KU Scammers on Amazon – What’s Going On?

This is extremely long and probably only of interest to indie authors, but it does impact readers who shop Amazon, so I’m putting it here for anyone.

Not many readers (who aren’t also authors) know any details about this, though readers sure are noticing the impacts of the scams. I see threads or posts all over the place about the difficulty readers are having with simply browsing on Amazon to find their next good read.

Discoverability is an author’s word when it comes to books…it’s the holy grail of the indie. If you say it in the tones of a voice-over in a serious movie, you can almost hear the slight echo: What is the secret of the grail (discoverability)?

Now, it is also a reader problem. The scammers have made finding books too difficult. Readers are going back to older methods for finding books or even worse, simply writing off any new author out of hand unless the recommendation comes from an actual person on Goodreads or forum or the like.

It impacts me and those of you who read my books in a direct way. I support Kindle Unlimited (hereafter called KU) as a program and like the idea of people getting to read for a fixed amount a month. I think it opens reading up to more people. That said, I can’t afford it anymore.

Being in KDP Select is the only way to have my books in KU. It also offers a bit more visibility to the book, which helps a struggling author like me. The downside is that I can’t have them at any other vendor. Not iTunes, B&N, Google Play…nowhere.

Those other vendors don’t actually make much at all, truly low amounts since I’m not a heavy hitter. That said, I’ve been wide with the Silo 49 books for over a year and while the amount they bring in is low elsewhere, they are one of the few WOOL Universe series that is available outside of Amazon, so I leave it there.

Because KU is lowering sales and also bringing in lower and lower amounts per read, I’m taking the Between Life and Death series out. It will be going wide. Will I earn less? Sink into oblivion without the KU boost? Possibly, maybe even probably. But if KU implodes under the weight of the scammers, then I won’t have lost much, will I? And I can’t continue to keep all my eggs in one basket when the basket is so leaky.

On the other hand, they are good books (if I’m allowed to say that) and there’s always a chance this will let them come out from under the shadow of my inherent inability to promote myself aggressively. It could happen. Pigs might fly too!

So, if you’re a KU member and haven’t checked those out yet, do so soon! They come out between April 22nd and June 10th, depending on the book.

Back to the issue of the scammers and what’s really going on…

A couple of authors who don’t muck about too much in the market part of the business have asked me via PM about this strange thing going on, and I’ve explained it. But if two have asked me (little old me), then how many others are wondering what’s really going on with books in KU and Amazon right now? How many readers are looking at page after page of nonsense books on the bestseller lists for their favorite genre and wondering what’s going on?

Or worse, how many readers see those lists and say, “That must be indie work. Glad I don’t read indies!”

For those who aren’t familiar with it, here’s the trick in as short a form as I can make it. This might be painful or complicated for those who aren’t familiar with this system Amazon has, but it is impacting all of us as readers, so it might be worth reading to understand what’s going on.

They have tried to fix it before. KU was a scammers paradise from day one. That’s why we’re in KU 2.0 now. KU 1.0 had another system and the scams were different, but eventually so pervasive that the system broke and it had to be changed. Here’s how that went.

In original KU, authors were paid a flat rate for any book at all, no matter the length, for every borrow. Usually around $1.35, it actually varied because it is a communal pot in which all authors share. KU members pay their monthly fee, Amazon divides the pot (they actually added to it so that it wouldn’t fall below $1.34, which I’ll explain in a second.) The only caveat was that the reader who checked it out must reach 10% of the book in length to trigger a read payout.

During that period, it sort of sucked for writers of…you know…actual books. No matter how long or how wonderful the book, you made the same as a ten page pamphlet. Ah, you see what’s coming right? Enter the era of the “Scamphlet.” These were often cobbled together from the internet or wikipedia or simply gibberish. Because they were ten pages or so, then the mere act of opening the book to the first page meant a full payout of $1.34.

It also meant the heyday of erotica in very short form. No offense to them, because that’s got to be hard to write, but during KU 1.0, things went a little wonky. Usually very short books anyway, it wasn’t unheard of to see bragging threads of writers saying they could “bang” out four of those a day and were bringing home $10K to $50K a month.

Still worse were the hired scammers, who simply got people in foreign countries to cobble together bad erotica for five bucks per ten page unit, then loaded them up under many pen names a hundred times a day. They were also making bank.

The bank came from a communal pot. A communal pot shared by a million authors who wrote 500 page books. Who got the same for a five minute “aid to completion” a contractor wrote in an hour.

So not fun.

This was clearly a problem. So Amazon fixed it! They made KU 2.0!

Yeah, so not effective.

Now, we have a “Pay per page read” for books in KU. That means that a reader checks out a book from KU, reads to page 100 and decides they don’t like the book so they stop and return it. The author gets paid for the 100 pages read. If the book is only 20 pages long, then the author gets paid for 20 pages. If it’s a page turner that every reader reads through to the end, they get paid for all 500 pages of wonderful and quality prose.

The pay per page is a small number and varies by a few thousandths of a penny each month, but it seems to be settling in at around $00.0045 per page.

That equates to about $1.575 for a 350 page book (but the pages are assigned to the book via a secret algorithm and NOT explained. A good example of weirdness there is that two 50,000 word books can have up to 180 pages *difference* between their assigned pages. In fact, I have a 90K+ book (The Book of Sam) that has the same number of Amazon-assigned pages as a 55K romance. So, clearly all books are not the same even from the get go.

One thing we were all assured by Amazon…many times…in writing…was that Amazon knew how much a reader was reading in each book and they would pay us for those pages.

Scammers being scammers, they realized Amazon was lying very early on. Amazon couldn’t tell what pages were read. They only knew the last place you were at in the book. And that’s what they were paying authors, the last place that the reader synced in the book.

So, a KU borrow on a device that didn’t sync until after the book was read and the reader flipped back to the front to check out what else you’d written? Yeah, no pages read.

But likewise, a reader who clicked a link on Page 1 offering them the opportunity to win a Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and a $100 Amazon Gift Card….which then sent them to the back of a 3000 page book? Yep, you guessed it. They got paid for 3000 unread pages. (And no, there was no winner for those contests that  anyone knows off.)

Keep in mind, Amazon clearly knew this was happening, because the page limit for books in KU changed very recently (and abruptly) DOWN to 3000. There were 10,000 page books in KU doing this before that change. Even at $00.0041 per page (which is our lowest payout yet), that’s a big payout, particularly when a real author of a real book might get $1.50 for a full read.

One of the scammers has YouTube tutorials on how to pull the scam. He showed a screen shot of a 15 year old kid’s KDP Dashboard who made over $70,000 in one month pulling this scam. And there are HUNDREDS of them.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, let’s go with the visual aids! From a real book in the Amazon store at this moment. I did a benign search for a genre and this was the first result that popped up. Here we go!

I typed “scifi romance” into the search box on Amazon. Before you try this yourself, make sure no child who might be scarred for life is in eye-shot of the screen. You’ll get such beauties as this title, “ROMANCE: BWWM: Between Love & Friendship (BWWM Paranormal Scifi Romance Collection) (Interracial Alpha Male Pregnancy Short Stories).” 

Yes, I sucked it up and clicked buy just so I would have proof that I’m seeing what I’m seeing here. I’m so erasing it from my purchases so that my recommendations don’t get messed up forever.

CAVEAT! HUGE CAVEAT! I don’t want to get sued, so I’m going to make it clear from here on out that this book example is chosen at random from search results (first result). All that I say is my opinion and my assessment based on what I can see, evaluate, and judge as a human person who is allowed to make evaluations and judgments based on my common sense. If this is a real author and this is a real book and not a scam, then they have made a HUGE boo-boo in…uh…formatting?…and it needs to be corrected.

Lest you think I’m snooty…here’s a little sneaky peek inside the above book. It is thousands of pages long and has about a hundred pages of actual content at the start to fool any casual browser. What’s pictured below then starts and to get to the rest of the story, you have to click the table of contents and trigger a full 3000 page read to get past all the pages of this. (Click to embiggen.)

Now, this is supposed to be a book full of sexy romance shorts by “award winning” authors. Does that look anything like that to you?

The first part of the book is actually a story, so you can get a hundred pages or so into it and read actual words. Badly written, poorly formatted, and not very good…but it’s a book. Then that mess starts.

So, this is a prime example of the scams. Now, you might ask yourself, why is this book up there? Surely no one is borrowing it! And if so, they must see the scam!

Ah, this is the next level of scamdom, my fellow authors and fellow readers! And Amazon is letting it happen. Here are the particulars in image form. Again, click to embiggen.

What you see there is the cover, the title (what a title!) and that it is free right now. So, if it’s free, it must not be making money. Not so fast. See that other thing in the price box? It’s in Kindle Unlimited. And what do KU users often do instead of buying a book, even if it’s free? They click the Borrow box and that’s where the money is for these books.

It’s totally legit to get KU borrows during a free run and no one would argue against that. It’s part of what making a free run along with a BookBub ad is about. It often pays for the ad. And won’t most legitimate KU readers simply close the book and return it once the gibberish starts? Probably. Yet if they are, why do we see this?

What is that? That is the rank (#2,974 in the entire Kindle Free Store).  In terms of free, that means a whole boatload of copies moved.

You also see the size of the file: 2837 KB, which is huge and for a non-illustrated book, means a whole lot of pages. And also you’ll see the publishing date of April 10th, so less than a week ago.

Where’s the scam, you ask? I don’t see it, Ann!

Here it is. By giving a bunch of KU accounts to a whole lot of people, you create something called a “click farm.” Since KU is cheaper in other countries…say India…where click-farms can become very big business, this black hat scammer can get a whole lot of people to borrow the book via KU, click to the back, bank $13.50 each time, and then pay the click farm a buck (or less!) per trigger.

And many of them don’t even use click farms for this. Instead, they create cooperatives of other black hat “authors,” each having more than on KU account. They all click on each other’s books and trigger a payout. Sounds like a lot of work? Nope. If you put the same book out with nonsense inside ten times a day under new author names each time, with just 25 people in the cooperative, you can make hundreds or thousands of bucks a day. Literally.

If you’re dedicated and want to work two days a week instead of one, you can do it twenty or thirty times and earn even more.

And your two or three KU accounts required to get into a cooperative so you can do your part? Yeah, that costs you $20 to $30 a month.

They also use click farms to have thousands more “buy” the book for free, raising it in the ranks and creating visibility for the book so real readers will see and maybe accidentally click, thinking it’s an actual book. Those kinds of click farms are far cheaper. You can buy thousands of clicks for very little. They are openly advertised out there. (If you’re an author, don’t even think about it. Once Amazon does do something, they will likely take down all who participated.)

And what’s more, when the “free days” allowed by KDP end, the book will appear very high on the Paid ranks because of all the KU borrows, which means REAL consumers will see the book, think it’s a popular book and click it, creating some extra cash flow.

By the end of this short little scam – maybe two weeks if people report it – the scammer will have made thousands of bucks. Then they will slap a new five minute cover on it, change the title, and do it over again by publishing it once more under a new author name. Possibly they’ll change the nonsense in the middle to fool the automated machine checkers inside Amazon.

Or they’ll do it a hundred more times for each of the 100 iterations of nonsense they have inside the books. It’s a business. A big business with streamlined and effective processes. And it’s winning.

Remember how I said the authors share the KU funds from a communal pot? We still do. That means for each $100,000 bucks these scammers get (and since they are getting KU All Star Bonuses for being the biggest sellers of the month, they are doing very well indeed), that is $100,000 that isn’t being shared by actual authors.

For Strikers, I earn about $2 per borrow if the reader actually finishes the book. For some of the others, less. For the PePr novellas? About 40 cents.

Why? Because the per-page pot is diluted to lower and lower amounts with the millions and millions of pages the scammers get paid for, but no one reads.

That…in a nutshell…is the scam. Some of them have dozens of “author names” because the names get yanked when Amazon catches them. Many get a new EIN (business identifier number) and start over with one day off when an account gets banned. In essence, this is an unbeatable system of scam-age that KU fosters simply by it’s nature. And Amazon’s automated systems are so automated that there’s not a darn thing they can do to stop it *under their current system.*

Ah, their current system! What can they do? Scammers gonna’ scam, right? Well, up till now that’s been their attitude. Only us little guys are really harmed since we’re barely visible anyway. But the scammers have now started stepping on much more dainty and well-paid toes and hopefully, things will get action.

David Gaughran is a well known voice in the book world, and he’s been posting some amazing and insightful pieces that help to make sense of the current KU problem. His latest is depressingly on point and in a way, I’m actually glad the scam has risen to this level.

Why would I be glad? That’s awful!

Simple. Because up till now the scam was primarily impacting the mid-lister or tiny prawn in the self-publishing world. It stripped us of whatever small visibility we could get and pushed us into oblivion, where no reader would find us. The big names were still safe.

So, it wasn’t their problem. They were still banking 5 or 6 figures a month, so why should they care?

Now, it’s their problem too. Not only have KU scammers taken some of their All Star bonuses from the big names, prominent authors are now being pushed right off the main pages of the Top 100.

That’s serious. But again, why would I be happy because that’s happening to them? Am I bitter?

No! Not at all. It’s because Amazon has been ignoring all us mid-listers and prawns because, after all, we’re mid-listers and prawns. Our purpose is to make sure we put our books in so they can boast they have fourteen bagillion books in KU and then be happy with what we get. Now that it’s bigger names (the kind that have actual contacts in KDP Customer service), Amazon just might listen.

So, that’s me, breathing a big sigh of relief.

If you’re interested in the problem and finding out more about the latest iteration (along with a great example by Phoenix Sullivan, a smart, successful, and savvy publisher who has now felt that scammer burn), David’s wonderful post is here:  https://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2016/04/15/ku-scammers-attack-amazons-free-ebook-charts

And if you’re not really interested in that, how about I just show you my comment to that article. It’s fairly aggressive in terms of a solution, but at this point, the problem is so pervasive, I have doubts whether anything less will be effective.

There are lots of people offering all kinds of solutions and mine may be no better, but I think it’s likely to be more effective than doing nothing. It will also be incredibly difficult for Amazon to actually get started and not spend money. They got lucky for a long time by just having us run amok out there, but the china shop is a wreck and there are bulls crapping in all the yards, so they really have to just do it.

Here it is:

I spent my first career dealing with complex problems on a very large scale. That part of me is shaking her head and knows what needs to be done. The author part of me that gets most of her writing income from Amazon dreads what needs to be done (though thankfully I don’t depend on it or I’d be freaking even more than I am).

 

The best solution is one that Amazon most surely dreads taking too. They have to take the Google Play Nuclear Option here and simply suspend creation of new author accounts.

 

But wait…there’s more!

 

Because KDP isn’t Google, it will have to be a tiered attack and it can’t be defensive in nature. It has to be aggressive and sustained. Because the black hat cheaters are aggressive and their work is all too sustained and creative. And they’re winning.

 

Aside from immediate suspension of new accounts within KDP for new authors (which will seriously suck for many legit authors) they will need to go back through everyone on there and weed out the cheaters, ban for life the egregious ones (I know the black hats get new EINs like candy, which is where new accounts comes in), ban for life all KU users who have circled these wagons (should be a fairly straightforward program there), stop expanding KU into countries where click-farms are so easily created, and create an actual customer service center with actual English speaking people who have more than 20 seconds on the timer to service calls.

 

On top of that, they have to have probationary periods for new authors when they open it back up. Those get looked at by humans. Duplicated material (which will be a pain for anthology and box set authors) will get flagged for human attention.

 

Will cheaters still get through? Absolutely! There will no doubt be black hats with new EINs that are “clean” and past the probationary period who will sell those EINs for major bank to cheaters who will then load up 100 cheat books in one day and click farm them to death.

 

But by then, the ranks will have cleared and reports can then be dealt with in a far more timely manner. Right now, they’re holding very tiny fingers in giant holes popping up all over their dam and the water is running right over them. The only way to do anything at this point is to go nuclear.

 

There will be those that say Amazon would never do that (and they may be right). But consider that even though KDP and Amazon book sales consist of a high percentage of indie titles, that doesn’t mean they don’t have enough to keep readers busy already. They do. There are enough legit titles on Zon for them to stop new authors from joining for a while. There are enough legit authors already on Zon that they can fill up the new releases lists and jump for joy while no one new joins.

 

So yes, Amazon could feasibly do this and not suffer one single missed dollar due to millions of titles already in hand.

 

But will they? Or will they wait too long and doom KU for themselves, for readers, and for authors.

 

That said, I’ve unchecked yet another series from KDP Select. Like many others, I’ve gotten to the point where I’d rather get a little less now than be slammed later when things totally fall apart. So, I’m taking that series wide.