[Lisa Blackwood]

...better option than trawling through pages of scammy books with titles as long as my forearm....

Bonus points for making me grin.

 

[Bluebonnet]

Book Description:

There is certainly an urban area inside the clouds above a spot where you can find the human beings of older. Today, all people live inside the clouds and the ones tend to be few. A lot of the globe kept once the area turned uninhabitable. Worldwide is filled with strategy and also the sole responses will come.

Still curious about where the scammers swipe the material they turn into nonsense synonyms. I have a feeling the "author" of "The Argument's Viscount" scam book might have gotten it from the Bible, Revelation 21:4:

"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

"And John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

"And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away..."

It goes on to mention destruction of the sinful cities.

Scam book: "urban area" = city = Jerusalem. "Inside the clouds" = heaven. "Human beings of older" = the Tribes. "the ones tend to be few" = the righteous people who were accepted into heaven. "Globe... uninhabitable" = fire, brimstone, destruction, floods.

However, if the scammers are stealing from the Bible, it seems like it would be an awful lot of trouble for them to "translate" long passages into nonsense stuff. I'd think they would want to do something quick and easy, something they could completely automate.

 

[Bluebonnet]

They hire out at 5 cents a page to use Google translate for this. Just translate something into ten languages, one after the other, and then back into English, and you get this.

Yep, that sounds about right. After you go through several languages and back to English, things would get pretty muddled.

I am still trying to figure out the howler: "Ingesting a dad with significant pals isn't all way too suitable." That ought to be fun!

 

[Monique]

There's a synonymizer software you can buy.

 

[Veronica Sicoe]

...

And then THIS article landed in my inbox (Amazon KDP and Kindle Unlimited: What It Means for Authors and Publishers). In it: a link to another article (Are Authors Really Losing Out in the Kindle Unlimited Pay-Per-Page Scam - Or Is It Amazon?) which says:

"The per-page rate has not fallen through the floor like The Guardian assumed would happen as the scammers cheated their way to higher revenues.
So unless you are going to argue that the rate would be higher in the absence of the scammers, we have to consider whether Amazon is aware of this problem, and is keeping authors from being harmed."

Thoughts?

I'm not an expert, but I made a little calculation...

Let's say Suzy Scribe's book had 315 pages before, and 300 after recalculation. That's a difference of 5% (the assumed average that books "lost" in page counts).

And let's say she got $0.0045 per page in December 2015. Times 315 pages, that equals $1.41 per complete book read.
Then once the recalculation was implemented in January 2016, she got $0.00479 in February (x 300 pages =$1.43), $0.00478 in March (=$1.43), and $0.00496 in April 2016 (=$1.4.

This silly little example shows how Suzy Scribe didn't lose any money due to the recalculation > because Amazon increased the pot.

In the mean time, the scammers have multiplied like fungi, and still that payment-per-page has grown, resulting in an increased income for Suzy's book, even though she "lost" 15 pages.

So...

Am I on the wrong track with this?
Has it all been said before and I missed it? (if that's the case, sorry, move along, nothing interesting to see here...)

 

[Becca Mills]

I think people's concerns about the scamming were more indirect than just the dilution of the pot. Some that come to mind: the difficulty of finding KU books, since the new release lists were swamped with scam books; readers leaving the program en masse because they perceive it to be a poor value; scammers displacing real authors as KU All Stars; eventual shutdown of the program, if keeping up with the scammers' impact becomes too costly; having one's product tainted by association; etc.

 

[Veronica Sicoe]

Yes, true. The flooding of the lists is indeed a major issue, since visibility is very hard to get anyway. But how many customers actually use those lists to shop...?

The All Stars are another issue...

 

[lyndabelle]

I think people's concerns about the scamming were more indirect than just the dilution of the pot. Some that come to mind: the difficulty of finding KU books, since the new release lists were swamped with scam books; readers leaving the program en masse because they perceive it to be a poor value; scammers displacing real authors as KU All Stars; eventual shutdown of the program, if keeping up with the scammers' impact becomes too costly; having one's product tainted by association; etc.

We're also moving towards the time when KU tends to go through changes. Come July 1, there may be changes that may address everything. This is such a problem, more so than the erotica shorts taking over KU1, that Amazon can't do nothing. I'm sure the wheels are turning, planning something to roll out in July.

I'm sure there will be emails sent out about mid-June that there will be a KU3. What the change will be, we could start trying to guess now. Because once the emails come out, there will be whole threads dedicated to it. I think our guesses about a penny a page were generous when we theorized for KU2. What it turned out to be was so far below the .10 per page Amazon tried to sell everyone on in the email sent out.

 

[Not any more]

And let's say she got $0.0045 per page in December 2015. Times 315 pages, that equals $1.41 per complete book read.
Then once the recalculation was implemented in January 2016, she got $0.00479 in February (x 300 pages =$1.43), $0.00478 in March (=$1.43), and $0.00496 in April 2016 (=$1.4.

This silly little example shows how Suzy Scribe didn't lose any money due to the recalculation > because Amazon increased the pot.

Am I on the wrong track with this?

Your math is only correct if "all other things being equal" applies. However, if the pot increased, and 20 million scam pages are removed, then the per-page amount would be increased, therefore Suzy would make more money than if the scammers were excluded.

Monthly pot = $14.9 million
Pages read = 3,047,034,764
Payout = .00489 per page

Pages read = 3,027,034,764 (i.e. 20 million fewer pages)
Payout = .00492

No one knows how many scammer pages got paid, but some made the all star list, so I assume 20 million is conservative.

 

[Cherise]

Sorry for the ignorance here but I don't get it - what does it mean for "click farms" to make a "blog push"?? You mean they actually hack into Amazon or they pay thousands of people to download the books? How do they manage to get so many people to download them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_farm

 

[90789]

What do these scammers have to gain?

 

[Not any more]

What do these scammers have to gain?

Money. Without all the pain of actually writing a book.

 

[Dolphin]

Yeah, I spent some time working in a black hat SEO shop. It's wild stuff. Did you know that there's subscription services where you can pay offshore workers to fill in CAPTCHAs for you? That's all they do all day, as far as I know. They sit and solve CAPTCHAs every few seconds, so that robots masquerading as humans can brute force passwords, post robot-generated drivel for ad revenue, upload books to Amazon, create KU accounts and borrow scamphlets...the list goes on.

Sometimes my boss took us out for lunch in his BMW. Unless he was attending a party at the Playboy Mansion, that is. Most people have no idea about the dark underbelly of the internet, or how much money changes hands based on this stuff.

 

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

Yeah, I spent some time working in a black hat SEO shop. It's wild stuff. Did you know that there's subscription services where you can pay offshore workers to fill in CAPTCHAs for you? That's all they do all day, as far as I know. They sit and solve CAPTCHAs every few seconds, so that robots masquerading as humans can brute force passwords, post robot-generated drivel for ad revenue, upload books to Amazon, create KU accounts and borrow scamphlets...the list goes on.

Sometimes my boss took us out for lunch in his BMW. Unless he was attending a party at the Playboy Mansion, that is. Most people have no idea about the dark underbelly of the internet, or how much money changes hands based on this stuff.

If only these scammers used their knowledge for good *sigh*

 

[Dolphin]

If only these scammers used their knowledge for good *sigh*

I try not to dwell on how much talent our world either wastes or sees put to nefarious uses. Otherwise, I'm not sure I'd ever stop weeping.

 

[JA Konrath]

It isn't zero-sum.

Scammers don't take from other authors. Amazon decides the pot after the month is over, so no author is being cheated.

Amazon is very aware of scammers, and it's a priority for them. Whenever I talk to Amazon folks, I urge them to inform the writing community about developments when things like this happen, but that just doesn't seem to be Amazon's MO.

But we aren't getting smaller payouts because of scammers.

 

[J. Tanner]

It isn't zero-sum.

Scammers don't take from other authors. Amazon decides the pot after the month is over, so no author is being cheated.

Didn't at least one scammer make the zero-sum All Star list, thus meaning at least one legit author was cheated financially? /wiseacre

But, yeah, in the bigger picture very few authors have suffered much financial loss due to Amazon being a bit more flexible with the pot size. And it's nice to hear they're being diligent about the situation. Thanks for the update.

 

[JA Konrath]

Didn't at least one scammer make the zero-sum All Star list, thus meaning at least one legit author was cheated financially?

While I've spoken with Amazon, I can't speak for Amazon. Nor would I. Just putting this out there to clarify some misconceptions.

Amazon has been pretty clear that if they catch scammers--and they are catching scammers--they don't get paid, including bonuses.

Can they catch them all? No. But since you brought it up, here is my take:

If I barely missed a bonus because a scammer got it, no big deal because anyone who made that list is already making a lot of money, and it's bonus money, not actual earnings. If a scammer takes my spot on a bestseller list, how is that any different than someone paying $900 for a BookBub ad and taking my spot on the bestseller list? Or if JK Rowling releases a new pre-order that day? Some people will always get a higher rank, for whatever reason.

This business is luck, and it's a long game, and there is nothing good that can come from worrying what other authors are doing. This is NOT zero sum. And visibility and discoverability don't diminish for you in the long run because someone else is temporarily gaming the system.

 

[Saul Tanpepper]

I think we can argue semantics all day, but to say it's not a zero sum game simply isn't correct. As mentioned, when a scammer takes the spot of a legitimate author on an All-Star list, that author loses. There are finite spots on that list, all of them (ideally) earned through legitimate sales. Arguing that they already make a ton of money is irrelevant.

By the same token, Top 20 lists, whether they be New Release, Pop Lists, whatever, when those spots get filled with scammers' books, legitimate authors lose out on exposure.

Is there a difference between a scammer taking a Top 20 spot versus an author buying it with a BookBub ad? Are we really having this discussion? An author may buy a BB ad, but rank is still earned through legitimate purchases of that book. Scammers using click farms, well, there's nothing legitimate about that.

 

[Brad Vance]

And visibility and discoverability don't diminish for you in the long run because someone else is temporarily gaming the system.

"Visibility" is what Huffington Post pays you for articles. And how visible are you, really, when your new release is buried in a sea of spam?

Even I've figured out how to spot certain spammers. Either A, one of them is always using this content, or B, they're all copying each other, but you know it's a spambook when you see this in the front:

The information provided herein is stated to be truthful and consistent, in that any liability, in terms of inattention or otherwise, by any usage or abuse of any policies, processes, or directions contained within is the solitary and utter responsibility of the recipient reader. Under no circumstances will any legal responsibility or blame be held against the publisher for any reparation, damages, or monetary loss due to the information herein, either directly or indirectly.

I saw this exact copy in the first huge romance spambooks (most of which said paranormal or MM romances were about time management and the South Beach Diet). And I went looking for books on the cryptocurrency Ethereum, with an eye to maybe writing one. And guess what! There it was, that exact same poorly worded wordage again... I immediately knew it was a spambook, as was its companion book. And of course they're both in KU.
https://www.amazon.com/FinTech-Beginners-Guide-Financial-Technology-ebook/dp/B01FX0UK7O/ref=sr_1_9?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1464368848&sr=1-9&keywords=ethereum
https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Simple-Guide-Everything-Need-ebook/dp/B01F7YJSEW/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1464368848&sr=1-10&keywords=ethereum

Oh, and take a look at the blatantly fake reviews...

My Point Is: If I a simple customer can immediately flag a spambook based on copypasted blather, why doesn't Amazon have the brains to use some kind of plagiarism software to find more spambooks based on this kind of thing? Once you've identified a pattern (which given Amazon's massive computing power and programming genius they should be able to do) it should be easy enough.

So when I put out that Ethereum book? Well, there they are, highly rated KU books pushing me down the list...

Also, "a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s)." When KU is a fixed pot, their gain *is" my loss.