In any endeavor, there are those who go beyond the boundaries of the law or the TOS or the rules, whatever you want to call it. None of that is whining about "fairness." It's about competing within the bounds of the spirit of the rule of law.
"People are getting away with it" is not a credible defense. "Other people do it" is not a credible defense. The fact that Amazon doesn't do a good job of policing is no defense.
Thank you, David.
For the record, I do not write romance, but I understand the genre and those who love it and want to write it. When you're looking at increasing competition, you can up your game and compete. When you're looking at people who are cheating their way to the top spots, and getting bonuses to do it, while making it almost impossible to market due to their huge ad spends, it makes it very hard to want to try.
Don't forget, those bonuses aren't tied to a genre, but to sales/page reads of any book in the program. So, if you write SF, but a romance scammer has taken a bonus you normally would have qualified for, that's okay? I know a few people in the situation.
As to the thing about it being the "unsuccessful" people doing all the complaining? Really? Do you people not know who most of those who are in the forefront of this? I may not be one of those people, but I hope to be someday. It would be a lot easier if I didn't have to battle the black hat SEO folks.
And I have plenty of time to read a few blog posts and articles, and get my word count for the day, thanks for everyone's concern.
snortFor those who don't understand the basic issues:
It's not about long books.
It's not about reasonable bonus content.
It's not about hiring ghostwriters.
It's not about having happy readers who pounce on every word you write.
It's about those who have overrun indie publishing with bloated books, books stuffed with ten or more of the same files of individual content, rearranged, sometimes with a "new" story at the end and still ways to get people to click past all the junk they've seen before so the entire book is "read". This is to the tune of about $14 per "read". And before the KENPC was capped at 3K, it was more than that, often $20 or more.
And to think, people used to complain about people getting $1.30 per 10% read, though that was usually laid on the short story writers. Yes, there were scammer then, too, but at least they weren't getting 10% more money. Now the scamming is worse, because there's more money in it.
Now, get this. This isn't about those people who just love a certain author's work, and will happily reread the same content over and over. (This "reshuffling" comes about because you can only be paid once per borrow for content, so somebody re-borrowing your book gets you nothing.) It's about people using incentives -- raffles, other "free" stuff, gift cards and so on -- to get people to click through a book so the full payout is reached.
It's about people who hire click farms to "read" a book completely, to get the full payout. These people have the click farms borrow other author's work in order to mask their behavior, thus getting innocent authors' accounts terminated.
Put limits only on romance, and I'm sure we'll see this crap move on to other genres. It might be a little more work, but on the back end, the payout would still be huge. And that's all that matters to these people. They aren't writers, they aren't publishers, they're black hat marketers who don't care about anyone but themselves. They aren't our friends. They aren't our fellow writers trying to follow a dream and tell our stories. They're cheaters, plain and simple. Don't spare any of them a moment's concern, because they don't have any for you.
