My only quibble with this and the previous post is that you're using past tense. A few posts in this thread are pretty good evidence against that. The fact that it's a thread about Amazon's fake book problem, and we all know what that is, and it somehow becomes a condemnation of short erotica writers in KU1, says it all. And in other threads we've got people saying using Vellum is hacking. Back to the old saw that if you're not doing it my way, you're wrong.
We all inherently know if we're doing something wrong. I've never needed anyone else to define right and wrong for me, even when I was a kid. I doubt anybody else here does either.
True, past tense when it's still happening. My bad!
Whether or not you can second-guess Jeff, I think we should all be circumspect. He's done a lot for us. KDP and KU have been very good to a lot of authors and a lot of readers, foibles notwithstanding.
OMG, really? We need to be circumspect? What's he going to do, close Amazon because people aren't being completely nice? The program is faulty, the bots are faulty, there are issues, and there's nothing wrong with talking about it. Goodness knows, it's not like the folks over at the Zon don't know this stuff is happening. We aren't sharing any state secrets here.
By the way, forum decorum is not censorship.
Amanda, the stuff about erotica authors being dissed that I was talking about wasn't in this thread, though there have been statements made that weren't really supportive. I was using it as an example for something else. Sorry for any confusion. But, ever since I've been a member, people have been down on erotica writers. It's not as bad as it used to be, but then, most of them have left kboards since there's no more linking to erotic content and the discussion of it is limited.
The truth remains that people were treated horribly, insulted and called scammers, simply for writing short fiction. Someone at Amazon set it up so the KUv1 payment started after ten percent. Should people have cheated and had books skipping to that point? No, I think it was dishonest. Why didn't someone see that it would happen? Why didn't someone realize that short fiction was going to flood KU for the flat payment? Many of us foresaw the issue. Even I did, and I'm not that savvy about such stuff.
People tried to point out that KUv2 was going to encourage people to pad books in whatever way, and to figure out other ways of getting something over on Amazon. It wasn't that hard to see it. Why didn't Amazon see it? They act like this is some surprise, or else deny it's happening, but it's obvious to us and to readers.
For the record, I never did anything scammy in KU. My books opened at the beginning, it was clear what they were, there were no bonus junk, no padding, no weird translation crap. They weren't double-spaced, formatted with huge fonts, nor any other trick to make huge numbers of KENPC. People knew what they were getting, and they could download/borrow/buy as they pleased. If they pleased.
