader would know what they are getting. It's not a question of publishing or republishing Hemingway in KDP. so I don't know what you're quibbling with here. The point is that the reader knows exactly what they are getting and chooses to borrow or buy the book. I think some of the people in this thread have been confusing the case where the reader knows what they are getting with the case where the reader does not know. I agree that if the reader does not know what they are getting the book should not be offered.

_Edited. PM me if you have any questions. --Betsy/KB Mod_


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## Michelle Hughes (Dec 12, 2011)

Well slap my mouth and call me stupid because I never knew something like this even existed.  I guess I've had my head stuck in the sand (writers' cave) for the last 8 years!


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

icarusxx said:


> Public domain or Hemingway is not relevant. I used Hemingway merely because in the hypothetical case of a new Hemingway story plus a bonus of his collected stories the reader would know what they are getting. It's not a question of publishing or republishing Hemingway in KDP. so I don't know what you're quibbling with here. The point is that the reader knows exactly what they are getting and chooses to borrow or buy the book. I think some of the people in this thread have been confusing the case where the reader knows what they are getting with the case where the reader does not know. I agree that if the reader does not know what they are getting the book should not be offered.


1 book with all the collected works = OK/Fine/Not a problem.
10 books with all the collected works just rearranged differently in each file = Not OK/Violation of the T&Cs (whether you personally agree with the rule or not).

_Edited quoted post. PM me if you have any questions. --Betsy/KB Mod_


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## dianapersaud (Sep 26, 2013)

Four books I suspected were fake books (stuff I've seen before just repackaged with a different author name and cover, not real stories just junk to boost KENPC pages "read" by bots) have now been taken down. 

So Amazon is cleaning house. Slowly but surely.


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## Guest (Jun 23, 2017)

PhoenixS said:


> 1 book with all the collected works = OK/Fine/Not a problem.
> 10 books with all the collected works just rearranged differently in each file = Not OK/Violation of the T&Cs (whether you personally agree with the rule or not).


Well, who suggested the same content merely reearranged is okay? Pick another windmill.


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## LadyG (Sep 3, 2015)

icarusxx said:


> Well, who suggested the same content merely reearranged is okay? Pick another windmill.


You may not realize this, but Phoenix is one of the most helpful and informative members of this group. Might want to think about showing just a bit of respect.


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## SuzyQ (Jun 22, 2017)

I see no issue with including bonus short story or book, as long as its not longer than the original material and not shoved into every single book you release. But right now there is a glut of 1700-2000 page novellas with who knows what shoved in, and 'hot NEW bonus content' allll the way at the back.

Some of these books end at 10% OR LESS.

Oh and if you go looking for them, better catch em fast because the authors are creating paperbacks with the original content, and then having author central adjust the page count. So you can only tell if you 'look inside' or see it in the first few days that its live.

These are the people getting the big bonus's now. These are the people skewing the system. It's not the people who include book excerpts or a short story at the back- which a lot of readers actually DO LIKE. But we are all being punished for it with page reads being altered/suppressed.

I also suspect some of these scammy people are using click farms. I think the rational is that 'everybody is doing it' (we're not) and that 'its cheating zon not readers or authors' (it IS stealing from other authors).

Bonus content is allowable. But so is up to 2000 pages apparently. They are grossly abusing the system.


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## Don Donovan (Dec 12, 2015)

At the end of the first two books in my series, I have an "exclusive preview" of the next book. Each of these previews is only about 10-15 pages long. Would this fall into the category of "adding a book at the end of a book"? I didn't really do it to increase page reads, rather to spark interest in the next book.

I'm really not up to speed with these scams. I have to admit, I didn't know they were happening until I started reading this thread today.


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## LadyG (Sep 3, 2015)

Don Donovan said:


> At the end of the first two books in my series, I have an "exclusive preview" of the next book. Each of these previews is only about 10-15 pages long. Would this fall into the category of "adding a book at the end of a book"? I didn't really do it to increase page reads, rather to spark interest in the next book.
> 
> I'm really not up to speed with these scams. I have to admit, I didn't know they were happening until I started reading this thread today.


No, I don't think that's what anyone is complaining about.

There's an author in my category who has over 140 books, but if you look at the Look Inside and read the TOC, she's basically just recycling the same handful of stories over and over to fill out those 140 books. If you buy her Mail Order Bride book, for example, you get about a three page Mail Order Bride romance followed by dozens of random stories heaped on after it. Those exact same stories are then rotated around to make her Amish romance and her Western, as well as her Regency, her Victorian, and so on.


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## dianapersaud (Sep 26, 2013)

SuzyQ said:


> I see no issue with including bonus short story or book, as long as its not longer than the original material and not shoved into every single book you release. But right now there is a glut of 1700-2000 page novellas with who knows what shoved in, and 'hot NEW bonus content' allll the way at the back.
> 
> Some of these books end at 10% OR LESS.
> 
> ...


Wow. That's ingenious. And this is why Amazon is going to lower the cap on KENPC per "book". I'm guessing the next cap will be at 1000 KENPC and that is only to accommodate those genres that tend to be very long books (like high fantasy).


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## dianapersaud (Sep 26, 2013)

LadyG said:


> No, I don't think that's what anyone is complaining about.
> 
> There's an author in my category who has over 140 books, but if you look at the Look Inside and read the TOC, she's basically just recycling the same handful of stories over and over to fill out those 140 books. If you buy her Mail Order Bride book, for example, you get about a three page Mail Order Bride romance followed by dozens of random stories heaped on after it. Those exact same stories are then rotated around to make her Amish romance and her Western, as well as her Regency, her Victorian, and so on.


I noticed that "person" too. They've been doing it for a long time now. It's so easy to spot, too.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

icarusxx said:


> Wonderful. And where was the respect for me when I was called dishonest for no reason? I thank you all for your indulgence.


I'm willing to be corrected and shown that perhaps I missed something here.

I've laid out three times now what the bonus book stuffing tactic is that's dishonest, citing Amazon's guidelines. Each time I've been very careful to caveat my response by saying bonus books in themselves and used appropriately that do not violate Amazon's T&Cs are perfectly fine. My responses are long because 1) I usually do try to include the caveats and answer thoroughly because 2) I realize there are others who might have the same questions looking at these responses.

Twice you've come back on me to argue that adding bonus books is not harmful or dishonest. Each time I *thought* I was reiterating that I agreed with you that a single instance appropriately configured and labeled was within guidelines and was, indeed, not dishonest, but also reiterating that there are uses that do violate the T&Cs.

Please remember that I don't know who you are or what you're publishing or how you're publishing it. I did (and do) call out people generically who are intentionally breaking the KDP T&Cs in order to game the system what they are: "gamers" or "scammers," depending on the tactics they employ.

I don't believe I've ever called someone who was operating within the guidance of the T&Cs "dishonest." If you feel I applied that label to you, and you're operating in accordance with the T&Cs, please let me know where I made that claim. I will absolutely extend a sincere apology if I did so, as that was never my intent.


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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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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Indeed, let's keep it classy.

Folks, it appears that this thread might have run its course.  Locking while I review.

EDIT:  Ok, I'm going to provisionally reopen this thread given the level of interest from yesterday.  I've pruned a discussion that went off topic.  Everyone, let's not take personally comments that were not meant personally.    Unlock commences in three...two...one....

Betsy
KB Mod


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## Jena H (Oct 2, 2011)

LadyG said:


> No, I don't think that's what anyone is complaining about.
> 
> There's an author in my category who has over 140 books, but if you look at the Look Inside and read the TOC, she's basically just recycling the same handful of stories over and over to fill out those 140 books. If you buy her Mail Order Bride book, for example, you get about a three page Mail Order Bride romance followed by dozens of random stories heaped on after it. Those exact same stories are then rotated around to make her Amish romance and her Western, as well as her Regency, her Victorian, and so on.


This isn't exactly the same thing, but your post brought it to mind: back in the days before ebooks, I used to love the Signet Regency Christmas anthologies, and bought them every year for about 8-10 years. But in later years some of the anthologies were made up of stories from previous books. I don't recall if all of the stories are recycled in that book, or maybe 'only' two or three out of the four, but it was very disappointing.

Again, this isn't the same thing as what's being discussed, but it reminded me of it.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Jena H said:


> This isn't exactly the same thing, but your post brought it to mind: back in the days before ebooks, I used to love the Signet Regency Christmas anthologies, and bought them every year for about 8-10 years. But in later years some of the anthologies were made up of stories from previous books. I don't recall if all of the stories are recycled in that book, or maybe 'only' two or three out of the four, but it was very disappointing.
> 
> Again, this isn't the same thing as what's being discussed, but it reminded me of it.


Well, it could have been the same thing had there been such a thing as Amazon and e-books then.


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## yeababygetit (Sep 21, 2017)

> I often search through the top listings in my erotica genre - all subs.
> 
> 80% of the "books" are collections that have nothing to do with the niche. Most of the rest are suspiciously absent any reviews and have blurbs that sound like they were strangled from an asphyxiated chimpanzee.
> 
> ...


I agree with you. I recently searched the top 100 of a certain sub as well and saw the same thing. Yes, most titles were in KDPS. When I'm searching for something, I want what I want, not something else. It makes finding what I want to find frustrating if you know what I mean?

I have nothing against collections, bundles, series, whatever - at least make it consistent with what readers are actually searching for.


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