It seems rarely a month passes without David Gaughran exposing how scammers are milking Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, at the expense mainly of indie authors. Here, for example. Or here.
And as often as not it’s indie authors who are getting penalised
But it’s not just indie authors getting scammed. Or penalised for something they haven’t done
The Bookseller today leads with a story of two mainstream-published authors, with £4 million ($5.3 million) of sales between them, who have found fake ebooks on Amazon in their names.
According to The Bookseller,
(Miranda) Dickinson believes that the fake book epidemic plaguing the authors are intended to steal money from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited programme by tricking the e-retailer into paying out through the page-per-read model, introduced in 2015. It is thought that as self-published authors are growing more aware of the fraud, the scammers are turning their attention to traditionally published writers.
When one of the authors complained to Amazon she was told as she didn’t have a KDP account, being published by Pan Macmillan, they could not act. Amazon then allegedly made her genuine book “unavailable” while leaving the fake books live.
For the full story, including more examples of mainstream-published authors being scammed on Amazon, check out The Bookseller.
I’m left wondering if this might work out for the common good.
The indie scams, as Gaughran’s posts show, have been going on pretty much since the inception of Kindle Unlimited. But now mainstream-published authors are getting hit Amazon might finally sit up and take notice.
