amazon kindle unlimited I don't want to go on a rant, but...

[Brayon]

First off the link: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal

 

I'm a Reddit user, so when I'm not here trawling GA for good stories, and talking to friends, I'm over there reading several subreddits. I came across his article linked in r/writers. It's a very long article that talks about several scams that a cabal of romance writers was doing to scam Kindle Unlimited, to pad their paychecks. Scams from bookstuffing, to selling their mailing-lists, to reviewing each other's books in newsletters to their fans, and trademark and copyright law gaming. It's sickening, what sort of low someone would go to.

 

It's bad enough that tech these days, allows people, who should never be published (e.g. Fifty Shades, Twilight), can go the route of small press and self-publishing to produce a stellarly craptastic book, but then to add insult to injury, they then scam the system to take money away from people that play by the rules.

 

It's not limited to just Hetero-Romance either. I recently read on r/LitRPG that an author of that genre was banned from KU for doing the exact same practices.

[CassieQ]

Is this the Cockygate thing?

[Brayon]

56 minutes ago, CassieQ said:

Is this the Cockygate thing?

Yeas, among other scams that were talked about in the article.

[CassieQ]

I just read it.  I knew there was something going on with the copyright thing, but I only heard bits and pieces about it.  

[Cia]

Oh, I'm up on all of that. You also have "authors" who use author names similar to more popular authors, titles, etc... and the worst part of all of it is that Amazon, like so many other big corporations, ignores the reality of many author situations and focuses on the irrelevant. Sure, let's go after reviewers who read KU books and actually comment on the books they enjoy because they MUST be getting paid for their reviews or be lying and don't even think to figure out a way to track their reads on Amazon's own program they pay authors for, but ignore the way authors are stealing from other authors by stuffing books, threatening legal action or filing improper infringement claims and getting authors' content pulled from sale, etc....

 

If there's a way out there to scam the system, there will always be assholes willing to do it. 

[Laura S. Fox]

Amazon KU became a cesspool of scams most likely when they decided to pay the authors on the number of pages read, which meant longer books could generate more money. So no surprise that there were 1k pages books suddenly available, in which most pages weren't even related to the topic of the book anymore. At least that's what I heard. I can't even imagine how anyone from Amazon could believe those would be legit books. But there's no curation and this is how such things happen.