Image: dailyfinance.com
The Internet has been buzzing lately with news relating to the placement of our Table of Contents. Specifically, Amazon is now requesting that we place it at the beginning, not the end of our ebooks.
Has the company lost its marbles, as some claim?
Sadly, no. Scammers have been making millions off Amazon – and off any author enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select program.
The KENP Scam
Authors know that when Kindle Unlimited was first launched, we were paid “by the borrow.” It was similar to a sale (on sales, we were paid 70% of list cost on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99), except now we were paid out of a general fund instead of a set percentage.
But Amazon changed that payment method from “per borrow” to “pages read.” Not pages written, but how many pages a reader actually reads.
As reported by author Selena Kitt, The Fussy Librarian, David Gaughran and others, digital entrepreneurs (ie scammers) have found a loophole in this system.
You see, all you have to do it just upload “books” stuffed to the gills with anything, even unrelated material (romance books, cookbooks, South Beach diet books, foreign language texts, any and everything you’ve got at your disposal), then use a click-bait link at the front of the book (something like “Click here to win a Kindle Fire!”) to take the reader directly to the very back.
Image: David Gaughran
If a reader clicks it, the author is paid for all those pages. A full read. Even though a reader just skipped over your book.
The serious guys aren’t just using TOCs to inflate their page reads, but also links to the back of the book, footnotes, and all sorts of other tricks (like filling books with page breaks, filling books with the same text in 10 different languages – done by Google Translate – and then having a link go to the English version at the back, etc. etc.).
And these scammers are pretty successful. Many have been in receipt of All-Star Bonuses – taking that money from the authors who truly deserved it. Remember when Amazon capped the KENPC count at 3,000 pages per book per month? This is why. This also explains why KENP payments have seen a steady decline since the switch to payment per pages read.
Why Would you Put the ToC at the End?
There are a number of perfectly reasonable reasons why you might want to place the ToC at the end of your book. For example, author Ali Isaac places her TOC at the back because she writes short chapters and so it gets very long.
But the main reason is that the Look Inside feature only shows so many pages. With the ToC at the back, people looking inside your book can jump straight into your story, without going through copyright, acknowledgments, a 3-to-5-page-long (in the case of Pearseus) ToC etc. Hopefully, with them reading more of your story, the incentive to buy the book will be greater.
Besides, a ToC’s placement is irrelevant with ebooks. Although it makes perfect sense in print to have it at the front, with Kindle the ToC is always available, whether you’re in the middle of the book, at the start or at the end. You just click “Go To” and “ToC”.
The Crackdown
According to David Gaughran, some individual authors are receiving Quality Notices warning them that their title will be removed from sale unless the TOC is moved to the front. Normally these notices – which appear to be generated by bots – give us just five days to comply. Other writers are having their buy buttons removed without receiving these notices – a rather blunt-instrument approach.
Given the bad publicity generated by the story of author Walter Jon Williams – who had his Nebula-nominated SF novel Metropolitan removed from sale during a BookBub promotion – it looks like Amazon is no longer using a sledgehammer approach to the matter. The company’s statement reads as follows:
We have recently received a number of questions on topics such as TOC formatting and our policing of abuse and fraud among KDP publishers. In many cases, putting a book’s Table of Contents (TOC) at the end of a book can create a poor experience for readers, and in general we suggest authors locate TOCs to the beginning of a book. If the formatting of a book results in a poor experience or genuine reader confusion, or is designed to unnaturally inflate sales or pages read, we will take action to remove titles and protect readers. That said, absent any other issues of quality, locating the TOC at the end of a book is not in itself outside of our guidelines.
An Inelegant Solution. But it Works.
Amazon is aware of the problem:
Some in the community have contacted us about the activities of a small minority of publishers who may attempt to inflate sales or pages read through the use of various techniques, such as adding unnecessary or confusing hyperlinks, misplacing the TOC or adding distracting content. We both actively police for this type of activity on our own as well as investigate when the community points out such abuse (thank you to those of you who have helped us in this regard). Any abuse we find results in the immediate suspension of a title. Some circumstances, including repeat offenses, will result in KDP account suspension. In any abuse cases, we will also remove related pages read from the allocation of the monthly KDP Select Global Fund.
When I first read about Amazon asking authors to move their Table of Contents (ToC) to the beginning of the book, it raised an eyebrow. How would that help?
And yet, Chris McMullen informs us that this month’s KENP payments are already 17% up. So, kudos to Amazon. I just hope they find a more elegant long-term solution, as implied by the message above.
Until the scammers figure something different out, anyway…
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Thanks for this informative piece, Nicholas. 🙂 — Suzanne
Thanks for reading 🙂
Bad people will always find a way to cheat any system that’s in place which is such a shame for the reputation of good authors.
It wasn’t until this post that I realised why ToC would be placed at the back and I can see the reason. I’ve used the look inside feature before and found pages and pages of the ToC (one particular non-fiction book had so many content page links) and only one page of the actual book to read.
How true – some people will always try and game the system.
So, do we put the TOC at the beginning or keep it at the end of the book?
Unless Amazon comes to you with a QC, I suggest you keep doing what you’re doing 🙂
I’m totally confused. So can we in effect leave our TOC at the back for now? I’d hate to be blackballed by Amazon. Also, I don’t format my own books, which would mean having to send the file back to formatter to move the TOC and more money. 🙁
Unless Amazon asks you to move it, yes, you can leave it in the back. That’s what I’m doing, anyway.
Thanks Nicholas. I shall leave mine where it is until further notice from you, lol. 🙂
Lol – deal 😀
🙂
I think authors will see more cuts to their royalties come out of this. Free is free and that is the way Amazon looks at things.
Perhaps. However, KENP payments were up this time, for the first time in months.
I’ve always put my TOC in the front (mostly because I don’t think about better ways to do things) but it seemed like moving it to the back made sense. I’ll probably leave it in the front until the situation gets a little more grounded. It’s so true that in ebooks it doesn’t really matter.
I suggest you leave it there for now so you don’t have to worry about it 🙂
Mine don’t tend to run to long, so yes, planning to leave it where it is 🙂
I read this on Goughrans blog… what a heavy handed way to deal with it. Just shows how little Amazon value it’s authors. They need to be able to adequately police their own system so that Scampers can’t steal their/ genuine authors money. My TOC is at the back, because I write short chapters and so it gets very long. Fiction books need a good contents page to find their way around a book. Its shortsighted to say they should go in the front, where it is located in an ebook is irrelevant, especially if you want to give your reader as much story in their free sample as possible.
Or even Scampers, although I like the word Scampers lol!
Lol – scampers is a great word 😀
I agree completely as to the irrelevance of ToC location with ebooks. I’m less sure about what that shows, in regards to Amazon. I simply think they panicked when they realized just how many people were scamming the system, and slammed the brakes before the whole project got derailed 🙂
People will use any ruse they can to get a little bit of free money! I don’t participate in Kindle Unlimited anyway, but I was just wondering. Why would anybody put the ToC at the end of a book? Did you ever see a print book with the ToC at the end? At least I never saw that in an English-language book. The Table of Contents belongs at the beginning. Indexes come at the end, and most fiction books don’t have indexes..
It’s simple, actually: the Look Inside feature only shows so many pages. With the ToC at the back, people looking inside your book can jump straight into your story, without going through copyright, acknowledgments, a 3-to-5-page-long (in the case of Pearseus) ToC etc.
Hopefully, with them reading more of your story, the incentive to buy the book will be greater.
I can’t resist replying to this comment by a fellow cataloguing librarian. Yes, in most English language books, the TOC is at the beginning and index (if any) at the end. But I recall cataloguing Russian and maybe French books of short stories where the TOC was at the end. And of course in ebooks it doesn’t matter except for appearance. I’ve heard advice to put all the copyright stuff and disclaimers at the end too. (Of course I didn’t do that in my own ebooks).
Thank you for sharing that! I put all of my copyright info and disclaimers at the back.
I read about this scam too, and thought it was terrible! It gives us all a bad name, so I’m glad Amazon is taking steps to eliminate the practice.
Absolutely!
It never ceases to amaze me the lengths scammers will go to find yet another way to screw legitimate authors. I get the underlying idea to place the TOC in the back of the book, but that must look ridiculous. Clearly they’re not interested in keeping readers, only selling as many books as they can before AZ shuts them down. Thanks for sharing.
It’s ridiculous, all right.
As to why you might want to move the ToC to the end, it’s simple: the Look Inside feature only shows so many pages. With the ToC at the back, people looking inside your book can jump straight into your story, without going through copyright, acknowledgments, a 3-to-5-page-long (in the case of Pearseus) ToC etc.
Hopefully, with them reading more of your story, the incentive to buy the book will be greater.
Yup. Realized that two seconds too late. Story of my life lately. 😀
Scammers will eventually ruin everything, it would seem. All the costs involved with keeping up with their antics must affect both sellers and buyers, in the long run.
As always, thanks for the good advice and tips, Nicholas.
Best wishes, Pete.
Thank you, Pete 🙂
I’ve been wondering for a while how scammers would game that system. Hope it’s been fixed, but I’ll admit that I stopped depending on a decent bonus from the KU stuff a long time ago.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I’ve always thought the TOC goes in the front. For easy access to the place someone left off, but that could just be me.
Actually, that makes perfect sense in print. With Kindle, however, the ToC is always available, whether you’re in the middle of the book, at the start or at the end. You just click “Go To” and “ToC”. So, you’re free to place it anywhere in your file.
As to why you might want to move it to the end, it’s simple: the Look Inside feature only shows so many pages. With the ToC at the back, people looking inside your book can jump straight into your story, without going through copyright, acknowledgments, a 3-to-5-page-long (in the case of Pearseus) ToC etc.
Hopefully, with them reading more of your story, the incentive to buy the book will be greater.
Excellent post, Nicholas, thank you. After mulling it over for days, I decided to leave my TOC at the back. The way I see it, it’s the TOC at the front that involves the risk of the reader skipping to the end as I have several sections in the back matter, including a glossary of Greek words in my romance, The Ebb. I feared that would cause Amazon to misjudge me as a scammer in this case. So, I left it at the end, safe in the knowledge I am scamming no one this way, not even inadvertently. My mind was even put at rest by what Amazon said, ie: “…absent any other issues of quality, locating the TOC at the end of a book is not in itself outside of our guidelines.” Thank you, Amazon. Just keep your wits about you a bit better from now on, I will add!
I, too, haven’t made any changes yet. We’ll see how it plays out 🙂
I had a QC notice to move the ToC to front of a book. I had to comply or see the book blocked from sale. I asked amazon was ToC front of book a new rule. Amazon said yes. I shared that email and many authors moved the ToC from back to front.. Three or four days later, along comes a post in an Amazon forum: Back of book ToC is NOT a firm and fast rule. Total about face. Too late for me, and many others…in time and $$$. My rule of thumb is never make changes on rumor. I always ASK Amazon. Yes is yes and No is No.
Amazon does not want indie authors in its face on this issue. By-the-by, a new raft of Clickbait books were published this week. The scammers have adjusted. Some are removing the ClickBait message to beyond the Look Inside feature. 40,000 word units.
No resolution to the issue yet.
Sigh… Thank you for sharing your experience.
glad to hear they had a good idea for once…
Lol – very cynical 😀
This is a very interesting and informative post. Thanks for the share.
A pleasure! Thanks for reading 🙂