Category: Uncategorized

There are a lot of scandals happening in the indie publishing world right now. The latest one has to do with Amazon deleting KU reads from March: some authors have seen their page reads retroactively revised down as much as ninety percent.

The speculation is that this is connected with Amazon deactivating several customer accounts, allegedly on the basis of those customers accepting free or gifted items in exchange for reviews. It’s also supposedly connected with Amazon’s recent legal arbitration against book stuffing in KU, which scammers use to inflate their page reads. Until now, Amazon has done precious little to push back against endemic scamming in KU.

The best potential explanation for this that I’ve read comes from TexasGirl and PhoenixS over on KBoards. TexasGirl writes:

I think it goes like this:

— An author hires a bot reader to inflate their page reads.
— The bot account opens the book and page reads through it.
— The bot then spiders the sales page for other books like it, to strengthen the association with other books Amazon has placed either as 1: normal also-bots 2: sponsored products
— The bot opens the also bot or sponsored books and reads them too.

This creates synergy between the paid bot book and collaterally botted book. This means the other bot accounts will do the pathway as well, creating more page reads via bots by the bad accounts. It ALSO muddies the waters as to which books hired the bots and which were just secondary opens.

PhoenixS adds:

A good portion of those “bots” may well be incentivized readers. Once a real reader account has been identified as a recipient of incentives either for leaving reviews or for borrowing or for reading — or skimming through — a book, then all their reviews and borrows/reads become suspect. So anything they might borrow, even for their own, real personal pleasure (often within the same subgenre they’re getting incentivized for) would be dinged.

In other words, KU authors who use AMS ads are inadvertently shooting themselves in the foot, as the bots and click-farms use the sponsored links to find legitimate books to borrow (in order to mask their illicit activity). Also, when Amazon deactivated a bunch of customer accounts, they also removed a bunch of legitimate page reads, putting the screws on some of their KU authors.

I have many thoughts on this subject. Personally, I haven’t been affected at all, as none of my books are in Kindle Unlimited. I do feel for the authors who have been hit, though. It takes about two months for book royalties to show up in your bank account, so when you think you have $$$ coming only to have it arbitrarily disappear, it can create some heartburn-inducing cashflow problems. No one likes to be jerked around like that.

In my view, though, this is all just one car of a much larger train wreck.

The big tech companies that comprise the FAANGs all seem to suffer from the same hubris: that the fundamental laws of nature, economics, and human behavior can all be overcome by a sufficiently advanced algorithm. Combined with this is the equally arrogant hubris that they, by virtue of their power and success, have a responsibility to reshape the world in a progressive way, even if that’s not what their users want.

We can see the second part of this hubris in Zuckerberg’s recent testimony to congress. His admission that Facebook bears responsibility for the content on its platform has got to be giving his lawyers multiple aneurysms right now.

The first part is evident in the way Amazon structured Kindle Unlimited. The whole program is rife with perverse incentives, from the zero-sum payment structure of the KDP global fund to KENPC and the All-Star bonuses. Book stuffing, click-farming, and other KU scams are both predictable and forseeable. Instead of restructuring the program, though, or hiring a team to clean it up, Amazon has either denied that any problem exists, or created algorithms to play whack-a-mole with the scammers, often striking legitimate authors in the process.

The dirty little secret is that KU wasn’t created to benefit authors or readers, however, but to benefit Amazon by preventing a rival ebook subscription service from eating into their market share. Hence the exclusivity requirement for KU authors. By tying up the majority of the indie publishing community with exclusivity, Amazon denies the competition the content it needs to get off the ground. Never mind that KU isn’t that great for readers and is downright horrible for authors.

But why all the drama right now? Because this train wreck is headed for a massive cliff: an antitrust suit against Amazon. Between President Trump’s tweets about Jeff Bezos and the “Amazon Washington Post,” and the mainstream media’s neverending crusade against the president, the political winds are shifting in ways that must appear very foreboding in Seattle.

Amazon is cleaning house, and a lot of dolphins are getting netted as a result. One bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and the scammers have been squatting in Amazon’s house for years. But the real train wreck is just getting started, and when it goes over the cliff with the rest of this mixed metaphor, that’s when the fireworks will begin.

As an indie author, now is a good time to be as flexible as possible.