KDP Select Titles Being Pirated and Distributed to Other Stores

Do you have any titles in KDP Select? Titles that are supposed to be exclusive to Amazon? If so, you may want to check periodically to make sure they’re not on sale anywhere else.

I only have a couple of titles in KDP Select, or rather my pen name does, and one of them has had a rough year. Earlier this spring, I got an email from Amazon informing me that Stars Across Time (yes, the pen name writes science fiction romance), which was enrolled in KDP Select, was available at Kobo (it turns out it was up at Apple, Barnes & Noble, etc. too). Amazon said I had five business days to remove the title from the other stores, or I’d be kicked out of their program. Imagine my surprise, since this was a relatively new book, and I had never published it anywhere except for Amazon. Imagine my alarm, too, since I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to get it removed in five days.

I emailed Kobo, since, at the time, I didn’t know it was in other stores, as well. They said it had arrived via a distributor, so they couldn’t take it down. .

I was lucky enough to have Mark Lefebvre‘s email address (he’s the director of self-publishing and author relations at Kobo), so I sent him a note and got some more information. He told me it had come to them via Draft 2 Digital and that he would check into it.

I was still panicking a little, since I didn’t have a D2D account or any way to contact them other than the form on their site. I was also worried because this was a book published under a pen name. I was afraid it might be harder than usual to prove that I was the rightful author, if it came to that (the pirate was publishing it under my pen name, letter for letter). I figured this would get resolved eventually, but worried that it wouldn’t be in time to save me from getting booted out of KDP Select. At the time, the book was selling well and getting a lot of borrows, so that would have sucked.

I emailed D2D’s customer support. Fortunately, they got back to me later that same day, said the person publishing the title was a known pirate who’d made accounts and caused trouble there before. I didn’t have to prove anything (phew). They took the book down, and it disappeared from the other stores within 24 hours.

Ultimately, that was a speedbump in my week, but not a big deal. I was relieved and pleased that the D2D folks handled it so quickly. (Though it is pretty lame that people bought the book — yes, I checked, and it had sales rankings everywhere and even a couple of reviews — and I didn’t see any of the money from those sales.)

You would think this would be the end of the story…

Part 2

Last Friday, I was poking around in the Apple store, making affiliate links for the audiobook version of the same title, which recently came out and is available everywhere (did you know that being exclusive with Amazon for an ebook doesn’t preclude publishing an audiobook everywhere?)

And guess what I found? It’s happened again. Stars Across Time was up on all of those same stores again. I emailed D2D to ask them about it, but it was Friday night, so didn’t expect to hear back from them over the weekend. It’s late Monday as I write this, and I’m hoping to hear back from them soon.

Mark at Kobo answered my email right away this afternoon and quarantined the book in their store, so I’m hoping that means it can’t happen again until I’m ready to take the title out of Select and publish it there myself. I don’t know people at Apple and Barnes & Noble, so I’ll have to wait for D2D to handle the rest.

Update: about 20 minutes after I published this post, I got a note from D2D that they’re disabling the account and taking it down again. Thanks, guys!

Asking for a change

This blog post is in part cautionary — my KDP Select friends, you may want to regularly check your titles to make sure someone else isn’t publishing them behind your back — but I also feel that something needs to be done to make it so this doesn’t happen in the future. A quick check on Twitter revealed some other authors who have dealt with similar experiences.

Right now, it seems to be way too easy to make an account at a store or a distributor and publish ebooks without anyone checking if you have the rights to do so. It’s not just D2D. Amazon didn’t bat an eye when I started publishing Ruby Lionsdrake books from my Lindsay Buroker KDP account. Smashwords didn’t care, either, that the author name didn’t match the name on the tax forms.

I don’t know what the solution would be, because it would a pain to make everyone with a pen name jump through 99 hoops just because a few people are uploading pirated ebooks. At the least, I think distributors and stores need to ask some questions when the author listed on the book doesn’t match the name on the account. This would mean publishers having to provide documentation (but they should have contracts with authors on file, anyway), and might mean that those of us who write under pen names would have to get a DBA or some other kind of documentation. It would be an inconvenience, yes, but should it really be this easy to publish someone else’s books?

I would love to hear from you guys. Any thoughts on solutions to make it harder for pirates to do this? Should stores and distributors ask more questions?