Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon

This scam isn&#x27;t victimless.<p>First, it depletes the pot awaiting actual no-shit <i>real</i> hard-working authors who supply a product people want.<p>Secondly, Amazon react by trying to engineer algorithmic anti-scam measures, which end up catching the aforementioned hard-working authors instead of the scammers. For example:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walterjonwilliams.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;amazon-may-they-choke-on-my-vomit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walterjonwilliams.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;amazon-may-they-cho...</a><p>(TLDR: Walter Jon Williams is a respected author, who has been bringing out his backlist of out-of-print novels as ebooks. Amazon&#x27;s anti-scam measure yanked all his books off sale -- right after he&#x27;d released them and run a marketing campaign -- for the crime of having a table of contents at the end of the books. Because that was easier to automate than, say, collecting actual pages-viewed metrics as a basis for payment instead of just checking the last-page-bookmarked.)

I don&#x27;t think the right solution is to track pages read better. That would make the scam a bit harder (because scammers would have to either manually turn pages or fake the client software), but is still pretty easily defeatable.<p>A couple of things that Amazon <i>could</i> do to fix this behavior:<p>1. Instead of putting all KU subscriptions in a big pot and then dividing the pot among all authors by page read, divide the income from each individual subscriber among the pages he&#x2F;she reads (so a read from a user who reads less would effectively be worth more). That way spammers who join collectives to read each others&#x27; giant books are just taking money from each other instead of stealing from the larger pot.<p>2. Don&#x27;t pay out revenue for pages read until 2-3 months after the fact, and if a book is determined to be spam during that time withhold all revenues. This admittedly affects legitimate authors as well, but maybe Amazon could soften the blow by contributing the spam-attributed portion of the KU revenue back to the author pot so all the legitimate authors get a nice little bonus for their patience.<p>Note that either&#x2F;both options might require renegotiating contracts with KU program authors, but if the spam problem is as bad as it sounds I can&#x27;t imagine most legitimate authors objecting.

Ouch. I wrote a travelogue as a side project&#x2F;on a bit of a lark, and I enrolled it in &quot;KDP Select&quot; (Kindle Unlimited). I make far more money, it seems, from full-price purchases than my per-page royalties from Kindle Unlimited. It really seems that it doesn&#x27;t make sense for most authors, since the revenue-per-page is diluted by these scammers.<p>EDIT: To put some numbers on it, here&#x27;s my KDP dashboard: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;lDWoQQ6" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;lDWoQQ6</a> The book is $4.99, of which I receive 70% ($3.50). I sell about 3 copies per day (making about $10), and generally get ~350 pages read per day (making $1.50). So I make 10x on regular sales what I do on Kindle Unlimited. If it matters, it&#x27;s a short book of ~300 Kindle-normalized pages.<p>While writing this up, I realized Amazon charges authors $0.15 per megabyte of book file size per download. My book was 10 MB thanks to a bunch of photos. After extreme JPEG compression I was able to get it down to ~2MB or so. I wonder how many authors, like me, are losing 20% of their royalty without realizing it.<p>On AWS, you&#x27;re charged ~$0.09&#x2F;GB of bandwidth out. How Amazon thinks 1000x pricing is fair here is beyond me.

This is very interesting. My son like most kids in his age range is a minecraft junkie. He blew through a series of Minecraft diaries - very short pages, very simple reading, but it entertained him. He read more than 20 of them in a week before I went and got Kindle Unlimited, and blew threw another 20 of them once I did.<p>It was obvious to me that the books were spam of sorts - but I figured it was to make money on $2-$4 purchases. It wasn&#x27;t just one author, there was a series of similar book series.<p>Now I have an understanding of what&#x27;s taking place. They are targeting kids like my son who can churn through pages like it&#x27;s his job because it basically is. I&#x27;d rather him be reading ANYTHING than nothing. Once you develop a love for it, it turns into a lifelong joy instead of a punishment that you have to suffer through during school.<p>I really don&#x27;t like how kids are targeted as revenue streams these days. I feel like there needs to be an awareness campaign targeting soccer moms so they are made aware of all the channels that are aggressively focused on making money off of elementary-school aged children. (endless youtube channels, video games, addictive mobile games, web games, etc.)<p>There is a giant hole in the marketplace for engaging and fun educational experiences that can be had for an annual subscription that doesn&#x27;t try to monetize kids throughout the day. There are a lot of &quot;free&quot; educational options that don&#x27;t have the quality or engagement that kids want. There are a handful of quality ones, but there really needs to be a market-leading presence that small&#x2F;startup businesses can emulate and aspire to. The money is there in the market but nobody is attacking it properly.

Self-published authors who went “all in” with KDP Select&#x2F;Kindle Unlimited are furious about this. You can see the discussion on Kboards:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kboards.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;topic,234330.0.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kboards.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;topic,234330.0.html</a><p>A few days ago someone shared a link that showed the free KU books in one of the categories filled with scam books, but it looks like a lot of them have been removed:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;search&#x2F;ref=sr_pg_97?rh=n:283155,n:!1000,n:25,n:16190,p_n_feature_browse-bin:618073011,p_n_publication_date:1250226011,p_n_feature_twenty_browse-bin:13054657011&amp;page=57&amp;bbn=16190&amp;sort=date-desc-rank&amp;unfiltered=1&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1460832033&amp;tag=viglink20273-20" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;search&#x2F;ref=sr_pg_97?rh=n:283155,n:!...</a><p>The other issue this brings up is how Amazon has been pushing authors to join KDP Select&#x2F;Kindle Unlimited and the Spotify-style payout structure. It’s a raw deal for most authors, the exception being prolific&#x2F;well-known authors (and the scammers). Anyone joining the program gets some nice marketing tools, but they have to remove their books from other marketplaces (Google Play, iBooks, etc.) and end up cannibalizing the sale of digital downloads which pay more (typically 70% of list for titles priced $2.99 and above).<p>Like Spotify, Kindle Unlimited is great for audiences and the platform owner. The publishers&#x2F;creators who can scale do OK. Everyone else gets the scraps.

Isn&#x27;t this payment scheme similar to Spotify&#x27;s model? I thought that was broken too, considering some artists have 10min &quot;silent&quot; songs that they encourage their fans to play over and over during the night so they can get some more revenue.<p>Why are services like this using such a fundamentally flawed model to pay their content creators? Why not just allocate funds based on users usage? Is it that much harder to implement?<p>---<p>For those who aren&#x27;t familiar with spotify, they also have a &quot;pot&quot; they pay out of, and they pay out based on your content&#x27;s consumption (measured in minutes) as a percentage of all content consumed that payout period. So you could have one single Spotify subscriber who listens to your music 24&#x2F;7 causing you to be paid more than than subscriber pays Spotify. Alternatively you could have a couple subscribers who listen exclusively to a single artist a few times a week and the artist will receive substantially less than those subscribers share of money, since other artists may have a more voracious fan-base.

This is a very old scam. Twenty years ago, my little brother did something essentially the same with pay-per-click ads and an IRC chat room of people that would all click on each others ads (or more likely there was a bot that did it for them). My little brother was getting multiple checks each week for $50-$150 until his account with most the ad networks was terminated five to six weeks in.<p>He was 13 or 14 at the time.

Reward systems of any kind need to be very, very carefully designed, otherwise they are vulnerable to perverse incentives. Unfortunately, there can&#x27;t be a single chink in the armor.

I dabbled in subscribing to Kindle Unlimited, but quickly realized that most of the material there was just trash. It was like the literary equivalent of tuning out to some cheap reality TV show. Hearing that authors are paid per page explains a lot.

I read the whole article and didn&#x27;t find any explanation what &quot;KU&quot; was. Now I find here that it means &quot;Kindle Unlimited&quot; but I still have no idea what it is. Some kind of subscription service?<p>I buy a lot of Kindle books but never seen any &quot;Unlimited&quot; offer, perhaps something that is US only?

I guess this is one version of what a micro-transaction powered Web could look like. Potentially even worse forms of click-bait becoming dominant.

If this is correctly documented, there is no reason why Amazon would not have to pay out all the truly owed royalties to authors.<p>Fraudulent methods of measurement are a real issue in online marketplaces and you can&#x27;t just say oops when you are sued.

Wouldn&#x27;t it make sense for Amazon to hold payouts for 30-60 days on new accounts, and <i>require</i> books to be available for 30-60 days before a payout?<p>It seems a huge part of this scam is pulling your book from the store before you get caught - make that part impossible and he scammers will have to work a lot harder.<p>There are ways around anything for a determined scammer, but those all have an associated cost, and if you make the costs high enough many of the scammers will go away.

I was a founding member of the ACX service, which is a partnership of sorts between Amazon&#x27;s Audible and KDP properties. It allows self-published authors to have audiobooks made by voice actors of _highly_ varying degrees of talent + expertise, which then get sold on Amazon&#x2F;Audible.<p>As the manager of the Audio QA team and its related internal technology services, I saw this kind of scammery on a daily basis. Amazon has actually a very weak policy against these kinds of scammers, because getting someone kicked off of the service for this kind of thing requires a lot of expensive and time-consuming legal work. Amazon likes avoiding this consequence whenver possible.<p>And yes, audiobook voice actors would try to turn all kinds of scams on us - from robo-voicing entire narrations, to resubmitting a prior-recorded audiobook under a different title and author credit.<p>When you open your media library to the dastardly UGC (user-generated content) world, these things will happen. The fact is that Amazon has become successful in monopolizing both book and audiobook distribution because they have figured out how to devalue the experience _just_ enough to extract as much scale as possible to out-perform the competition.

What is ridiculous that while these kind of KU scams abound a legitimate publisher is still unable to publish on KDP (where people pay real money for a real e-book whole) unless your language is one of the chosen few: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kdp.amazon.com&#x2F;help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kdp.amazon.com&#x2F;help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119</a><p>It took forever to get Welsh added to the list and after that no change for the past 4-5 years on Amazon KDP.<p>Finnish is fine, but Estonian is not. Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian are deemed unreadable by Amazon KDP despite rendering just fine sideloaded on my Kindle. It is beyond infuriating.<p>I have edited multiple books for a non-profit organisation to publish on Amazon Createspace, that is the print-on-demand division.<p>No problem on Amazon print-on-demand you can publish in Klingon if you want, but every time I choose to publish the same book on KDP(KDP is half-assedly integrated into Createspace Dashboard) my books get thrown back programmatically after a few days because too much of the text is in an unsupported language.<p>The official Amazon reason for refusal to publish these same books on Kindle is because they feel the user experience in unsupported languages would be substandard.<p>In other words Amazon are either incompetent and understuffed or mostly just do not care about publishing in niche languages. I suspect it is the latter since I doubt the former.<p>This is despite the book rendering just fine on my Kindle privately I just can&#x27;t publish it on KDP.<p>I apologize for the rant, but it irks me that Amazon a company which is supposed to care about book publishing is so blase about it.

Paying per page and requiring exclusivity seem like a recipe for terrible content.

It doesn&#x27;t seem like it would be that hard to add a time on page metric before counting pages, especially when you own the hardware. I am honestly quite surprised this was missed.

Who is writing these horrible systems for Amazon? From the article, the way they detect page reads sounds like the simplest use case that a novice developer would come up with. Kindles can definitely record information and upload it later when there&#x27;s a chance to sync; I use it all the time to submit corrections for books. There&#x27;s no reason that it should be this simple to game.<p>Of course, the scammers would just move on to using actual device farms but at least there would be some physical obstacles.

In summary - Amazon pays all Kindle Unlimited authors out of a shared pot, the size of your share determined by the metric of &quot;pages read&quot; (and you thought your Kindle just reported that back for syncing purposes!). Enter the scammers - who make 3000 page fake books, page one containing an enticing link to the final page. This counts as having read the whole book!

Stating the obvious here but the difference from monetising music streaming services is that you don&#x27;t consume the content over a live connection hence the current Amazon model is just plain flawed.<p>I personally would adapt to something much much simpler than guessing thousands of page views sharing thousandths of pennies.<p>KU subscribers pay £10 pm for up to 10 books at a time. After the commission just share the remaining £7 amongst the other books held during the month. None of this funky pageview stuff.<p>That way the scammers would only be taking from their own subscription fees.

It should be divided by user. Let say the service costs 10 usd per month. So lets say you are going to pay 5 usd to authors. You should divide each user 5 dollars between the percentage the user read of each autor, so if a user only read one author, then the author gets 5 usd. And if he reads 80% of one and 20% of other authors, then the same percentage should be applied from the 5 usd. I do not know how hard would be this to implement.

Sites down, Google Cache link:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.annchristy.com&#x2F;ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-know&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;...</a>

This is another reason the court&#x27;s decision to fine Apple over the iBookstore and its publisher agreements was such a shame.<p>Amazon still has a stranglehold on the market and authors suffer for it.

Amazon has been pulling books with the table of contents at the end for a few weeks now and has also informed the authors. So this scam is no longer workable.

Scams like this are why we can&#x27;t every have nice things. Not for very long anyway.<p>Sigh. I guess I&#x27;ll put that novel on the back burner, again.

&gt; then he or she won’t get their money for this EIN<p>What&#x27;s an EIN?

Wow, Amazon is this cheap?

the retail side of Amazon is so sloppy. things like this. vendors much much worse than eBay for small items or sometimes even $600 smart phones...<p>it&#x27;s the main reason i have never even considered AWS. I&#x27;m too conscious to depend on them.

this is like expert cheaters in a casino keep the casino security on it&#x27;s game. The people pushing the edges of what counts as a &quot;real page read&quot; are forcing Amazon engineers to be more clever. But the article really assumes Amazon isn&#x27;t doing anything sneaky and clever to filter out cheaters. Maybe the sales are low because they are low. And cheaters will always cheat and Amazon is &quot;on this.&quot; But what authors need to do is write better? I&#x27;m quoting LCK, &quot;be more funny&quot; that&#x27;s your only job as a comedy writer. Be more funny.