You might expect Amazon to take more decisive action against book scams in a perfect world.īut the reality is that on many occasions that Amazon took action, it also affected legitimate authors. When any online activity involves money, it’s a potential target for scammers. One can only hope that Amazon takes action very soon to protect readers and authors from these obvious Kindle scams. Yet, the scams continue in various forms because Amazon still can’t count pages. In reaction, Amazon has tried limiting the length of ebooks and placed bans on tables of content at the end of an ebook. So they added skip links at the beginning of a (trash) ebook to get readers to go to the last page of the book with a promise of some phony reward or special offer. Scammers quickly recognized this flaw almost as soon as Amazon released KU. Therefore, if a reader skips pages, Kindle counts the skipped pages. Kindle makes the calculation based on the location a reader is at in an ebook. But in fact, Amazon doesn’t really know how many. Of course, authors are paid by the number of pages read. I mean, one author publishing 84 ebooks in one year is a pretty good clue that something is amiss.Īnother problem that scammers easily exploit is Amazon’s technical inability to count pages that Kindle Unlimited (KU) subscribers read. ![]() It’s a tough world out there in self-publishing for the honest, hard-working self-published author.īut for the crooks, thieves, and miscreants, well, it’s easy pickings. It must be noted, though, that Amazon technically also profits off its catfish:įor every dollar, someone like Pylarinos or Marrocco makes off the Kindle store, Amazon makes $1.86. Perhaps this quote from the Washington Post article will help you understand why Amazon doesn’t move as fast as one would like to think it should. ![]() So if it is so easy to spot a Kindle scam, why doesn’t Amazon react and close down the scammers? It’s manipulating or buying reviews to give these Kindle scam books some credibility. There is no regard whatsoever for quality. But sadly, now it’s the name of a Kindle scam author.Īs the article in the Washington Post explains, it is all about publishing content. Those who have read Atlas Shrugged will recognize this name immediately. In fact, one author, by the name of Dagny Taggart, published 84 books in one year. And that they produce new ebooks at a phenomenal rate. The article states that non-fiction self-help ebooks are the prime target of these Kindle scams. How an industry of ‘Amazon entrepreneurs’ pulled off the Internet’s craftiest catfishing scheme. This article in the Washington Post goes into great detail. ![]() No, they outsource the time-consuming writing part or use AI writing programs and simply concentrate on milking the market. It might feel like a kick in the guts to know that Kindle scams are raking in mountains of money.Īnd they don’t even write the ebooks themselves. There are a lot of hard-working self-publishing authors out there, and all of them are battling away day after day, trying to make a go of selling books. Updates to this article How Kindle scams work
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