Today I received the dreaded e-mail going around. Amazon says they detected illegal Kindle Unlimited reads on my account, probably coming from scammers connected to the places I advertise. I DO NOT advertise. Ever. At all. And I'm not the only one hit by this. Amazon took away some of my page reads for April. The only books I have selling, being read are LitRPG, GamerLit, HaremLit books. In fact, I have a LitRPG/HaremLit book that sold very well in April. Maybe it's only because I'm mostly on LitRPG facebook forums, but it seems a lot of writers are getting hit by the same issue with Amazon, and a lot of writers have had their accounts suspended or terminated over this. One and all say they don't advertise. KU is becoming toxic if you want a career as a writer. Half my income comes from KU, and I might I to give up the dream if I leave KU, but it might be my only option if I get hit again. Some income is better than no income. I really don't know what to do.
Thanks. Readers need to know Amazon is threatening their favorite writers with account termination due to borrows we have no control over. Maybe they can apply pressure some through customer support. This affects them adversely, too, since they'll lose some of their favorite writers.
Thanks for starting this, @Tom Gallier . We've got a private thread (or three) going, but it's good to have something for the readers too as this all shakes out.
My question to Amazon right now it, if Amazon knows who the bad actors are in this scammer game (ie the scammers borrowing and reading our books) why aren't they blocking them and leaving us alone? We can't stop them from borrowing, but Amazon can.
Personally, I think they're trying to automate the problem and failing miserably. I saw the same with Google in the early 2000's...
Revealed: How one Amazon Kindle scam made millions of dollars | ZDNet That was one of them. He's probably still around? Eye-opening read.
Amazon believes (and maybe they are correct) that a lot of places writers advertise have their own bots that borrow and "read" the books advertised with them. Also, some believe that scammers, to help hide their activities, actually borrow and "read" other books. Either way, Amazon doesn't like it. Hell, last year I heard a writer tell how he ONLY advertised through Amazon (AMS) and his account was terminated for a short period for "Gaming" the system. Amazon is clueless, but trying to fix the problem. Unfortunately, they hurt more good people than scammers. I honestly believe their best avenue is to block anyone they believe to be scammers from using KU. Of course, the scammers would just create more accounts. It's probably an unsolvable problem, but at the rate Amazon is going the only ones in KU will end up being the scammers.
Ok, understand that now. I read up at one time on how authors actually receive royalties based on the amount of a book read so I could make sure I was providing the author with royalties if I read on unlimited or bought the books outright if I enjoyed it. I guess that’s how they were gaming the system with downloads rather than pages read.
Well, both. The downloads/borrows would spike the book up in the ranks and real people would buy/borrow and read at least some. All craziness.
I buy a copy of each book I edit, if it’s available, and check it out on KU, if it’s there, too. Generally I speed page through the KU copy and will probably never open the paid file, because I’ve just spent two or three weeks deep diving them already, but I like to support my authors. If I’ve contributed to this, I’m going to feel pretty terrible about that.
So I read at one time that authors on KU are paid not for downloads but for total percentage of the book read. Is that correct?
