Indications Of A Desperate Author

How To Tell Wich Author Betrays On Amazon By Studying The Also Boughts

As an author, you can despair of the fact that it is so hard to get reviews and make money with your books. That is why many people try to take a shortcut to success.

If you have been a self-publisher for a long time, you notice a lot. Many authors are unwilling to invest the necessary work and hold out long enough until success is achieved.

The search for shortcuts and hacks becomes a substitute for learning the craft of writing and marketing. Because it is faster to push a finished book through questionable methods than to write a new one, many authors are willing to cheat the readers and the other authors.

What do I mean here by cheating? Well, cheating has many faces, especially at Amazon’s Kindle Store. Forged or bought reviews are undoubtedly the most well-known and widespread form of fraud, but that’s not what this is about today. As annoying as this practice is, in my opinion, it causes little harm.

Reviews have much less influence on whether a reader buys a book than one might think. A hundred fake five-star reviews hardly sell an additional book. This scam is just too obvious to be taken in by a reader today. In my opinion, such false reviews only satisfy the author’s ego. He can show off the stars to his friends, but he doesn’t have more money in his pocket.

What I want to talk about instead is a special kind of scam with Kindle Unlimited books.

For those who don’t know what Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program means, The books offered in this program can be borrowed for free by Kindle Unlimited subscribers. The monthly price in Europe is €9.99. I don’t know the price in other countries, but you can research it quickly if you’re interested.

The subscribers’ money is used to pay the authors of the books included in Kindle Unlimited. As a self-publisher, you decide during the publishing process if you want to include the book in Kindle Unlimited.

You will be paid per page read. So if more people read my book, I get more money. The payment per page read varies from month to month. Amazon recalculates this value every time.

The point is that the amount is limited. So there is a sum X that has to be shared among all authors. In months with a lot of reading, the remuneration per page read is lower.

In addition to the page fee, the most-read authors receive bonuses. These are graduated and are paid to the 150 (USA 100) most successful authors.

These payouts, called All Star Bonus, amount to

500 € for the ranks 101 to 150 (USA: not awarded)

1500 € for the ranks 51 to 100 (USA: 1000 $)

2500 € for the ranks 31 to 50 (USA: 2500 $)

3500 € for the ranks 21 to 30 (USA: 5000$)

5000 € for the ranks 11 to 20 (USA: 10.000$)

7500 € for the ranks 1 to 10 (USA: 25.000$)

As you can see, it is worth having many pages read.

And this is precisely where the fraud comes in, which is the subject of this article.

To get as many read pages as possible, some authors join together in groups. They lend each other’s books and flip through them. If such a group is big enough, it has a significant effect on the ranking of the individual books. In turn, the higher ranking gives the books in question greater visibility on Amazon and makes them more likely to be borrowed by regular readers. The pages read continue to rise.

The scam is that this unfairly distributes the limited amount of the Kindle Unlimited Pool.

So the scammers are taking real money from all honest authors.

How you can sometimes spot these scammers

Once, now two years ago, I was invited to join such a group of authors. I declined with thanks because this kind of “marketing” is not my thing. But I kept an eye on the books of these authors over the next days and weeks.

I have to say that they were authors from very different genres who worked together in this group. Thrillers were represented, romance novels, children’s books, non-fiction, and also porn.

It’s probably too much work to gather a few dozen authors from just one genre. That would have been smarter, though, because the result I was able to enjoy in the Kindle Store, was hilarious.

What these authors didn’t think about were the so-called also-boughts. Amazon shows underneath each book in the Kindle Store, which books customers who bought this book also bought. Amazon treats purchased and borrowed books in this list the same way.

Since the authors in this group all borrowed books from each other, they were also included in all the also-bought lists of the other books.

Now imagine you are looking at the product page of a children’s book called “The little bumblebee on a big journey”. Then you scroll down the page a little and find out that customers who bought this book also purchased the following books:

Bloody Massacre at the Monastery

How to communicate with angels by dancing on one leg

Naughty secretaries at the prom

You’d be wondering how that could be. If you don’t know how something like this comes about, you’d think Amazon was malfunctioning.

But in fact, Amazon works very well. It shows precisely which books are connected to which ones. So typically, under a thriller, you should see a lot of other thrillers in this list.

But because, in this case, many authors from entirely different genres have agreed to cheat, the result is a strangely mixed list.

So if you want to know if an author is likely to be part of such a scam, check out the list of books bought by customers who bought his book.

If all readers knew this, the Kindle Unlimited scammers would have a big problem.

The next time you search Amazon for something to read, check which books appear on this list. Most of them will be fine. But avoid the ones that make that list look like a mixed-use bookstore where there’s a little bit of everything.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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