Amazon finally made a move on (one) Kindle Publishing scammer.
Read the Forbes article here.
Why is this important? Given the difficulty of snagging a literary agent and the slow pace of commercial publishing, many authors are choosing self publishing as a side hustle or their main living.
Amazon, for better or for worse, is the biggest game in publishing right now. If you want to make money publishing, Amazon is going to be a large part of your portfolio.
Authors have a choice when using Amazon as a purchasing outlet. ‘Go wide’, publish with many different platforms, and accept a smaller royalty from Amazon. Or publish solely with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Select, get a higher royalty, and share in the profit pool from all sales.
Like every other lucrative money-making platform, Amazon is a scammer’s paradise. Every time Amazon refines its rules and algorithms, the scam authors quickly retool their approaches. Lately, KDP Select has been paying out ‘per pages finished reading’. The scammers figured how to ‘stuff’ a book with hundreds or thousands of pages of their own previously published (or plagiarized) content, then include a table of contents that induces a reader to skip to the end, and thus signal to Amazon that the reader *finished the whole book*.
The scam stuffer may get $100,000 per month from Amazon, just by gaming page views.
Especially in the Romance categories, stuffers abound in the best seller self-pub categories. They employ large text, weird stretched formats with many spaces between paragraphs, large empty spaces per text line, and big gaps between chapters. They load samples of all their other books (sometimes very large samples) in the back. Often, the title mms may only take up 25% of the ‘book’.
I write big books, between 100K and 150K. I know what that looks like when it’s professionally edited and formatted. I also know what it costs. Most 400 to 800+ page ‘stuffed’ self-pub texts don’t resemble properly formatted work. They also sell for enticingly low prices, usually from $.99 to $2.99.
The Forbes article quotes David Gaughran’s note that many current Amazon bestsellers are showing some form of stuffing behavior. Gaughran is kind, and doesn’t name the KDP Select author he referenced.
I know who it is. This person writes sexy contemporary romance. I won’t link to her; a little Google Fu will tell you her name. She comes from Book People, and should know better than to treat her books and readers like this. Pick any of her bestselling novels, and you’ll probably find the hallmarks of stuffing. She and fellow stuffers get away with it because of readers who excuse bad writing and worse business practice. Those readers may not grasp they’re being played…or care, as long as their readerly itches are being vaguely scratched.
But watching stuffers get boatloads of cash, when my more-honest self-pub author friends are making *pennies*, has made me look skeptically at Amazon’s KDP program. I suspect the only reason Amazon has cracked down is the public embarrassment, as well as trying to woo the thousands of authors who won’t go near KDP right now.
Because who makes the biggest profit in the page-view scam, even at $.99 per book? Amazon.