In my last post, I described my positive experience with KDP Rocket. When I used the software for the first time, however, I was amazed to see that about one-third of the books in the top 20 had been published within the last week or so. This was regardless of genre, which is even stranger. What’s going on here?
The answer came in the form of an excellent post by author David Gaughran, which exposed the latest scam by unscrupulous so-called “entrepreneurs”: fake books.
These are books that are powered by so-called clickfarms — and here is how the scam works.
Raiders Of The Lost KENP
Image: David Gaughran
David looked at the Kindle Store Best Seller charts and clicked over to Free Books. As the screenshot on the right shows, the Top 20 had five suspicious-looking titles: none of them have reviews. All were published in the last week. They have no Also Boughts – meaning they have had very few sales. And each of these titles is around 2,500 pages long, seems to have duplicated content, and is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
What is going on here?
First of all, scammers pilfer a book’s content — often by stealing an author’s original work and running it through a synonymizer before uploading it to Amazon, thus avoiding the automatic plagiarism detectors. They make sure the “book” is as long as possible, but as they are enrolling the title in Kindle Unlimited, they keep it under the program’s limit of 3,000 pages.
These thieves make the book free for a few days, and then use a variety of banned methods to generate a huge and immediate surge in downloads – generally suspected to be bots or clickfarms or dummy accounts, or some combination thereof. These fake books then suddenly jump into the Top 20 of the free charts, displacing authors who have gone to considerable effort to put together an advertising campaign for their work.
As the Amazon staff tasked with dealing with reports of suspicious activity don’t seem to work weekends, when authors and readers report these fake books to Amazon, no action usually gets taken until the following Monday. By then it’s often too late, and these titles have returned to the paid listings, and the subsequent boost in page reads (which normally follows a free run), enables them to grab a huge chunk of the Kindle Unlimited pot – the same shared pot that all authors get paid from.
Sometimes Amazon zaps these fake books when staff return to work on Monday, and presumably then withhold KU payments. Lately, however, the situation has deteriorated to the point where these scammers are getting bolder in the face of Amazon’s increasingly lax attitude, often attacking the free charts during the week now also.
Why Does This Matter?
You might think that this has no bearing on you. However, it impacts authors in two ways:
First, the obvious: there’s less money left in the pot for legitimate authors.
Second, these fake books displace real books. There you are, working for weeks to create the perfect promo, only to slide to #21 and to the second page of Amazon’s best-sellers because a bunch of fake books has taken your place.
As David explains, free promotions are one of the perks of going exclusive with Amazon and an incredibly powerful marketing tool. Free runs can provide significant exposure, which leads to a bump in Kindle Unlimited page reads a few days later. They can also be useful by boosting sell through in a series, or by generating mailing list sign-ups for future launches. As such, authors invest significant resources in free runs, and those places in the Top 20 are high-visibility spots – i.e. incredibly valuable real estate.
In other words, authors are getting screwed. However, readers should be even more enraged, as they find themselves buying stolen, or even unreadable books. This means that their trust in Amazon is eroded — which makes it Amazon’s problem.
There is some controversy as to how much of a payout this actually entails to scammers. Scammers only make money if Amazon actually pays up. As royalties are paid two months after the actual sale, Amazon has plenty of time to pull a fake book and withhold the relevant royalties. Amazon has over a month to go over any complaint reports, ID the scam book, and pull it from their system before payments go out. It is unlikely that any one of these books actually gets a penny.
A second controversial point is whom these scams affect most. As Kevin points out in the comments, KENP payout is not a fixed pool, as the per page payout is deliberately set to specific levels by Amazon each month. This means that these scams cost Amazon a ton of money. If Amazon wants the payout to be 0.45c per KENP, and a click farmed book got 100,000 pages read, that book will cost Amazon $450. Not other authors. Amazon. Because Amazon will have to add in more money to compensate for scam books in order to keep the payout at the level they want.
The Hammer
That is why I’m as concerned about Amazon’s possible solution to the problem as I am to the problem itself. Amazon might decide that 2 months is not enough to check the legitimacy of each book. Or they will yank down suspicious books, as they have done in the past, in the process pulling down legitimate books in their fervor to remove the scam ones. We’ve seen this dozens of times over the winter, with individual books or even entire accounts locked down for the author supposedly using click-farms. Thankfully, in most cases, the author has recovered their account later.
One thing Amazon might do is to make it harder to get a KDP account. They could require users to jump through a stack of hoops in order to block people from setting up repeated, fraudulent KDP accounts. They might even create some sort of ID verification process: something which beyond a shadow of a doubt verifies who the person starting the account is. Or they might require a nominal fee for publishing, which would keep many scammers out as they work on volume.
Every time authors have launched major complaints about a problem on Amazon, the company has eventually done something about it. We usually have disliked the solution even more than we disliked the original problem. If this continues to deteriorate the Amazon customer experience (which is, in the end, all Amazon really cares about), they will act.
Until then, our best defense is to report such books whenever we see them so that Amazon can deal with them. If you report a book, it gets assessed. If it violates the Amazon TOS, then it will be taken down and won’t be getting any KU dollars. A win for everyone!
For more information on this, check out the full post on David’s site and be sure to read the comments.
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Thanks for the information, Nicholas. 🙂 — Suzanne
A pleasure. I hope it has no bearing on you.
Thanks for the “heads-up” on this issue. I’ve had other issues with Amazon and this is just another one to add to the list. It can be extremely efficient, but frustrating with issues like this.
Oh, absolutely. It’s one of the things I love about CreateSpace; their excellent support.
This is a sad situation for everyone. I have many books that I’ve purchased when the price was low or even free that I haven’t gotten around to reading, but since most of the books I buy are from newsletters and book blogs or reviews, I tend to think I won’t have any “fake books” on my Kindle. I am so sick of hearing about “fake news”, “fake Times covers” and such, now we have “fake books.”
We do live in fake times, it seems 🙂
Yes, we do. And yesterday my 3-year-old granddaughter told me the shorts she was wearing had fake pockets. LOL
Lol – too cute 😀
It’s so disheartening. I read David’s article a week ago. It’s amazing how when author’s have a concern having to constantly try to get Amazon’s attention to no avail to rectify, and honest reviews being taken off our work, yet these scammers can get through the damn system.
Well, we’re trying to do things the right way, while they follow more of a ‘hit-and-run’ mentality.
So true! 🙂
This is news to me, Nicholas. Scammers truly are everywhere. I have free work on Amazon, but I can’t get a true reflection of its position because of this. Am I understanding that right?
That’s right. Also, you may be getting less money because of scammers eating into the KENP pot.
Right. My most recently published work is with KU for the first time so I guess we’ll see how this plays out. Thanks for the info.
I hope you make a killing with KU 🙂
Small steps.
If you find your book as one of the copies file a take down with Google against Amazon. That should wake them up. Also file a complaint with the US Attorney General for copyright infringement against Amazon and the so-called author. There are copyright laws out there, but I don’t think anyone is using them.
I guess we’re all tired of litigation — and weary of taking on a giant.
I remember reading about this before and it’s still aggravating. It explains why I see such a mess on the lists even when paid stuff. I wonder if those free ones go high on the other lists when they return to pay. Either way, it really does a number on the confidence.
Some people just suck…
And they tend to suck the fun out of things for the rest of us.
It’s annoying that scammers work the system like this… everywhere it seems. Hopefully whatever Amazon comes up with will focus on distinguishing legitimate humans from robots. Honestly, we shouldn’t have a problem proving that we are humans even if it adds a few steps. We’ll all benefit. 😀
Let’s hope it’s something simple 🙂
This is one of those posts for which clicking a “mad face” rather than a “like” feels more appropriate. Scammers are everywhere and, sadly, not going away any time soon. Thanks for the info.
I know what you mean!
I understood this one for a change, and shared it around too. Surely books of 2,500 pages would immediately come to notice?. That’s a very unusually long book length these days, when many books that are best sellers have less than 500 pages. Some of the top sellers in fiction are only just over 300 pages. Amazon must be able to set up something that alerts them to book in excess of a given number of pages, say 600.
My own fear is that these scammers will just make the process more difficult for new authors, and the scammers will just move on to something else once they have ‘milked’ this market.
On a similar point, I have read somewhere (?) that some bestselling books are written by computer programmes, using fake names for authors, and ‘amalgamated styles’. Is this a myth, or have you heard that too?
Best wishes, Pete.
There was some research on producing a “best-seller” using software, but it’s still all rather academic, as far as I know.
Like you, I fear that Amazon will make things harder for everyone in response to these ridiculous scams.
In my estimation, Amazon is too busy buying this and droning that to care about books and authors too much. I’m not sure how much money they make from their publishing arm but it doesn’t seem to be enough to take time and really come up with a properly tailored solution that tackles the problem instead of just layering onto the problem making it even more cumbersome. This is why I am so glad that I left KDP select. I didn’t want my royalties to be fully in their hands because at some point they’ll make a fist.
I understand your concern, and I’ve been reading similar statements in a lot of places. Personally, I’m not quite so pessimistic or negative toward Amazon. Still, I’m glad that companies like Smashwords exist.