Latest Posts

Selena Kitt

Amazon Scammers Take Over Kindle Unlimited – Game Over for Real Authors?

by | April 29, 2018 | | 3 Comments

I’ve been quiet about Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Program, and self-publishing in general, for several years. Part of me just gave up. (It really does feel good when you stop banging your head against a wall!) I’m an old cynic about Amazon now, I guess. They have been squeezing authors, paying us less and less, since the program started.

Personally, I’ve removed most of my books from the program, even though I’ve left a lot of money on the table doing so. Why? Because it’s unethical. There’s no other way to say it. Authors are getting screwed by Amazon every which way in the program. I kept a few books in, hoping to entice those all-you-can-eat Kindle Unlimited readers into paying customers.

I am, however, now rethinking that. Why? Because any author in the KDP Select Program is now in danger of losing their account.

I’ve been accused of being “Chicken Little” in the past, and here I am again, screaming at the sky. But this is reality. This is happening.

I’m going to let my author friend, D.A. Boulter explain it to you in his open letter to Jeff Bezos. He explains it much better than I do.

And it happened to him. Authors, it can happen to you. Readers, it can happen to your favorite author.

Even if they did nothing wrong whatsoever. 

OPEN LETTER TO JEFF BEZOS from author D.A. Boulter

Mr Bezos:
 
I opened my email program and found I’d received a message from your company.
 
The mail came from ‘content review’, asking for my attention, and I got the immediate feeling that this would be bad. I didn’t know why I’d receive that message now; I’d done nothing with my account in almost six months, haven’t changed a bit of content at all. Thus, it was with no little consternation I opened the message and found that my account is in violation, and if it continues to be so, I’ll be faced with penalties up to and including the termination of that account.
 
What did I do wrong? Actually, nothing. Not a thing. Amazon claims that accounts suspected of ‘manipulation’ have borrowed my book and I therefore accrued ‘illegal page reads’. I’m told that Amazon doesn’t offer advice on marketing, but I’d better be careful because if this happens again, well, see the termination threat above. There’s only one problem with that: I don’t do marketing. I’ve never hired any marketer, and for the past year or more I’ve not even advertised any of my books. The only advertising I get is by word of mouth. Yes, I sometimes – but not always – put a notice in one of the infrequent entries in my blog, and I sometimes, but not always, make a mention of a new book in the two writers’ forums of which I’m a member. Other than that, nothing. I’m lazy, know nothing about marketing, and don’t want to spend the energy finding out about it when I could be writing.
 
So, because Amazon alleges that suspect accounts have borrowed my book through Kindle Unlimited, I’m in danger of losing my account with Amazon. I use the word alleges, because Amazon up front refuses to give any details on their ‘investigation’. At first I found myself just sitting there, stunned. Then I looked up my stats. I’d sold three books so far in April, and had 3000 page reads in nine days. What kind of manipulation was that? Like a fool, I asked.
 
Why do I use the words ‘like a fool’? Because we can rarely get any sort of a straight answer when dealing with Amazon KDP. I asked, “What sort of manipulation?” I got the reply that they rechecked my account and stand by their determination; I will not be paid for illegal page reads.
 
See what I mean? I didn’t ask them to assess the status of my account or to reinstate my page reads. For the leader of a multi-billion dollar industry, you can’t seem to hire anyone for KDP who can read and understand a simple sentence in plain English.
 
I keep daily records of my sales and pages read through Amazon-provided KDP reports. After receiving this letter, and conferring with other authors with whom I share certain authors’ forums, I discovered that the letter would refer to my March totals, not my April month-to-date. I checked my March figures. Of the 24,829 Kindle Pages read (from the daily reports), I find that Amazon has now removed 15,924 or 65%.
 
As the book which constituted over 80% of my previously counted page-reads contains upwards of 750 Kindle Pages, I have to suspect that your company believes that I contracted marketers to “read” a grand total of 21 copies during a 31 day span, grossing me some $72 (approx). You must think I engage the bottom of the barrel marketers.
 
Amazon has a great reputation with respect to customer service. In fact, I’ve enjoyed just such great service. Last year, a CD I ordered from one of your 3rd party suppliers in Germany failed to show up in the stated time – in fact, I didn’t complain until some weeks after that time had passed, wanting to give the CD every opportunity to show up. Within hours of my finally making a complaint, I received a choice of them sending a second CD or giving me my money back. I chose to receive the second CD. It took 8 weeks to arrive – but I don’t blame Amazon or the 3rdparty retailer, because the postmark on it showed that the German Post Office had received it only 3 days after my complaint (and one of those days was a Sunday and Monday was New Years Day, as well). It was marked Luftpost (airmail). So, I blame the Post Office – either the German PO, the Canadian PO, or both. (The first CD never did arrive.)
 
Yes, you are rightly proud of your company’s customer service. However, the concern that you and your company show to your customers falters somewhat when dealing with your content providers – those of us who write books and place them in the Kindle Store and especially in Kindle Unlimited.
 
When I began providing content to Amazon in 2010, things were simple. If someone liked the presentation of an author’s book, they bought it outright or read the sample and then bought it. The author then collected the royalty. If the customers didn’t like our presentation or the sample, they didn’t buy it, and we received nothing. And, finally, if the book did not live up to their expectations, they returned it for a full refund and again we received nothing.
 
There existed no way to scam the system to get more royalties than we deserved. Customers either bought our books or they didn’t. They bought short books, long books, epics. They either paid the price we set – or they didn’t buy. No one had a valid complaint over length or price; if they didn’t feel they got value for money, they didn’t buy the book or they returned it. The only scamming that occurred came from a very tiny minority of readers who bought books and then returned them on a regular basis. Some authors noted that book after book of theirs got purchased and then returned, in order. This suggested a multiple returner. We lived with it.
 
Then came Kindle Unlimited. KU started out and remains an irredeemably and irretrievably broken system. Its terms and make-up were almost created with the interests of scammers in mind, and it continues to provide them with the means and opportunity to – let us not mince words – steal money from legitimate authors. That went for the original iteration of KU and every iteration since then.
 
We legitimate authors don’t know what to do. We can only complain, but that rarely gets us anywhere. We hate scammers even more than Amazon does. They steal our money, not Amazon’s. We hate the manipulation of rank that goes on. We believe in value rising to the top. We work very, very hard to provide the best reading entertainment we can. So, yes, we hate scammers. And, at times, we try to do something about it.
 
Example: One scam entailed putting up books full of repeated sentences, paragraphs, or short chapters – thousands of pages worth of repeated verbiage. A poorly-made cover and an enticing, though totally inaccurate description, accompanied the publication of these books. The authors in one of my groups spotted them, and we counted something like 40 obvious scam books in Amazon’s top 100. Eight “authors” with five books each. If a scammer had someone “read” one of these books (with 10,000 pages or more by my estimate), he’d make $50 for that one read.
 
I took it upon myself to report this to Amazon. All I wanted was an e-mail address to send the details to. Unable to find such on the Amazon site, I went the route of “Chat”. Upon discovering that I was not a customer who had been cheated out of money, nobody really wanted to hear from me. Over the next 45 minutes (I still have the transcript), I got passed through 6 different representatives, the last of which agreed with me and gave me an e-mail address. Those books quickly got taken down. I thought I had done my part. It took time, caused frustration, but a blow had been struck for justice.
 
You’d think that your company would be happy. I thought so, too. On my own time, I had investigated and presented the evidence. Amazon had struck quickly to maintain its honour. All was well with the world!
 
Then it occurred again just days later – the exact same sort of scam. Another 20-40 books. Annoyed with the scammers, I sent a second e-mail, only to get told that I should use “Chat” – they wanted to subject me to another 45 minutes of pass-along only to get told in the end to use the email address I’d just used? Not a chance; I then gave up.
 
So, if I’m a customer, I get treated royally. If I try to help Amazon prevent fraud in KU, I’m a nuisance. I’m a nuisance, because this fraud didn’t really hurt Amazon financially – they had already set aside the pool of money – it only hurt legitimate authors who would receive less for their page-reads.
 
We legitimate authors hate scammers with a passion. But then, Kindle Unlimited – as well as being a haven for scammers – is something of a scam in itself.
 
The contract we sign with KU gives Amazon exclusive right to sell and lend out our books; we can place them on no other platform. For this, Amazon undertakes that they will pay us per kindle-page read (present edition of KU). However, it turns out that Amazon does not have the ability to accurately determine how many pages get read. Scammers depend upon this weakness for their scams to bring in the money they steal from legitimate authors.
 
Authors have imaginations. You might consider possession of such as a prerequisite for the trade. We’re curious, inquisitive. Thus, when things seem just a little off, we investigate and talk among ourselves. At first we accepted Amazon’s word that they would pay us for pages read at face value. Then we noted strange things, and began experimenting. The result: we have determined that if someone borrows a book, downloads it to their Kindle reader and then turns off the wireless, bad things can happen. If that person then reads the book through – every page – but then returns to page one before again turning on the wireless and syncing with Amazon, the author gets credited with only one page read. This, in effect, is Amazon stealing from us. Amazon uses our content to entice readers to KU, promising to pay us for each page read, then paying us less than ½ cent for an entire book read – no matter how many pages.
 
I have often seen my page reads tick up by one page. [Let’s face it; I’m not a heavy hitter. I don’t sell a lot of books, and I don’t get hundreds of thousands of pages read per month – or per day – like some do. So, I can note this sort of thing better than more popular authors might.] And seeing my stats tick up by one page, I wonder if someone read one page of my book before putting it down, or if someone read through my whole book and then returned to the beginning before syncing with Amazon. Did I get my half-cent for one page, or did I get paid a half-cent for seven hundred and fifty pages? Did Amazon pay me justly according to contract, or did Amazon scam me out of three dollars? I don’t know, and Amazon relies on non-transparency to ensure that we don’t have more than the minimum amount of information useful to finding out.
 
KU’s lack of transparency doesn’t stop there.
 
When it became obvious that scammers were getting the monthly “All-Star” awards, and authors made this clear in blogs, in posts on forums, etc., Amazon’s solution to the problem seemed to be to make it more difficult … no, not more difficult to scam an “all-star” status, but more difficult to see the results of the scamming. Amazon stopped publishing the names of the winners, making it even less transparent.
 
When Amazon reacts to problems, it often uses a shotgun, where a rifle should be used – in other words, the solution often hurts the innocent as well as the guilty – often more than the guilty, because the guilty, if caught, simply abandon that account and start another. We legitimate authors cannot do that – or, if we do, we lose all books previously published.
 
Take this present situation. I, who have absolutely no control over who reads my books, find myself in danger of losing my account. Why? Because someone Amazon considers a scammer has borrowed them. I didn’t ask anyone to; I didn’t pay anyone to; I didn’t do anything. And my sales figures should show this to be the case. I had an average of 800 pages read per day in March (initial figures) of which you claim an average of 513 per day were scammed. No scammer worth his salt would try for a $2.50 per day payout.
 
I put in a lot of work to write a novel. It takes me a minimum of about 400 hours work to get one ready for publishing – I’m not fast. Sometimes it works out; other times I get a flop. One of mine (which I still believe is a fine novel) has sold 103 copies in almost 4 years. That’s $200 for 400 hrs work, or $0.50/hr. Not near minimum wage. A scammer puts in a couple hours work and nets thousands. We legitimate authors don’t think this is fair. But that’s what KU invites, what by its very composition it has always invited.
 
As I said, I don’t advertise – not any more. I did try AMS, but it gave me a very poor return on investment. And AMS has authors bid against each other to get what the Amazon algorithms once gave for free. The last time I tried for an ad, the bid went up over $1 per click. I think I got about 1 impression and no clicks before I gave up. At $1 per click, I would need a 50% success rate to barely break even. In fact, more likely I’d be paying Amazon more than my book is worth for the privilege of finding a reader. And Amazon knows that and still operates AMS like this. If I were to pay those readers a dollar each from my own pocket to read my books in KU, I’d make money – but that would be scamming, and I’d lose my account. So, doesn’t that make Amazon Marketing Services somewhat of a scam in itself as well?
 
To finish, I’m threatened with termination of my account for no valid reason; AMS doesn’t work for the author; KU is filled with scammers, and the innocent are tarred with the same brush by what? association? by the fact that alleged scammers may actually have read our books?; Amazon doesn’t seem to care who they damage with their shotgun attacks; Amazon actually scams us by not paying us for pages read – because they don’t know how many pages are read, and they knew they didn’t know this from the introduction of Kindle Unlimited. Yet they said that they did, and made a contract with us on that basis.
 
To protect my account, you have forced me to withdraw all my books from Kindle Unlimited when their present terms finish (one’s turn was up today – my best earner – and it’s out, the others should be gone by the end of the month). I can’t stop anyone from borrowing my books if I leave them in – I have no control over that aspect – and if the wrong people continue to borrow them, I may lose my account. I understand: your game; your rules (even though they are generally undefined publicly, and the internal definitions change at a seeming whim and without notice).
 
There is much more I could say, but this letter is long enough as it is.
 
So, if you can, sir, please tell me one good reason that I or any other legitimate author should endanger our accounts by maintaining any books in KU? (I already know why scammers should: they get our money – and in large amounts.)
 
D. A. Boulter.
 
 

The Future of Indie Publishing – Selena Kitt’s Predictions for 2017

by | January 13, 2017 | | 2 Comments

I remember in the old days, back in 2010 (*rocking like the old-timer I am, in a chair on the porch*) when the ebook market was the wild west of publishing…There was gold in them thar hills, I tell you! So. Much. Gold! Those of us who got in early? We made out like bandits. Now, I know this isn’t 2010 anymore, but the metaphor of the gold rush still applies. The avenues to “easy money” have mostly been closed off in indie publishing. As Amazon continues their attempt to dominate the ebook market, other income streams narrow down to a trickle. And Amazon themselves continue to squeeze indie authors, offering them less in profits, while their algorithms force them to spend more money in ads to make a larger sum.

Depressed? Dejected? Don’t worry. This isn’t the end of indie publishing. It’s just a shift in the market, and the best thing about indie authors is their ability to adapt. Yes, the market will continue to be flooded with new authors and more books. As the pond gets bigger, there will be a larger gap between the “big fish” and the “little fish,” and it will become even more difficult to gain visibility. But if you stick with it, and do all the right things, you can still make a career as an indie author.

2017 holds a lot of promise. It may not be the gold rush anymore, but there’s still a lot of gold in them thar hills—you just have to work a little harder to find it.

I think upping your marketing game this year will be key. Learn how to create effective ads with the biggest bang for your buck—or hire someone reputable who can do it for you. Amazon Ads will start giving Facebook ads a run for their money. Bookbub will continue to be effective (but less so than in previous years – we may have reached a saturation point there…) To be fair, most mailing list sites are less effective now than they’ve been in years previous. That said, many are still worth investing in to get the most eyes you can on your books.

Unfortunately, I do believe that Amazon’s market share will continue to grow. However, I think we are starting to see the giant just beginning to stumble, now that they have to turn a profit and actually pay shareholders (and this isn’t limited to selling books). Amazon has made several missteps this year, and they’re battling widespread fraud (again, not just in ebooks) and I see this trend causing mistrust, both in their customers and their vendors.

Amazon algorithms will continue to give boosts to KDP Select books, but given the issues that have recently come to light about “Kindle Unlimited” (not the least of which is Amazon’s inability to actually count the “pages read” they’re using to pay out to KDP Select author participants) authors may become more selective about their use of KDP Select as a marketing tool. Authors may put only certain books into the program, or put books in for just the first 90 days and then use sale prices coupled with a Bookbub ad (or a cluster of other smaller ads) to push the book wide. I believe authors will continue to use KDP Select, but many will begin to back off from the “all in” philosophy. Personally, I’ve never been a proponent of putting all your eggs in one basket.

Still, Amazon will remain the elephant in the room, and I believe their own imprints will continue to dominate the top book spots on the site. Because of this, we may see authors seeking to go hybrid this year, whether it’s looking to become an “Amazon author,” or submitting to traditional publishing houses.

I think growth in 2017 will be in foreign markets (where Kobo already has a foothold), as well as audio (where the market is still growing by leaps and bounds) and direct sales (which means sites like Gumroad and Patreon will gain even more popularity with authors). And while we’ve seen some small pubs down-size (like Samhain) and other smaller sites collapse (like All Romance Ebooks / Omnilit) others like Excitica and A1 Adult Ebooks (and their sister sites) will be around to pick up the slack. And as Amazon and other vendors crack down on more “adult” material, these sites will offer niche markets for subsequently disenfranchised readers and authors.

My best advice for 2017 is to work smarter, not harder. It may feel as if you’re on a writing treadmill, forced to release something new every thirty days or so, and the truth is there are plenty of authors doing just that. And some prolific authors have found success doing so. There is certainly something to the formula of “writing to market, writing fast and publishing often.” But don’t worry if you’re not the 5-10K-a-day sort of author. You can still be successful writing just a book or two a year. How?

Work smarter. Make sure you’re growing your own mailing list—and engaging with your readers on a regular basis. Don’t let them forget you exist (but don’t spam them—or annoy them—either). Readers like engaging with authors. And what they seem to enjoy most is authors with big personalities. So find your author persona and work it! I’ve seen authors do this in many different ways, from the inimitable Chuck Tingle to the sassy Jordan Silver. Take the best parts of you—the parts that others tend to be drawn to—and amplify them by ten. Turn up the volume. Be bold. Do and say the things that will make them remember you, in your newsletter and on social media. Just make sure you’re doing it from a genuine place. You’re just turning up the volume, not changing the channel!

Also, remember that no author is an island. Find other authors who write things similar to you and work out a way to cross-promote and cross-pollinate on a regular basis. Trust me, even if you’re the most prolific author in the world, you can’t turn out books fast enough to keep up with readers. Cross-promoting keeps readers on your side. They’ll start looking to you for recommendations and it will help keep their interest while you’re writing your next novel. And if you find you really click with another author, you can always consider an author partnership. After all, two authors can writer faster than one!

I don’t think 2016 was a great year for indies—but I do believe 2017 has the potential to be. No, 2017 won’t be anything like the gold rush year of 2010, but it’s still full of possibilities. I think the indie author community has grown together and become stronger over the years, and their future is still quite bright. Indies know how to adapt. They’re natural entrepreneurs, and even when the learning curve is steep, they’re willing to jump into the deep end to learn how to swim.

Looking forward to 2017, I think indie authors will continue to innovate, push the envelope, and transform the face of publishing itself.
Selena Kitt
www.selenakitt.com

ScAmazon 2 – Mammoth Consequences: The Digital Sweatshop

by | April 20, 2016 | | 0 Comments

About a month ago, I did a post about the scams that are rocking the self-publishing world on Amazon. I pointed to the scam Kindle internet marketing course that Dave Koziel was doing, and the 15-year-old German kid who made 130K using his methods.

Today, I saw a video from Dave Koziel on YouTube. He apparently felt it necessary to explain to his viewers that his methods weren’t really “scammy” and why he, himself, is not really a scammer. Watch the video for yourself. (I don’t recommend eating anything beforehand, though, if you have a tendency to get queasy…)

You see, Koziel admits he’s not a writer but more of an internet marketer who hired ghostwriters to write his hundreds (literally, hundreds) of 8,000-10,000 word “books.” He would then publish those books under pen names on Amazon. In KU 1.0, those 8-10K books would yield $1.30-ish a borrow. After KU 2.0, Dave clearly found himself with an abundance of short books that paid about half-a-penny per-page-read. So about $0.40-$0.50. That’s quite a pay cut.

Then Dave realized, if he bundled all his books together (and, you know, published them under different titles, changing up that order with every new title) he’d get paid more and could maximize his “Kindle real estate” so to speak. In fact, he discovered, if he got his reader(s) to click to the end of that mass of titles, even if they didn’t read them, he’d get paid for a full read!

This is particularly interesting to me because, as I revealed in a previous post, a representative at Amazon had directly told me, at the very beginning of KU 2.0, that “skipping to the end of a book” would not result in a full read. Dave Koziel, on the other hand, says that Amazon directly told him that yes, skipping to the end of a book does result in a full read, and that they somehow planned this by design.


So, Amazon – which is it?

Clearly, the evidence shows us that skipping to the end of a book does, indeed, result in a full read. We now have conflicting reports about whether or not that was intentional, or even known, by Amazon.

Dave Koziel took it upon himself to put a call out to his readers at the beginning of his books, asking them to click to the end if they wanted him to get paid for all his hard work (or in his case, his ghostwriters’ hard work and his cash outlay…) He explained to them that Amazon had started paying authors by the page read, and in order to get fully paid, they had to skip to the end.

What reader, who picked up a book because they liked the cover/blurb enough to borrow it, wouldn’t click to the end after that plea?

Koziel claims he was just being honest with his readers. And his scam wasn’t a scam, or even a loophole – that Amazon told him they’d designed the system this way on purpose. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I do know that Koziel and the others he taught his “system” to clearly had some ethically questionable morals, but they weren’t technically doing anything against Amazon’s TOS. As with the short “scamphlets” (making books so short, just opening them would get a reader to 10% and count as a $1.30-ish borrow, no matter what content was inside) this “loophole” was built into Amazon’s system.

The shocking thing, to me, was that Amazon decided to pay authors by “pages read,” when in fact, they couldn’t actually count those pages. They threw out a communal pot of money to the authors and like some literary Hunger Games, we were forced to fight over it. And the thing is – the game was rigged. Not just Amazon’s algorithms that favor their own imprints (they do) or Amazon giving authors sweetheart deals in Kindle Unlimited.

No, this game was rigged by Amazon’s own design. In the first version of Kindle Unlimited, they created a perfect storm where erotica authors (who already wrote short) could get $1.30-ish per borrow for a 5000 word story. This made authors of 100,000 word novels mad–and allowed
scammers internet marketers like Dave Koziel to create scamphlets–so Amazon closed that loophole. But it turns out, Amazon had “fixed” the loophole in Krap Unlimited 1.0 only to create an even bigger one in Krap Unlimited 2.0.

So the game’s still rigged.

David Gaughran and Phoenix Sullivan recently pointed out how many of these scammers have taken courses like Koziel’s and run amok with them, adding even scammier ideas along the way to the mix. These scammers are using giant click-farms to drive their books up in rank on the free charts (and Kindle Unlimited subscribers can still borrow books while they’re free).

They’re stuffing their titles full of keywords (a practice Amazon cracked down on years ago and have since let run rampant again) even going so far as to put keywords at the beginning of each title so they’ll appear high in the search rank. (This has made it nearly impossible to find anything on Amazon – they’ve effectively broken Amazon’s amazing search engine.)

While many authors have learned that adding a “bonus book” at the end of their titles can increase pages read (a bird book in the hand, and all that) and actually add value for readers – scammers have taken it upon themselves to add thousands and thousands of pages of “bonus” content. Sometimes they just put all their ghostwritten books in to increase that page count to 3000. Or they translate those books with Google Translate into twenty different languages and put those at the back. Some are even so bold as to just put gobbeldygook culled from the internet with a link at the front with an incentive (win a Kindle Fire!) to skip to the end.

They’re also putting their books into as many categories as possible (most of them unrelated to the actual content) and sometimes aping the looks of covers, titles and even author names, to appear high in searches for popular books.

So… why isn’t every author out there doing this? Well, the reality is, some of them are. They’ve found out about the loophole and have jumped on the bandwagon because… if you can’t beat them, join them? After all, the loophole is still open. Amazon has done nothing to close it. Skipping to the end of a book still results as a full read, right this very minute. Amazon recently capped the amount of pages read per book at 3000. They have also now disallowed (sort of… in certain cases… about what you’d expect?) putting the table of contents at the back of a book.

Of course, none of that has actually fixed the problem. And that is ALL the action they’ve taken. That’s it. They still have a loophole big enough to drive a $100,000 a month Mack truck through!

As Phoenix Sullivan pointed out: “How many ethical authors are feeling pressured into adopting black hat techniques seeing how many black hatters are making bank on them with seeming impunity? Some days even I’m tempted to grab a few EINs and a handful of throwaway email accounts, put on a black hat and go to town. I understand the system—all I need is one good month to game it…”

Authors learned very quickly that Amazon is where the real money is. Amazon allowed self-publishing stars like Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and Hugh Howey to rise to the top after being rejected by the gatekeepers or legacy/traditional publishing, to make thousands, hundreds of thousands, from their work.

When self publishing first became a thing, everyone claimed that with no gatekeepers there was going to be a “ton of crap flooding the market!” Oh noez! Of course, what they meant was a “ton of crap writing” from authors who couldn’t write up to legacy standards.

I don’t think anyone thought, “from hundreds of ghostwriters paid by internet marketers!”

Forget devaluing our work by offering it for $0.99 or free. Forget devaluing “literature” by allowing self-published authors to publish directly to readers. That wasn’t the “race to the bottom” everyone worried about. THIS is the true race to the bottom.

Dave Koziel claimed he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He says he’s not a scammer (even though he admits he’s not really a writer.) He’s a self-proclaimed “internet marketer,” just looking to make a buck on the internet. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

Actually, there is.

Koziel is just one example of his kind. (In fact, he teaches and sells internet courses to others who want to copy what he’s done.) And if Koziel alone has hundreds of ghostwritten books, and they’re not plagiarized or written like a third grader (two things he claims in his video…) then the reality is, he’s accumulated material at a rate that no reasonable writer could accomplish. Only a few outliers (Amanda Lee, I’m looking at you, girl! 😛 ) can reasonably write 10K a day without burning out. But Koziel can hire 10 ghostwriters a day. 100 a week, if he wanted to. He can mass-produce titles at will.

Granted, the system itself is the problem when everyone is vying for a piece of the same pie. The more scammy you get, the more money you make. Yay you! But as the system starts to erode, and more and more mercenary types get on board, the further things collapse. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with hiring a ghostwriter (Patterson does it all the time in the legacy world – and no one cares) there’s a problem when people start taking advantage of ghostwriters and working it all like a “system.”


If you pay a ghostwriter well, and that ghostwriter does a good job, that’s a legitimate business transaction. But most (if not all) of these odesk-type ghostwriters are undercharging (that hurts legitimate ghostwriters) because they’re overseas (there’s outsourcing again) and IMers can (and do) take advantage of that. There’s a difference between an author who has a story to tell who hires a ghostwriter (either because they don’t have time to write it, or because they don’t have the skills) and an IMer who gives an army of ghostwriters the trope-du-jour and says, “write me as many stories as possible.”


These guys may hire click farms, as Gaughran and Sullivan noted – but guys like this are also getting legitimate readers and building a following. (They talk a lot about building mailing lists so they can accumulate a way to sell all their scammy internet marketing things, not just books…) So what’s wrong with what he does? Clearly he doesn’t see anything wrong with it. But there is something wrong with it. I call it the Jurassic Park problem. Remember Jeff Goldblum’s speech to Hammond about cloning dinosaurs? When Hammond asked (like this guy Koziel) what’s wrong with what he’s done?


“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it – it didn’t require any discipline to acquire it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it. Well… you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should…”

Since Koziel likes YouTube videos so much – here’s one he and all of his minions should watch:

The problem is now we really are competing for readers with this guy. It’s like the outsourcing to other countries that corporations do to trim margins in any business – it’s a slippery slope. And now what do we have? A digital sweat shop environment. Writers terrified of falling off a 30-day cliff, utilizing voice software like Dragon to keep up and write as many words as possible as fast as they can, creating shared pen names to try to get a foothold in a flooded market.

It’s hard enough to gain visibility on Amazon these days, when there are plenty of excellent, legitimate writers out there putting out some great books. Because the reality of the gatekeepers was not that there was too much “garbage” out there to publish – the reality was always that there was never enough room at their table. There was plenty of stuff leftover that just went to waste – that’s the stuff that writers can now self-publish, now that the traditional gatekeepers are gone. And much of it is great stuff – books readers prove, with their buying dollars – they actually want to read.

Today, self-publishing authors don’t have to worry about getting past the gatekeepers. But they have to compete with internet marketers who see Kindle as a “business opportunity” and who are using it, solely, to make money. We’re competing with someone who can scam Amazon’s system (which, admittedly, is Amazon’s fault – they’ve made it “scammable”) and they’ve proven with hard numbers that they can take upwards of $100,000 or more a month out of the pot.

There are people in the world whose ethics are very fluid. Who think, “Why shouldn’t I take advantage of this giant money-making loophole?” And when those people don’t stop to think if they should, just because they can, and they decide to take advantage… there are plenty of people who come afterward who feel like they have to, as well – just to level the playing field.

How can a “real author” (as opposed to a scammer internet marketer) compete in a self-publishing world where scammers internet marketers can buy and publish hundreds of titles at a time? Where they can make enough money scamming publishing their deluge of titles to spend those ill-gotten gains on Amazon marketing (Dave Koziel says he was paying Amazon to market his “books”) and Facebook ads, outspending legitimate authors by thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands?

Who can compete with that? Unless an author is going to throw up their hands and decide (a temptation that Phoenix Sullivan so eloquently expressed above) “The hell with it, if I can’t beat them, I might as well join them!” how is that author going to have a chance?

In his video, Koziel says he can see why authors might be angry at him… but I don’t think he really does see. He feels he’s simply taking advantage of a legitimate business opportunity. Like most internet marketers, he’s looking at the short-term gain, and not paying attention to the long-term consequences. Or any consequences at all.

Granted, Amazon created this monster. All of these loopholes, from the scamphlets in KU 1.0 to today’s garbage-stuffed tomes in KU 2.0, could have been prevented with a little forethought on Amazon’s part. I told them this was a risk when they decided to change to paying by pages-read and they either a) lied to me, knowing readers could skip to the end for a full-read or b) they actually didn’t know that skipping to the end would result in a full-read. I’m not sure which is worse.

But if Amazon hadn’t started down this road to begin with, most of these scammers “internet marketers” wouldn’t have gained a foothold in the first place. Now they’re like sharks circling in bloody waters, and they’re not about to leave, unless someone cleans up this mess. And even if Amazon takes action, KDP and self-publishing is now a hunting ground they’re not likely to give up any time soon.

Even if Amazon cleaned up the waters tomorrow, these scammers internet marketers would continue to work the system, looking for ways to game it. Like the raptors in Jurassic Park–they have no ethical dilemmas whatsoever–they’ll continue to test the fences for weaknesses.

As Koziel’s video goes to show. These internet marketers will say and do anything to make money in the system. They haven’t paid their dues. Goldblum’s argument applies categorically – no discipline was required to obtain it, so they take no responsibility for it. Because they’re not writers, because they don’t care about the craft, telling a story, supplying a reader with real value and creating a real relationship between author and reader (rather, they just want to collect mailing list subscribers so they can spam them…) They remove themselves from the “system” they are gaming, and see it as just that – a system to game.

To them, it is a game. And thanks to Amazon’s lackadaisical attitude, they’re winning.

It’s readers and real authors who are losing. Because of the crap (real crap – now we know what it looks like) flooding Amazon’s virtual shelves, because of the keyword-stuffed or deceptive titles muddying up the search waters, real authors and readers are the ones who lose in this game. Readers can’t find what they want to read (I know, as a reader, I can’t find anything on Amazon anymore in the Kindle store, because of the keyword stuffed crap) and authors can’t compete with scammers internet marketers who could care less who they hurt with their scams.

They do hurt people. Real people. Because KDP Select is paid out of a communal pot, there is a finite number that decreases when scammers internet marketers decide to make “books” their “business.” Except they’re not writers, and they don’t really care about books. Or readers. Or the self-publishing community. Their idea of “paying it forward” is to monetize their scams “knowledge of the system” and sell it to others so they, too, can be scammers internet marketers.

Not once do they talk about craft–about plots and voice and point of view. Those are pesky details they outsource to someone else. They’re not even providing outlines – just pointing to the best-selling trope of the hour (what is it this month? is it shifters? billionaires? navy seal shifter billionaires?) and letting the ghostwriters do all the heavy lifting. While they sit back, package and re-package the “work,” publish and republish titles (sometimes dozens of times – and Amazon doesn’t care) with new ASINs when they drop too far in rank (to gain those extra five free days in KDP Select) and find any possible way to scam internet market themselves as high of a paycheck as they can manage for the month.

Never once thinking about or caring about the authors who are writing real stories, for real readers, who can’t humanly produce on the mass level in the digital sweatshop environment these scammers internet marketers have created – where Amazon has allowed them to flourish. This is where we all work now, thanks to the scammers internet marketers.

Thanks to Amazon.

I hope Dave Koziel meant it when he said he could understand why authors were angry with him – perhaps his video is proof that maybe, just maybe, he’s growing the seed of a conscience. Maybe he’s finally thinking, albeit a little too late, whether or not he should do something, instead of focusing on whether or not he can. 

But I don’t live in a fantasy world. I know Dave Koziel and those like him are just doing what they do. They’ve found a lucrative hunting ground, and they’re going to continue doing what they do (while occasionally justifying or spinning it in a YouTube video) until they can’t do it anymore.

In the meantime, authors and readers continue to lose – and their trust in Amazon wanes.

Selena Kitt

SCAMAZON – Amazon "Kindle Unlimited" Scammers Netting Millions

by | March 14, 2016 | | 15 Comments

scamazonHow are scammers making millions off Amazon? (And off any author enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select program?)

It’s easy. So say digital entrepreneursscammers like Dave Koziel – who admits to outsourcing his material, he’s not an actual writer or anything. You see, all you have to do it just upload “books” stuffed to the gills with anything, even unrelated material (romance books, cookbooks, South Beach diet books, foreign language texts, any and everything you’ve got at your disposal) then use a click-bait link at the front of the book (something like “Click here to win a Kindle Fire!”) to take the reader directly to the very back. A German blog has detailed these tactics as well, although it seems the German Amazon store (much smaller than the U.S. one) is cracking down on this now.

Why does this method result in big bucks? Because of how Amazon has changed the way it pays authors enrolled in KDP Select. Authors know that when Kindle Unlimited was first launched (rather quickly and in direct response to other book subscription services that were just popping up like Scribd and Oyster) we were paid “by the borrow.” It was similar to a sale (on sales, we were paid 70% of list cost) except now we were paid out of a general fund instead of a set percentage. (Like a “pot” or “kitty” – a communal pool of money – except in this case, Amazon was the only contributor and authors the recepients.)

But Amazon changed that payment method from “per borrow” to “pages read.” Not pages written, mind you – but how many pages a reader actually reads.

Except, the problem with this method that’s recently come, shockingly, to light, is that there’s a loophole in the system. Apparently, if you put a link at the beginning of your book to the very back and a reader clicks it – the author is paid for all those pages. A full read. Even though a reader just skipped over them.

Remember when Amazon capped the KENPC count at 3000? This was why.

Except Amazon didn’t want us to know one important thing – they lied to us.

They have no idea how many pages a reader actually reads.

Let me say that again, just so you don’t miss it:

AMAZON HAS NO IDEA HOW MANY PAGES A READER ACTUALLY READS.

Wow. A little bit of karma coming back at you with these scammers, Jeff Bezos?

Because Amazon has been scamming authors in the KDP Select program all along.

They decided to pay us by “pages” read, when in fact, they can’t count actual pages read, and they can’t time how long a reader actually takes to read those pages (last time I checked, no one could read 3000 pages in less than two minutes…)

Oh, they can email me and my publishing company that I’m missing a “page break” at the end of my novel, or threaten to take my book off sale or label it problematic for typos (that may or may not actually be typos), or actually take my book off sale (which they recently did – Bear Necessities – just after a great freebie run, too, while it was on sale for $0.99 – thanks, Amazon!) because I provided bonus content in the front of a book instead of at the back – but they can’t actually count how many pages a reader reads in a book.

Yet… this is how they have decided to pay authors. Per page read.

See anything wrong with this picture?

I sure do – and it smells like fraud and class-action lawsuits to me.

How do I know Amazon can’t count how many pages a reader reads?

Because, if Amazon had a way to count how many pages a reader actually reads, a link at the front of the book that took the reader to the very back would result in two pages read.

Just two, not every single page in the book.

But as Dave Koziel and company have proven, that’s not what’s happening. There’s a little loophole in Amazon’s system. When a reader clicks a link at the front of a book that takes them to the end of a 3000 page “book” – it gives that author 3000 “pages read.” Not just two.

If Amazon had a way to count how many pages a reader actually reads, placement of the TOC (table of contents) at the front or back of the document would be irrelevant.

But as this post proves (and man, do I feel awful for author Walter Jon Williams– he’s out a hella lot of money because of Amazon’s knee-jerk reactions and lack of planning and forethought) Amazon has suddenly begun removing books with a TOC at the back of the book from sale. As usual, they decided to shoot first and ask questions later, and damaged legitimate authors in the process, as David Gaughran first pointed out.

If Amazon had a way to count how many pages a reader actually reads, placement of “bonus material” (an extra story or book along with the original source material, which many authors have started to do, including myself in the Kindle Unlimited program) would be irrelevant. You could put it at the front or back of the book, and it wouldn’t matter, because the table of contents tells the reader what’s where, right?

Except the truth is, Amazon is showing us through their actions – their cap on KENPC, their insistence that the TOC needs to be at the front of a book, and their recent email to me about “bonus” content not being allowed at the front of a book – that they have no idea how many pages are being read in any given book.

All they know is where a reader STOPS reading.

That’s all they can actually calculate.

That’s why a TOC needs to be at the front (because TOC defaults as the “start” point of a book, and if it’s at the back and a reader goes to the TOC, an author has just been given credit for a full read even if the reader didn’t read the book) and why they are no longer allowing “bonus” content at the front of a book.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there are legitimate, non-scammy reasons to put a TOC at the back or bonus material at the front. The TOC (especially if a book is long or a boxed set) takes up valuable real estate in the “Look Inside” feature or “Sample” on Amazon. Placing it at the back avoids that issue.

And the logic behind putting “bonus” material at the front?

Well, this is how I explained it to Amazon in my letter to them:

I had a very legitimate reason for putting the bonus book/content at the front of this title.

The last time I put a bonus book at the end of the book, I had reviews complaining that the original title ended at “50%” – and they thought it was much longer, because the bonus book was taking up real estate at the back of the original text.

In this case, I put the bonus book up front (and labeled it clearly on the title page and in the table of contents) so that when the reader finished the main book, it would be near 100% and they would understand they’d reached the end, and wouldn’t feel “cheated” or “ripped off.”

It’s easy to look at a Table of Contents (TOC) and navigate to the book they purchased.

You see, I was under the assumption that, since Amazon is paying us by PAGES READ, that you, at Amazon, actually had a way of knowing HOW MANY PAGES A READER ACTUALLY READ.

I assumed, since it would be fraudulent otherwise, per our contract in publishing with you, that since you were paying us by pages read, if a reader skipped over a book in the table of contents, we wouldn’t actually be paid for those pages. So that putting bonus content at the beginning of a book would be no big deal, no harm, no foul.

Apparently, that isn’t the case. And you never told us that. As a matter of fact, you, personally, (rep’s name redacted), lied to me and said that skipping to the end of a book would NOT result in a full-read. We emailed about this and talked about it on the phone when KU 1.0 was originally rolled out, and you assured me that yes, Amazon had a way of tracking the pages a reader actually read, with time spent on each page.

Turns out, Amazon hasn’t been able to correctly count pages read since the very beginning, even though that’s exactly how you’re paying us. 

If you think this isn’t fraud, and that there aren’t authors out there already talking about a class action lawsuit, you’d be very, very wrong. There are a lot of wealthy authors out there who are beyond furious about this new information. 

I suggest you plug this leak as fast as you can and make some apologies and remuneration for it. 

And restore my book to published status immediately – and its rank as well, since you took it off-sale for a reason that shouldn’t have been a problem or caused an issue if you hadn’t lied to authors about your ability to actually count the pages you were oh-so-generously paying us less than half-a-penny for. 

On my part, it was completely unintentional. I was directly told that skipping over content in a book would not result in pages read. But that was clearly a lie. I thought I was creating a better customer experience (kind of like Walter Jon Williams and his TOC placement) when in fact I was unknowingly using a tactic commonly utilized by scammers.

Unfortunately, it’s not the only scammer tactic I unwittingly adopted.

You see, I have a link at the front of my books in my table of contents (I happen to place my TOC up front, so I dodged that particular bullet) that leads to the back and a link to sign up to my mailing list. I incentivize signing up to the list by offering readers five free reads. I’ve been doing this for years.

The thing is, I had no idea that doing this resulted in a full read in Kindle Unlimited. Because Amazon specifically told me directly that “skipping pages” wouldn’t work – that they could count pages read – and linking to the back page would not result in a full read!

I’ve been “cheating” and didn’t even know it was cheating. I wasn’t complicit in a scam but I’ll sure be blamed for it if they shoot first and ask questions later. (And as we know, they usually do…) Especially since I write erotica and I’m Selena Kitt. I’m guilty already by default. 😛

The problem is, Amazon has been throwing the baby out with the bathwater by taking books off sale for having a TOC at the back of the book, or bonus content in the front. As David Gaughran first pointed out, real authors are being hurt by Amazon’s attempts to plug up a leak that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

And I’m afraid it isn’t going to end there, folks. 

Are links from the front of the book to the very back going to be next in Amazon’s line of fire? Could be.

The irony is, many people do what I do – put a link in the TOC to a mailing list with a free read to sign up. Many of those originally had their TOC at the back of their books – but now Amazon is forcing them to put their TOC at the front. In effect, forcing them to have a link now at the front of their book to their mailing list… which leads the back of their book, and would result in a “full read” if a reader clicks that link.

Doh.

I don’t know how Amazon will plug this particular loophole, but I know what I’m doing this week. *sigh* Time to reformat my Kindle Unlimited books and take out the link to free content at the back and put that content somewhere up front. It’s not “WIN A KINDLE FIRE” click-bait – it’s a legitimate offer – but I’m sure Amazon will see it differently.

It’s better to get out the way of a potential nuclear explosion if you know it’s coming than sit around and wait for it to happen – at least that’s my philosophy. And the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So if Amazon’s reaction to this KU 2.0 problem so far is any indication, I’d suggest you follow my lead and clean up those “links to the back of the book” now before they nuke your stuff.

The thing is, all of this cleanup was preventable. There was no reason to implement such a flawed program like Kindle Unlimited in the first place. Amazon certainly could have predicted the original “loophole” in KU 1.0 that they attempted to close with KU 2.0.

Remember when short books were all the rage in KU 1.0? That was because every borrow that was read to 10% paid out around $1.30 each (well, at last count, the amount kept going down every month…) Erotica writers were hit hard when Amazon switched to the “paid per page read” scenario, because erotica authors have always written in short-form. What we were once being paid $2.09 (70% of $2.99) per sale for before Kindle Unlimited came along, then $1.30 per borrow for in KU 1.0, we were then being paid about $0.15 per read-through for in KU 2.0.

Ouch.

But the real scammers in KU 1.0 weren’t erotica authors, who simply benefited from the per-borrow payout by doing what we’d always done (writing short stories) – the real scammers put gibberish inside a book and made them so short that by simply opening the book on your Kindle, that first page would count as 10% of the book and result in a paid borrow.

Cha-ching!

Are you telling me Amazon couldn’t have foreseen that?

If so, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you.

Then KU 2.0 came along to “fix” the issues/loopholes/leaks of the “scamphlets” in KU 1.0. Amazon went to a “pay per pages read” scenario. It’s ironic that their solution to the money they were bleeding in the first Kindle Unlimited version was increased exponentially in the next one.

In KU 2.0, they weren’t paying out $1.30 a borrow to scammers who created their little “scamplets” and borrowed them in their little circles anymore. (Or to those nasty erotica writers who’ve always written shorts stories for readers who want to buy them… they clearly deserved to be punished for their dirty minds and “selling sex” in the first place, right?)

That’s great, but… before the KENPC cap was very recently instituted, the pages you could get paid for per-read were unlimited. Which meant that anyone could release a “book” of unlimited length in KDP Select (these scammers are putting garbage in their books – foreign translations, articles from Wikipedia, just words for words’ sake) then put a link at the front of that book that jumped to the back –  and voila. A $100 download in one click. I’m not kidding. I know authors who have told me they’ve seen these scammers bragging about getting that much per-read before the KENPC cap.

Even when they put the KENPC cap of 3000 on it, with the payout last month at $0.0041 per page read, that meant the maximum payout was $12.30 per download. Still not too shabby. Especially if you have lots of scammer friends to borrow your book and just click a link to read to the end – and push up your rank in the process.

KU 2.0 is far worse, in terms of scamming and money lost, than KU 1.0 ever was.

Guess you should have just continued paying out for those dirty erotica shorts, Amazon… 😛

Amazon’s continued “fix” to these problems are like putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding artery. Because guys like Dave Koziel aren’t just making money off Amazon. He’s making money off selling this method to other scammers and telling them how to make money scamming, too. And the more they scam, the more money they take out of the “pot.”

Check this link out. Apparently a 15-year-old mentee of Dave Koziel made $64,000 in a month. That’s not a typo.

Do I think this kid wrote all those words? Not if he’s following Dave’s advice, he’s not.

I’m posting a screen shot here, just in case the link gets removed. (You never know…)

Quoted on those images, Dave Koziel says: “A screen shot I got earlier from my mentee and coaching student @justin8600 For those of you who don’t know what this is it’s a report from Amazon that shows you your actual royalty payments from the Kindle store. Take a close look at these numbers and you’ll see how much money he is actually getting paid this month from Amazon. Did I mention he’s only 15? A lot of you may look at this and think it’s fake. How can a 15 year old possibly make $70,000+ in a month online from selling ebooks on Amazon? The world is changing and fast. Opportunities are out there to make money and a lot of it! It doesn’t matter how old you are, where you came from, what your circumstances are etc.”

screenshotb

Authors and readers –  does this make you angry? It should. You’ve been lied to and cheated, not just by the scammers, but by Amazon. Primarily Amazon, really. Scammers suck, but we all know they’re exploiting a loophole that was created by Amazon’s short-sightedness and could have been prevented by Amazon in the first place. The scammers are scammers – and they’re providing a poor customer experience to be sure – but Amazon bears the brunt of the blame here, let’s not lose sight of that.

If Amazon’s focus is “customer-centric” then their Kindle Unlimited program is a giant fail. KU 1.0 was called “Kink Unlimited” because authors (many who hadn’t started out writing erotica) jumped on the erotica shorts bandwagon and the market was flooded with them.

But KU 2.0 is now being called “Krap Unlimited” because of all of these crappy scam-books that claim to have great content, but really only contain a bunch of garbage and a click-bait link up front to take readers to the end, so the “author” of the book can get paid for all of those pages.

And when readers find these word-salad books, do they think, “Oh geez, a scammer, what a jerk?” No. They think, “Welp, everything they say about self-publishing and indies is true – their books suck!”

Thanks, Amazon, for perpetuating that myth.

And while the readers have to wade through crap (and boy, do they – I thought keyword stuffed titles weren’t allowed, Amazon?) authors are getting hit the hardest under KU 2.0. Not only are we getting paid less than half a cent per-word-read, these junk-books are forcing legitimate authors to split the “global fund”/pot with them. The rate we’re being paid per page just keeps dropping.

Gee, I wonder why?

Let’s take a look, shall we:

  • -6.32% = December rate decrease
  • -10.72% = January rate decrease

 

We can thank the scammers for that.

And here are some more numbers for you.

Amazon claimed recently that pages read were up by 25%. But I know that I didn’t see a pages-read increase of 25%. Did you? I bet you didn’t. Want to know why?

Because those pages read were click-bait scammer reads, that’s why.

I can’t prove it – but other authors have speculated as much, and I believe they’re right.

Take a look at this graph. (Courtesy of my author friend, Michelle Keep – she’s awesome BTW, smart as a whip, and writes great books – and provides amazing services to authors – check her out!)

graph

Before November 2015, the pages-read increased steadily for months by about 100 million-ish a month.

Then, in November 2015, there was a 350 million pages-read increase from the previous month. A pretty sharp increase but we’d seen increases similar to it before from December to January the year before.

Then, between December and January, look at the huge rise. There were 700 million more pages read in that month. How do we explain that? Christmas rush? Hm. Maybe.

Historically speaking, though, the program increases pretty steadily on that graph – but it started spiking in November and continued to climb drastically—far more than it ever had before—in December and January.

Let’s look at the actual numbers.

  • From November 2015 to December 2015, the pages-read increased by 347,751,042. (about 350 million)
  • From December 2015 to January 2016, the pages read increased by 716,220,032. (about 700 million)

Can Kindlemas account for this gigantic rise? Can we just chalk it up to Christmas growth?

Well, let’s look at the year before:

  • December 2014 shows 1,154,321,678 pages read. (1.1 billion)
  • January 2015 shows 1,402,376,812 pages read. (1.4 billion)
  • Between December 2014 and January 2015, that’s an increase of only 248,055,134. (about 250 million)

That’s about 1/3 of the increase we saw between December 2015 and January of 2016 (which was an increase of 716,220,032 – about 700 million)

Historically speaking, this giant increase is suspect.

So let’s go back and look at this year’s dramatic jump.

  • December 2015: 2,929,051,855 pages read (2.9 billion)
  • January 2016: 3,645,271,887 pages read (3.6 billion)
  • If we add those two numbers we get: 6,574,323,742 (6.5 billion) pages read

Now, just for chucks and giggles, let’s subtract the “average” historical Christmas/Kindlemas jump (which last year we saw was about 250 million…) from that total. Or, hell, let’s go a little further, let’s add to that historical average and say we should have historically seen about a 300 million pages-read increase from Dec 2015-Jan 2016…

If we do that, we’re left with a 763,971,074 difference.

 

There’s that shocking, inexplicable 750 million pages-read increase.

For speculation’s sake, let’s say that huge page-read increase is actually the result of scammers. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say they’re the ones who have caused this dramatic rise in pages read.

If you translate those pages-read into dollars (multiplying it by the last known pages-read amount Amazon paid out, which was $0.0041 per page)… that comes to…

About 3.1 million dollars.

That’s a lot of money. 😮

Okay, I get it, I hear you – that maybe it’s an exaggeration. Maybe Amazon did have a big jump in program growth this year, because they were pushing Kindle Unlimited around Christmas time and offering discounts. Okay, that’s possible.

So let’s account for that. Even if natural growth increased enormously this year – what if scammers accounted for just 1/3 of that 750 million increase in pages-read?

That’s still a million dollars out of the pot.

But that’s not all, folks.

No, because not only are these scammers stealing money out of my pocket and every author’s pocket who participates in the KDP Select program, they are getting “All-Star” bonuses on top of it. Just to add a little insult to injury and rub some salt in those wounds.

Amazon awards All -Star Bonuses to its top-sellers in the KDP Select program. Some of those bonuses are $25,000. Scammers most definitely got bonuses last month – and legitimate authors who have gotten them all along for being top-sellers discovered that their usual pages-read didn’t qualify. The bar had been set suddenly higher, and not by real authors, but by scammers.

And Amazon could have prevented all of this. They could have anticipated all of these issues – just as they could have anticipated the problem of erotica surfacing on children’s Kindles and done something proactive and preemptive about that. But Amazon works like the pharmaceutical companies. They make a lot more money ignoring root causes and treating symptoms.

The question now is – what are they going to do about it? And is it going to hurt?

I’m afraid the answer to the latter question is “yes.” As to the former one? Well, they’ll treat the symptoms again, I’m sure. They’ve already screwed over legitimate authors claiming they now have TOC and bonus content issues in their books, whether Amazon was aiming at the scammers or not. We’re collateral damage, as usual.

And frankly, I’m beyond angry. I’m appalled. I’ve become an unwitting participant in this “scam,” because Amazon lied to me. Amazon informed me in no uncertain terms that skipping over content in book would not result in pages-read, but they lied.

How can I ever trust them again? How can you?

Whatever trust I did have (ha) has been completely decimated. I don’t even trust their royalty reports at this point.

And you know what really sucks? Thanks to Amazon’s deception, I’ve been cheating other authors without realizing it. I suppose, if I were in the Hunger Games (which is exactly what this whole thing feels like) I’d just end up dead. I don’t have the stomach for this sort of zero-sum competition they’ve set up in KDP Select between authors. But like Katniss, I don’t have a lot of choice, if I want to feed my family.

In the end, the worst thing of all, at least for me, is Amazon’s stranglehold on the market. They’ve forced me into this horrible, socialist program of theirs where it is a zero-sum game – and I have to fight or die.

If you want to make a living at this, Amazon has created an environment where we’re all getting in the same bread line and fighting each other for crumbs. We’re all hungry. And getting skinnier every day.

(And OMG if one person in the comments says, “You’re not ‘forced’ into the program! You have a ‘choice!'” I will delete you so fast it will make your head spin like Linda Blair. We’ll talk about Amazon’s algorithms and how they weigh the visibility of KDP Select and the decreasing ability to make a living on any other vendor some other time, okay?)

Authors – when we were actually selling books, did we feel we were “cheating” each other out of dollars? Nope. Because we knew there was (arguably) an unlimited amount of dollars to be had. Competition in the marketplace is great – that’s good for the ecosystem. But competition for a “pot” of something?

That way lies… this madness.

And that’s all on Amazon.

They created this KDP Select monster. And remember that their whole company is run at a loss. In effect, Amazon is being subsidized by their shareholders. Authors keep complaining about Nook and Apple and Kobo and want to know why no other retailer is challenging Amazon for marketshare?

The real answer is, because they can’t afford to – they aren’t being subsidized.

And we, as a culture, have created the monster that is Amazon.

That, unfortunately, is on us.

selenasigsmalltrans

They’re Making My Book into a Porn Movie: Green Light on Babysitting the Baumgartners!

by | February 14, 2016 | | 2 Comments

They’re making my book, Babysitting the Baumgartners, into an adult film.

shocked-will-smith

Yep, you heard me right! 😀

babysittingthebaumgartnersNEWare

We got the official GREEN LIGHT from Adam and Eve this week. The amazingly talented Kay Brandt will be directing, and as for the cast… holy hell, scroll down, you won’t even believe the hotness!

Am I the first indie author to have their book made into an adult film? Oh wait, no – Kay filmed her book, Safe Landings, as an adult film last year, and she was nominated for an AVN award to boot for best director. Adam and Eve is venturing into new, exciting territory, folks. I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship – perhaps even a marriage made in heaven!

We all know Fifty Shades of Grey was made into a mainstream, much-anticipated film, but many fans were left a little… disappointed. Why? Well, let’s be honest – because all the “juicy parts” of the book had to be left on the cutting room floor. And the juiciest parts never even got filmed!

I’ve been approached before about making my books into adult films, but I’ve never felt right about it until now. Why now? Because it’s in the hands of Kay Brandt, who has won awards for directing adult films, and Adam and Eve, a long-standing brand I know and trust.

Like fans, I have been rather protective of Doc and Carrie, Ronnie and Gretchen–these characters are part of my psyche, and kind of part of my family. (Granted, a really naughty family that frolicks disease-and-chafe free in the fantasies that roll through my dirty mind… :D) I didn’t want to do a disservice to them – or to the fans who loved them as much (maybe more!) that I do.

So when Kay pitched the idea of her vision for Babysitting the Baumgartners, I have to admit – I hesitated. But the more she talked, the more I realized she really understood the Baumgartners. She “got” the book. (A lot of people don’t – they think it’s “pure filth” – and hey, everyone’s got a right to their opinion, eh?) This book is about sexual awakening. It’s a coming-of-age story about a vivacious but naive college girl and an adventurous, caring couple who allow her to blossom under their tutelage.

That’s not to say there’s not a lot of damned hot sex in it. 😀 Because, trust me, there is! This book could never be made into a mainstream film – like all good erotica, if you take the sex out, the whole story falls apart. The sex in Babysitting the Baumgartners is integral – in all its wet, messy, juicy, yummy glory! But that isn’t all Babysitting the Baumgartners is about. And that’s the part that Kay Brandt understands, which is why I was willing to trust her with this family and these characters that so many fans have fallen in love with since I first published it back in 2008.

That’s why I’m so excited to make this announcement, you guys! I will be posting here often, updating you on how things are going, letting you know about filming schedules and release dates, but the very first thing I’m going to reveal (aside from our very bright and awesome GREEN LIGHT on this project!) is that the roles of Doc, Carrie and Gretchen have been cast and are listed below. And I couldn’t be more thrilled with them! There will be a casting call for the all-important role of Ronnie – and you guys will get to vote on which one you like best!

Carrie Baumgartner (“Mrs. B”)

Anikka Albrite

 

Hello Mrs. B!

annika3 

Mrs. B in a bikini, of course!

annika2 

Oh. My. Word.

Steven “Doc” Baumgartner

Ryan Driller

 

Hey, what’s up, Doc?

 

Doc on the beach…

 

Can’t you see him playing Doc?

Gretchen

A.J. Applegate

 

A.J. Applegate – the perfect Gretchen!

 

Pretty without makeup!

 

All made up!

 

Dat lip bite tho!

*fanning self* Whew! Is it HOT in here?

Shooting starts in March – but I’ll post lots of awesome stuff about the casting call for our girl, Ronnie, before then.

This is going to be an amazing, exciting, and totally FUN journey! I can’t wait to take all of you on it with me!

Here’s to the Baumgartners – our favorite family! 😀

CASTING CALL

silhouette

Want to be a Star?

Director Kay Brandt is holding a casting call on Wednesday February 17, 2016 for the lead role of “Ronnie,” our favorite babysitter from the Baumgartner series.

If you’re a California girl and have always wanted to be in an adult movie – you can even audition! It’s an open casting call, no RSVP needed. They’ll be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Free Speech Coalition offices, located at 8399 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Suite 302, Canoga Park, CA 91304.

Ronnie is our star–the pivotal role that the entire book (and, I imagine, the movie) hinges on. The perfect Ronnie (as perfect as we can get, I suppose, outside of our imaginations!) is essential. She has to be young (Ronnie was just nineteen when Doc and Carrie took her with them to Key West) and have an air of freshness and innocence about her.

“The ideal candidate would be brunette and petite,” Kay says. “I can’t have someone with a lot of piercings, a lot of tattoos or breast implants.”

*Selena nods in agreement.* Amen to that.

As an author, I’ve got it easy. I can paint images with words. My favorite way to do this is in broad strokes, to allow you, the reader, to fill in the picture with your own imagination, which is a powerful thing. I’m not the type of reader (or writer) who goes in for paragraphs of detailed character description. That means most of my readers have strong ideas of what my characters look like, because they’ve used their own imaginations to fill in the blanks.

But a movie isn’t a book. And directors don’t have the luxury of painting with broad strokes, at least when it comes to actors. Directors have to cast real people. And matching a real person up to everyone’s idea of Ronnie is simply an impossible task. No one will be “perfect,” because my image of Ronnie likely differs from yours, and your neighbor’s and your book club friend’s.

I remember when I read Harry Potter – I had an image in my mind of what he looked like. After Daniel Radcliffe played the role, and I saw the movie, I’ve never been able to unsee him as Harry, or regain my image of what I’d imagined before he was cast. The same goes for Katniss from Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence will now always be that character for me, even when I re-read the books.

That makes casting a very important part of movie-making. Maybe the most important part. The good news is that Kay is a seasoned director, she knows this business and the talent, and she knows my book. She’s also graciously given me a great deal of input in the casting, and so far I think we’ve made some pretty great choices. I have no doubt we’ll find the best possible Ronnie we can.

That said, I’ve already heard a few fans say, “I don’t know if I want to see it – what if it ruins my image of X character?” Hey, I get that. Believe me, I do. I’ve turned down other offers to make movies out of my books in the past because I felt it wasn’t right, that they didn’t really understand the storyline or the characters. And I understand when something you’ve read becomes an experience for you, one that you can’t help but be a little protective of.

Look, let’s face facts–we all know that very few movies ever live up to their book counterparts. They’re simply a different experience, and comparing them is like apples and oranges. And while I had a completely different idea of who Katniss, Peeta and Gale were in the Hunger Games, I could put that aside and still enjoy the movie.

I think the same will apply to Babysitting the Baumgartners. I had to let go of my own vision of the characters and the story, to some degree, because until we can 3D-print actors (please God, don’t ever let us go that far…) no author will ever be able to completely bring their characters fully onto a screen as they’ve described or pictured in their mind’s eye.

Ryan Driller is as handsome a Doc as I could have imagined, and that smirky smile of his is just perfection. Anikka Albrite as Mrs. B has that bright, gracious quality about her I always associate with Carrie. (And dat booty tho!) A.J. Applegate as Gretchen is, in a word, simply stunning. So I’m really looking forward to who and what Kay discovers and uncovers next Wednesday at the casting call for Ronnie!

I just know that the Ronnie who’s finally cast will fit our collective vision as closely as we can get–and here’s the best news of all. Once Kay has narrowed the choices, YOU are going to get to vote for your favorite!

So stay tuned… I’ll post more as soon as I can!

XOXO

selenasigsmalltrans

Erotica Readers & Writers Association: Changing of the Guard

by | November 13, 2015 | | 14 Comments

The Erotica Readers and Writers Association has been around since 1996. It pre-dates my foray into the erotica genre by ten years, and is coming up on its twentieth anniversary. Adrienne Benedicks has run it from the beginning, and I remember finding my very first publisher (Stardust, now defunct) on their Author Resources page. Adrienne is now retiring – and moving to greener pastures and a warmer climate! She felt it was time to pass the baton, and I was honored that she thought of me.

In recent years, as Amazon (and other retailers) have pushed back against erotica authors, I have seriously considered giving up on the genre altogether. But in the end, I simply can’t walk away from something I’ve invested nearly ten years of my own time and energy into. Besides, I love erotica as a genre. And I love erotica authors. I have never met a more fun-loving, open-minded, good-hearted crowd of people. Erotica authors are the first line in the defenders of the freedom of expression. They go places others are often afraid to venture, and tackle topics that far too many shy away from.

I have some great ideas about how to develop the Erotica Readers and Writers Association into an even stronger community and resource for both readers and authors that I’m sure I will be implementing in the future, but truthfully, what’s in place right now is a gold mine that, I’m afraid, too many people don’t know about!

For instance, did you know that the Erotic Readers and Writers Association has a lively discussion list? In fact, they have several! The Parlor is a place where everyone can discuss whatever’s on their mind, Storytime is where authors can offer their work for critique, and the Writers’ List is a place where authors can network and talk about all things writing related. I’ve been a part of those discussion lists for the past year, and it’s been a great experience to connect with new erotica authors and erotica lovers.

For readers, there’s a huge library of erotic fiction available for free in the Treasure Chest! There’s straight erotic fiction, queer fiction, kinky erotica, the softer side, quickies, flashers, and even poetry. It’s not just erotic books, either. There are a wide array of articles in the archives, plus adult movies, sex toys, even suggestions for erotic music to set the mood. It’s an erotica lovers dream!

You can also follow ERWA on Twitter, we have a brand new ERWA Facebook page, and you can sign up for the ERWA newsletter to keep up on what we’re doing next.

For those who are already a part of the ERWA, I want to assure you that I have no intention of dismantling the site or bringing a bunch of new changes in too quickly. The site has grown and changed organically over the past twenty years, and I imagine it will continue to do so over the next twenty years.

Self-publishing and the rise of ebooks have given erotica a newfound freedom of expression that was unheard of twenty years ago. If I look into my crystal ball to see what the next twenty-years holds for erotica, I have to admit, it’s a bit cloudy. But I do know one thing – as a genre, erotica isn’t going anywhere. As long as there are humans, the expression human sexuality in all its forms will be explored by the most daring and adventurous of writers, and read by the most curious and open-minded readers. That much I do know.

My hope is that erotica’s future is so bright, we’ll all have to wear shades.

Portrait of sensual brunette woman in red hot lingerie.

But wherever the future of erotica as a genre may lead, I intend to be a part of that for a long time to come.

selenasigsmalltrans

Selena Kitt
www.selenakitt.com

Pornocalypse 2015 – Part Two (The Barnes and Noble Version)

by | October 22, 2015 | | 1 Comment

psaPSA: Barnes and Noble has made keywords and publisher names unsearchable on their site.



I hate to be the bearer of bad news twice in a week, but here we go again. This time it’s the folks over at Barnes and Noble. I’ve had reports (that I’ve now verified) that erotic keywords are being severely restricted. A search for “menage” comes up with a total of 3,661 titles. BDSM returns 6,988 titles, and incest comes back with just over 1,000 titles. Subkinks (like father-daughter or mother-son incest) are coming up at 20 to 40 total. Now, I haven’t checked the erotica keyword search results on Barnes and Noble in over a year, I admit, but back then, menage returned somewhere around 175,000 results, BDSM 110,000, incest about 80,000. For menage to suddenly come back with less than 4,000 books – it’s pretty clear that something’s happened.

Another interesting search restriction that’s been verified is that searching for a publisher on Barnes and Noble returns no results (unless the publisher’s name is in an anthology or listed somewhere other than the “publisher” field – our Excessica anthologies come up, for example, but none of our books do, and yes, they used to!) From Excessica to MacMillan – no results. For small publishers, this is a disaster. Many small pubs have spent years building a brand, and have readers who search those publishers for new books on the larger distributors. This eliminates that as an option (unless you do a search from Google – the results clearly come up there – which serves to prove further that this is a Barnes and Noble restriction.)

The conclusion we can draw here is that publishers and keywords are now restricted from the general search on Barnes and Noble.

My guess is this – Barnes and Noble is using a nuclear “quick fix” option. (Like when they dropped ranks on books by 1000 a few years ago – or anchored other books to keep them out of the Top 100…) They wanted to make keywords unsearchable going into the holiday season and in doing so they had to turn off publishers as a search term. I think keywords and publisher search were linked in their system somehow. So when they shut off one, they shut off the other–like throwing off a breaker to turn off one light in the house.

grinchxmas
Barnes and Noble has been known to panic like this in the past.

And now, we’ll see – but I think they’ll move on to individual books that have keyword-stuffed titles still coming up in searches. Because those are the books still showing when you search for things like “menage” and “BDSM.” Most of them have long keyword-stuffed titles that Barnes and Noble’s search engine is still finding.  Suppressing publisher and keyword searches decimated the titles available that come up in a search – and made less work for them. Now instead of 200K titles they have to comb through, they have to go through only a fraction of that.

If you’re an erotica author thinking, “Ohhh! I’ll just keyword-stuff my titles then!” let me say one thing – I wouldn’t if I were you.

Earlier this year, Barnes and Noble threatened to close Excessica’s account if we didn’t get rid of keywords in parenthesis after our titles. We had to go through and remove them all and clean things up or face being banned from publishing on Barnes and Noble. I didn’t blog about it at the time because we seemed to be targeted as a publisher – I didn’t hear anything through the erotica grapevine about it happening across the board. I’m sure a few others were targeted as well, but it didn’t seem to be widespread.

This, however, is a sweeping change I think all erotica authors need to know about. I know, in the wake of KU 2.0, many erotica authors went wide with their books and were starting to gain some traction on Barnes and Noble. I have a feeling this is going to ruin Christmas for quite a few.

Thanks, Barnes and Noble. Amazon didn’t give us any warning or use any lube, but just because you got sloppy seconds doesn’t make it hurt any less.

eggnog

Pass the eggnog, erotica authors. We’re gonna need it. Because while the storefronts will be safe “for the children!” this holiday season, none of the grownups will be able to find your books. Again.

 
Selena Kitt
www.selenakitt.com
Erotic Fiction You Won’t Forget
LATEST RELEASE: A Modern Wicked Fairy Tale: Peter and the Wolf

Pornocalypse 2015 is Upon Us!

by | October 13, 2015 | | 6 Comments

psaPSA: For those authors who have yet to discover it – Amazon is currently going through and classifying a great deal of romance books as erotica.

Pornocalypse 2015 has begun…

How do I know this? Because they shunted nearly 3/4 of Excessica’s catalog into erotica. All of a sudden my author rank rose to #2 in erotica – sounds great, doesn’t it? What’s the problem? I mean, doesn’t erotica belong in erotica?

Yes. And no. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

Anyone who publishes erotica and/or erotic romance knows that the line can be unclear between what is considered “erotica” and what is considered “erotic romance.” Generally, longer books with a romance focus (i.e. two people falling in love, overcoming obstacle(s) and ending up with their happy ever after, or at least happy for now) even if they have explicit sex in them, are considered romance. Shorter works are a little more dicey, but even short stories can be erotic romance if they have all of those elements I listed above. So who determines what belongs in erotica and what belongs in romance?

Amazon. Their store, their rules, right? The problem is – we all know how inconsistent Amazon is when applying their “guidelines.” Case in point, when they decided that most of our catalog belonged in erotica, they decided to place Hunting Season in erotica. There’s zero sex in that story. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. It’s horror, not erotica, and that’s where we placed it. But Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, decided to place it in erotica.

huntingseasonLARGE

Does this look like erotica to you?

That alone tells me that Amazon clearly painted us with one brush, without any regard to actual content. If your catalog is primarily erotic romance and/or erotica – they may have done that with yours as well. If I were you, I’d check.

CHECKING YOUR BOOK’S CATEGORIES

Unfortunately, I don’t know an easier way to do this, except to check one book at a time. To check what categories your book is in, go to the Kindle book page, and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. You will see a list of categories your book is in there. If you only see “erotica” listings, your book is in erotica.

So far books have been moved without much rhyme, reason, consistency or transparency. And definitely without any warning. Some authors have had their erotic romance sent into the erotica categories – along with their children’s books and cookbooks!

Oopsie.

Hello? Amazon? You in there?

Excessica is a small press – we have 450+ authors in house and about 1000 books. Amazon deciding to put 3/4 of our content into erotica without any warning, and then offering us little or no recourse, is just an unacceptable and unprofessional way to treat content providers. But we all know that while Amazon likes to be known as customer-centric, they don’t treat their workers very well. Or their white-collar employees either, for that matter. Now that Amazon has decided to pay their content providers half-a-cent a page, I’m starting to feel like I’m working in some sort of digital sweatshop. They expect all sorts of exclusivity from us, and put all sorts of restrictions on us, and then pay us a half-penny per page read? Just how long do they thing indies are going to tolerate this kind of treatment?

 

HOW TO GET YOUR BOOKS OUT OF THE EROTICA CATEGORY

 In my conversation with the Amazon customer service representative about this situation, I was told, “We are improving our ability to identify erotic content, so you’ll see more books put into erotica going forward.”

Me: Just going forward?

CS: No, we’ll also be identifying other content and moving it into the erotica categories.

Me: How will you be identifying this content?

CS: I can’t tell you that.

Me: How can we get our books out of erotica?

CS: You can change the content and resubmit it.

Me: How would we know what to change?

CS: ….

What… the…?

PORNOCALYPSE 2015

If you find your book(s) in the erotica category and you didn’t place them there, and you believe your book(s) belongs in romance or another category, you can email [email protected] to ask them to review the book(s).

Why don’t you want your book to stay in erotica? Well, there are a few reasons. But the main one is VISIBILITY. If your book has a tame cover and blurb, it has a clear story, two characters who fall in love, overcome an obstacle, and end up together in the end? Put it in romance. Because by definition, it is romance. Erotic romance, to be sure – but Sylvia Day and E.L. James are in romance, and they write erotic romance. I don’t see them being forced into erotica-only!

What’s so bad about EROTICA as a category? First of all, if your book is put into erotica by Amazon (rather than you choosing the category on your own – and yes, there are some books that do belong there!) you will never be able to change it again without their permission. If your book gets forced into erotica, your KDP dashboard will show the categories you initially chose. But the book page will show “erotica” – and ONLY erotica.

The other problem is, if a book is in erotica, it can’t be in any other secondary category outside of it. It can’t, for example, be in both “romance” and “erotica.” (Not to be confused with erotica>romance, which is still inside the erotica category). It can’t be in both “erotica” and “sci-fi,” for example. Erotica does finally have some sub-categories, but they are definitely located in a red-light district of Amazon’s store. They aren’t searchable from the main book page, until you drill all the way down (pun intended?) to the erotica category itself. So romance as a category has way more eyes on it – your book will be seen by far more readers in romance. And there is plenty of crossover between romance readers and “erotic romance” readers. I would venture to say, except for those who specifically seek out “sweet” (i.e. no-sex or fade-to-black sex) romances, most romance readers expect some sexual content in books in the romance category.

There’s also another problem with Amazon shoving books into erotica, aside from visibility. One of the biggest trends this year has been stepbrother romances. Amazon allowed the first one in romance, and erotica authors were shocked. Up until that moment, we’d been shown that using “familial” words (Daddy, Mom, Brother, Sister, Step-anything) was a blockable offense. Books would be blocked (even if step-father erotica was allowed – and it is) if authors used those words. So we came up with a whole lexicon of words, like “man of the house” for Daddy and “princess” or “brat” for daughter.

Once the stepbrother craze began, erotica authors began trying to put those words in titles again. Some stepbrother books were blocked in erotica – but they sailed through in romance just fine. Clearly the message was “familial” words are fine in romance, but not in erotica. (And I’m calling the “Daddy” craze coming in romance right now… here we go again…!) But check out the list of “bad words” on Amazon in erotica and see if you don’t see the issue here!

So I asked the customer service representative about these kinds of books. I told them that they’d just put books that would be considered blockable by their reviewers into erotica. What happened if I went to make changes on that book a couple weeks from now and new-reviewer Viper from India decided to block it based on the unwritten rules they refuse to tell us? Or if notoriously ham-fisted Carlos F happened to be reviewing and blocked it?

I was told they wouldn’t block books they’d placed in a category.

I laughed.

How would they know??

CS: Oh we keep records on changes to each book.

Me: Uh huh. But how do I know your reviewer is going to read and pay attention to them, given your incredible amount of employee turnover? I could be penalized for having that book in an erotica category when you’re the one who put it there!

CS: Oh that wouldn’t happen.

Me: Oh you mean like the last time I had to fight to get a book out of the erotica category, you told me personally none of our catalog would be forced there without notifying us as a publisher…?

CS: Oh. I didn’t… Did I? I don’t believe…

Me: Oh yes you did. So in other words “we wouldn’t do that” until you decide to do that anyway and to hell with whatever you said at the time because technically you don’t have any clear or consistent policies or guidelines, do you? So you can say whatever the hell you want. And you want me to believe you now?

I have been fighting with Amazon for the past week to get many of our books (which belong in romance) back into romance. For example, they put my top 50 bestseller with over 400 reviews, Step Beast, into erotica. Yes, it has sex in it. But it’s not erotica. It’s romance. It belongs (with all the rest of the stepbrother romance) back in the romance category.

They also put my gay romance, One Second Chance, into erotica. It’s most definitely a romance – with a plot. In fact, it was an Epic award winner.

And then this happened. As I was emailing ASINS (Amazon’s book identifiers) back and forth with them, they sent me a list of books that weren’t ours, saying they’d removed the “erotica” restrictions from them. This was their exact email (sic):

After further review, we have decided to remove the search restrictions so your book(s) will now be found in our general product search results. The change takes up to 24 hours to process. Bellow you will find the ASINs and the links showing the books in the Kindle Store with the correct categories.

That was followed by a large list of ASIN identifiers. I started going through the ASINs. None of them were published by Excessica. And they were all extremely explicit! I don’t mean, they might or might not be romance. I mean, they have keyword stuffed titles with explicit descriptions and they are all clearly erotica. 

But Amazon decided to put these books back into romance? While refusing to put books like the ones I listed above back into romance?

Here’s one of the books Amazon decided should go back into romance (where it still is, as of this writing, although I don’t expect it to stay there long) but my award-winning gay male romance? Nope.

Hard Men All Over Me

HARD MEN – ALL OVER ME (GAY TABOO EROTIC COLLECTION)
MEN ARE SO HARD – THEY’RE THROBBING! AND THEY’RE GOING DEEP INTO THEIR FORBIDDEN TWINK PARTNERS! THIS IS A HIGHLY EXPLICIT BOX SET – A HUGE VALUE WITH HUGE GUYS! DON’T MISS OUT!

In ROMANCE

WHAAAAAAAT????

Then there’s this one. It’s in romance – Amazon put it back into romance, and it’s there as of this writing. But they won’t put my lesbian romance, Stay, which definitely has a plot and a relationship, back into romance.

Lesbian Tattoo: My Sexy Roommate

LESBIAN TABOO: MY SEXY ROOMMATE (A LESBIAN EROTIC ROMANCE)

WE SHARED EVERYTHING… A ROOM, CLOTHES – AND EACH OTHER! MY ROOMMATE IS SO DAMN SEXY… AND I WANT HER! I WANT MY SOFT SKIN ON HERS, MY LIPS PRESSED AGAINST HER LIPS… MY MOUTH ON HER WETNESS. MY FIST INSIDE OF HER!

In ROMANCE 

 Wait… what??

And one more example. My book, Surrender of Persephone, a Greek god romance – Amazon has shoved it into erotica. But this book? This book was put back into romance – even with its warning at the end! It’s currently there as of this writing.

Leaking Diapers

 

LEAKING DIAPERS – A FOUR BOOK ABDL COLLECTION
SO FULL… SO READY TO BE CHANGED! TOGETHER IN ONE PLACE – A FOURSOME OF DIAPER BOOKS THAT’LL SATISFY YOUR EVERY NEED! These girls are ready – ready to be changed! Once the diapers are off – anything can happen! THIS COLLECTION CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE AND IS NOT SUITABLE FOR EVERYONE!

In ROMANCE

And this is only a fraction of the list of titles I have that Amazon put back into the romance categories. I won’t list all of them (and I was reluctant to list the ones I have already, given that I’m sure Amazon will target them now) but I thought it was necessary to list a few to prove a point.

Given Amazon’s actions, I can only conclude that:

a) Since they have no real guidelines about erotica – they tell us “it’s about what you would expect”

and

b) We have to read between the lines and figure out what Amazon allows, based on what is currently in the category, what they let through, and what they block, ban and adult filter…

It seems, given this list of titles and their descriptions?

Amazon apparently “expects” adult diapers, twinks and fisting belong in romance. 

Look, I have no problem with Amazon deciding what is or isn’t “erotica” in their store – if they do so with some consistency and transparency. But as it stands, their slash-and-burn tactics (and I seem to have to write at least one of those pornocalypse posts a year) when it comes to erotica, instead of developing a real solution to the “erotica problem,” only creates more of a mess. Like Smashwords or other retailers, they could solve this problem by allowing customers to decide whether or not they wanted to see “adult” material. It’s as simple as installing a button or toggle switch. But that would mean Amazon would have to admit to selling erotica! *gasp*

The reality is, without clear guidelines, self-published authors and publishers can’t really follow them – and how can Amazon expect dishonest content providers not to take advantage when they provide no structure whatsoever? But instead of being clear, consistent and transparent (why oh why isn’t Amazon run by this guy??) Amazon continues to stick their heads in the sand, pretending nothing is wrong – until they’re forced (for example, when they launch a new Etsy competitor like Handmade or maybe just because Kindlemas is coming!) to clean up the storefront. Then they run around like crazy, targeting the most visible books (like mine and Excessica’s) like a 13-year-old shoving Playboy between his mattress.

I bet Jeff Bezos did that a lot when he was a kid.

Once again. Amazon FAIL.

Selena Kitt
Erotic Fiction You Won’t Forget
www.selenakitt.com
LATEST RELEASE: A Modern Wicked Fairy Tale: Peter and the Wolf

Writing Great Sex

by | September 13, 2015 | | 2 Comments

What makes a really great sex scene?

Many authors will tell you it’s description—all the senses, touch, taste, feel, smell, sight, hearing. But it isn’t. The secret to great sex writing—are you ready? Wait for it… the secret to great sex writing is…

Emotion.

That’s it. Make your reader feel. That’s all you need to do.

How, you ask? Here are a few guidelines. 

THEY’RE ALIVE!

Your characters are alive and they are not the sum of their parts. They aren’t measurements or hair color or penis size. I’ve done sex scenes without mentioning any of the above. Don’t ask, “What would my character do in this situation?” Let them act. Let them decide. Let them speak. Let them feel. Especially let them feel.

GET TURNED ON

If you’re bored writing a sex scene, your readers will be bored. If you’re turned on, your reader will be turned on. The emotion you are feeling will be conveyed on paper. It’s a natural law of the writer universe. (This applies to any scene, not just sex ones, by the way. If it moves you to tears, it will move the reader as well).

DON’T STOP

If you’re turned on during a sex scene, really getting into it, your fingers flying over the keyboard, unless the house is on fire or we’re under nuclear attack, DON’T STOP. Never, ever stop in the middle of a sex scene. (This rule also applies well to actual sex). You will lose your momentum, and it won’t be the same when you come back to it. Your mood will have shifted, and the reader will feel it.

LUST

Human beings want. Our entire culture and economy is based on desire. We lust after the things we want. We dream about them. We fantasize about them. We want. And we want. And we want some more. Our bodies and our brains are hardwired for desire. We don’t just eat once and then we’re done. We don’t just have one orgasm and then it’s all over. We continue to crave what we want. Our emotions rule us, especially when it comes to sex. They’re naturally going to rule your sex scene, too. We don’t insert tab A into slot B because we’re following a blueprint manual. There’s a reason behind our physical responses, and that reason is always, always tied to emotion. Remember that. Use it.

Desire is what makes the sex hot. Make your readers wait for it. Foreplay begins with seduction, not with sex acts. It begins with eye contact. Flirting. Innuendo. It progresses, but slowly. Tease your readers. Tease yourself. Draw it out. Make it a long, slow burn. The best orgasms are the ones we wait a long time for. It’s no different when writing sex than it is doing it, really.

DON’T BE AFRAID

Don’t be afraid of the sex. Don’t be afraid of the fluids, the flesh, the human expression of our bodies. It is what it is. Some writers will tell you not to ever speak of bodily fluids. They’re above all that messy stuff. Thankfully, erotica and erotic romance have come a long way, baby. We can use the words cock and pussy now, and I would encourage you to do so. I wouldn’t suggest using the medical terms, however (i.e. penis and vagina) or euphemisms like “member” or “sheath.” Cock and Pussy are good. Think of them like peas and carrots. They go together. A few (and I mean a FEW) other words can work for a little variety. Prick or dick for example. Or cunt. No, don’t be afraid of the words we use during sex. It’s okay to talk dirty. “Please,” or “Now,” or “Suck me,” or “Lick me,” or “Harder. There. More.” These are words we’ve all spoken (I hope!) They naturally arouse. That’s a good thing. I’m not afraid of cum – I’m not even afraid of spelling it “wrong.” You shouldn’t be either.

THE GRAND FINALE

Once you reach the point of no return, you’ve built up to the sex, you’ve teased your readers (and your poor characters) enough, now it’s time to give them what they want. This is not the time to skimp. You can’t gloss over the orgasm. (Or orgasmS). We all (hopefully!) know what an orgasm feels like. Description doesn’t have to be technical here. There are spasms and contractions, there is throbbing and trembling, gasps, moans—the combinations are endless. You can and should include those, but don’t be afraid to move into the realm of metaphor. Sex can be like flying. It can be like falling. It can be like dying. This is the culmination of everything, the point you’ve been waiting for, working toward. Let your imagination go as wild as you would during an actual orgasm. Let yourself free.

DEFYING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS AND OTHER MISHAPS

On a practical note – your characters shouldn’t defy the laws of physics. Women cannot take twelve inches of hot man meat down their throats. An average vagina is only eight inches deep. 44DD breasts cannot defy gravity. And if you’re using any of the above descriptions in your sex scenes, you need a basic writing course, not a primer on sex scenes. Also, don’t let your character’s clothes go missing. She can’t be wearing pantyhose one second and be taking it from behind the next. The clothes have to come off and be accounted for somehow. Trust me, your readers will notice if they aren’t.




Selena Kitt
Erotic Fiction You Won’t Forget
www.selenakitt.com
LATEST RELEASE: Step Beast and Highland Wolf Pact Boxed Set

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

Categories

Babysitting the Baumgartners - The Movie
From Adam & Eve - Based on the Book by New York Times Bestselling Authors Selena Kitt

Categories

Archives

Pin It on Pinterest