Amazon stiffing authors on KU royalties?

Al X. · Jul 11, 2017

A couple author friends of mine have recently given me some very disturbing reports of entire month blocks of KU royalties being stripped, evaporated, with no warning, other than an after the fact auto generated nasty gram that they had 'detected illegal downloads and page reads.' I've been hearing grumblings that this appears to be systematic.

If true, I'm going to make a prediction that right or wrong in this matter will be decided in a high stakes class action suit.

Anna Iguana · Jul 11, 2017

Here's a related thread that might interest you.

J. Tanner · Jul 11, 2017

Pretty much everything at Amazon is systematic.

And such systems make mistakes at times.

There is a massive scamming system running on KU right now. Some of that includes trying to hide their activities by diverting some page-read traffic to legitimate authors. It's discussed at length around the internet. Amazon is trying to cope with that which is in the best interest of Amazon, readers, and authors.

If your author friends are not using the black-hat techniques Amazon is trying to cull, then their royalties will be restored to an extent of the actual page reads that occurred by contacting Amazon KDP support.

(While I haven't used qualifiers, this is all information from best guesses and observations by the hive mind as Amazon does not publicly discuss it.)

Al X. · Jul 11, 2017

J. Tanner said:
Pretty much everything at Amazon is systematic.

And such systems make mistakes at times.

There is a massive scamming system running on KU right now. Some of that includes trying to hide their activities by diverting some page-read traffic to legitimate authors. It's discussed at length around the internet. Amazon is trying to cope with that which is in the best interest of Amazon, readers, and authors.

If your author friends are not using the black-hat techniques Amazon is trying to cull, then their royalties will be restored to an extent of the actual page reads that occurred by contacting Amazon KDP support.

(While I haven't used qualifiers, this is all information from best guesses and observations by the hive mind as Amazon does not publicly discuss it.)

But how does Amazon really know what is legit and what isn't? It seems to me that, short of hacking in to Amazon's system, it would be impossible to arrange a scenario where Amazon gets defrauded. Presumably the KU payout is based on some percentage of Select revenue, and the number of page reads are a function of downloads which had to be made from legitimate Amazon accounts with Select membership, so it should all balance out.

It's kind of a big deal. The penalty you pay for opting in Select is that you have to be exclusive to Amazon, meaning you've been barred from receiving revenue from other sources for as long as your books have been in the program. If Amazon suddenly decides that you've been a bad actor and strips your royalty, then well, that's actionable.

I don't know definitively who is right and who is wrong and I am aware there are some bad apples out there, but any way you break it down, Amazon's s**t isn't smelling like daisies either. I don't have a horse in this race, because I'm pulling all my horses out and going wide. I've wanted to do that for some time anyway, and I'm thinking now is a real good time.

And here is the other thing. They've been doing that without warning. Poof. So, other than big gaps in page reads spanning a month period, there is no way for those authors to substantiate prior page read counts unless they've been taking daily tallies, or at least did a screen save or data dump before their reads were stripped. I'm sorry, but that is a very shady, deceptive move.

That won't look good in court, if it goes there.

J. Tanner · Jul 12, 2017

Al X. said:
But how does Amazon really know what is legit and what isn't?

Automated systems that identify patterns that look more fake than validated human behavior.

It seems to me that, short of hacking in to Amazon's system, it would be impossible to arrange a scenario where Amazon gets defrauded. Presumably the KU payout is based on some percentage of Select revenue, and the number of page reads are a function of downloads which had to be made from legitimate Amazon accounts with Select membership, so it should all balance out.

The program is generally thought to be a loss leader, so a payout in excess of the revenue generated, and much of the fraud is assumed to occur during the free trial period. So they're very much being defrauded as that money intended to lock more readers into their ecosystem is actually not serving that purpose. (One theory occasionally floated is that Amazon will eventually have to stop paying for page reads during the free trial which moves things a bit closer to your assumption.)

It's kind of a big deal. The penalty you pay for opting in Select is that you have to be exclusive to Amazon, meaning you've been barred from receiving revenue from other sources for as long as your books have been in the program. If Amazon suddenly decides that you've been a bad actor and strips your royalty, then well, that's actionable.

Welcome to America. You can sue for anything. But it's probably a better idea to do what you can to work it out with Amazon. It sucks when you're the loser in the longshot lottery, no doubt.

I don't know definitively who is right and who is wrong and I am aware there are some bad apples out there, but any way you break it down, Amazon's s**t isn't smelling like daisies either. I don't have a horse in this race, because I'm pulling all my horses out and going wide. I've wanted to do that for some time anyway, and I'm thinking now is a real good time.

And here is the other thing. They've been doing that without warning. Poof. So, other than big gaps in page reads spanning a month period, there is no way for those authors to substantiate prior page read counts unless they've been taking daily tallies, or at least did a screen save or data dump before their reads were stripped. I'm sorry, but that is a very shady, deceptive move.

That won't look good in court, if it goes there.

Amazon has always been a mixed bag for their suppliers. This is just one more example, and far from the most egregious.

I wouldn't worry about "missing" historical data. Amazon has it all. I stop short of buying into conspiracy theories that they'd hide evidence that exonerates an author. There are too many anecdotes about authors who got chewed up a little by the automated processes and then had humans review the situation and resolve the problem in the authors favor.

That said, the maxim about not having all your eggs in one basket is a good one to remember in this business. All else being equal, wide is the better situation. Unfortunately, for many authors it's nowhere close to equal.

veinglory · Jul 12, 2017

Just to echo, some people tend to go straight to a "stealing" idea. There have been some glitches recently perhaps related to the new reports system. I, personally, have not seen them effecting payments yet--just realtime reporting. As someone who has been KU for many years I would suggest keeping a record, chilling and waiting to see if it gets sorted out, give it a couple of months and I bet they will make it right. I have seen Amazon FUBAR things temporarily many times but seen zero evidence that they are actually trying to screw people out of money. they are just a very very large automated system with relatively few human staff and every time they make a big change is fixes some problems and causes others.

ASeiple · Jul 12, 2017

Yeah, it's a pain in the butt, but I chalk it down to the ongoing war between the fraudsters and the 'zon. If it hits me I'll go shout over the phone for a while until it gets straightened out.

Funny thing, I seem to recall at least one insurance agency offering a policy for this sort of thing. They'll cover you in the event that your earnings get delayed or shut off due to Amazon's banhammer falling in the wrong place. Might be worth looking into for the five-figure crowd...

Al X. · Jul 13, 2017

J. Tanner said:
The program is generally thought to be a loss leader, so a payout in excess of the revenue generated, and much of the fraud is assumed to occur during the free trial period. So they're very much being defrauded as that money intended to lock more readers into their ecosystem is actually not serving that purpose. (One theory occasionally floated is that Amazon will eventually have to stop paying for page reads during the free trial which moves things a bit closer to your assumption.)

But is it really a loss leader? Amazon has created a model in which it doesn't make sense to actually buy ebooks if you do a lot of reading. I have noticed the trend myself. Last year I had a healthy amount of sales. About 80% of my revenue was from sales. Then, although KU reads climbed, sales dropped. This trend has been reverberated excessively in Amazon's own KDP forums.

Nobody wants to buy ebooks when they can just pay ten USD and download a slew of them. That model can't help Amazon. I have to believe they thought this out, and have a model where they are not losing money. Otherwise it would be economic suicide.

I am good friends with an author who is caught up in this mess. The way she is treated by Amazon is deplorable. On one hand they declared her promotional efforts valid, e.g. it was clear that it was real people downloading her books and reading them, yet, they threw her under the bus. And they are throwing quite a few people under the bus.

It's Amazon that created this mess. There are legitimate promoters that cater to the KU market. It's a lucrative market so it's easy to capitalize on. Amazon sees authors with few reviews and insignificant sales bolstered from KU promos and automatically assumes they are enrolled in click farms or whatever the present scam is.

It's disheartening, and Amazon, FU. I don't want to engage in it. I write more for fun than to fund eight balls and hos, so I don't care personally. But it has convinced me to scale back the relationship with Amazon. Actually, from what I'm hearing it has cause a LOT of authors to abandon Amazon.

veinglory · Jul 14, 2017

But the evidence show that actually plenty of people choose not to join KU and to buy ebooks, and plenty of people join KU and still buy ebooks. Just like people with get hulu and or netflix, but still buy and rent movies or go to the cinema. Each stream effects the other but not necessarily by destroying and replacing it entirely because people have different and overlapping ways of using media.

FWIW I put my books in KU, but do not use KU myself. In my case, as a customer I want a small number of specific author's ebooks, and most of them are not in KU. But as an author my books sell and rent best on Amazon so until i have finished getting my entire backlist formatted and listed there I won't be bothering to go wide to see which does best for me (KU or wide).

lorna_w · Jul 14, 2017

Well over half the time people who cry "foul" actually are gaming the system and are in violation of TOS. That may not be true of your friends, Al X, but if they are innocent, they should write kdp an email and work their way up the chain until someone real looks into it. This may take a couple of weeks. Then the system will work, and they'll get paid, perhaps a month late, but paid. Deep breaths. Work through the system and don't game it.

I'm not an attorney, but I doubt a class action lawsuit over the damages, "I was a bit frazzled for two weeks while working this out" will get very far.

Or think of it this way: would they rather 95% of KU payouts went to scammers? Or would they rather Amazon try and deal with the scams, even if it delays payment for a month for a few unlucky souls?

J. Tanner · Jul 14, 2017

Al X. said:
But is it really a loss leader? Amazon has created a model in which it doesn't make sense to actually buy ebooks if you do a lot of reading. I have noticed the trend myself. Last year I had a healthy amount of sales. About 80% of my revenue was from sales. Then, although KU reads climbed, sales dropped. This trend has been reverberated excessively in Amazon's own KDP forums.

Nobody wants to buy ebooks when they can just pay ten USD and download a slew of them. That model can't help Amazon. I have to believe they thought this out, and have a model where they are not losing money. Otherwise it would be economic suicide.

Agree to disagree, I guess.

I am good friends with an author who is caught up in this mess. The way she is treated by Amazon is deplorable. On one hand they declared her promotional efforts valid, e.g. it was clear that it was real people downloading her books and reading them, yet, they threw her under the bus. And they are throwing quite a few people under the bus.

It's Amazon that created this mess. There are legitimate promoters that cater to the KU market. It's a lucrative market so it's easy to capitalize on. Amazon sees authors with few reviews and insignificant sales bolstered from KU promos and automatically assumes they are enrolled in click farms or whatever the present scam is.

Sorry to hear about your friend. I hope it all works out. But...

That can't be the whole story, right? If they declared everything she did valid, then her account would not be impacted or it would have been deemed an automated system error and restored. Clearly, Amazon has determined that something isn't up to snuff in regards to downloads and page reads (for the moment at least).

And this is the first mention of using promotional efforts. Who did she use during the month? That's an valuable piece of info.

And where did Amazon proclaim it "valid"? That doesn't sound much like how they do generally do business.

Dhewco · Jul 15, 2017

Amazon has never made a profit, according to some business sites. (I'm too lazy to google the articles.) It doesn't faze me that they'd choose to encourage things that reduce profit on books. The only way Amazon's business model is if they're trying to capture the market completely and then raise prices once everyone else in the biz turn to dust.

Al X. · Jul 15, 2017

J. Tanner said:
Agree to disagree, I guess.

Sorry to hear about your friend. I hope it all works out. But...

That can't be the whole story, right? If they declared everything she did valid, then her account would not be impacted or it would have been deemed an automated system error and restored. Clearly, Amazon has determined that something isn't up to snuff in regards to downloads and page reads (for the moment at least).

And this is the first mention of using promotional efforts. Who did she use during the month? That's an valuable piece of info.

And where did Amazon proclaim it "valid"? That doesn't sound much like how they do generally do business.

In fairness, I am tracking this story (and a couple others) from a second hand perspective so I don't have answers to everything. I can't tell you what constitutes 'valid' as I don't know what constitutes 'invalid." Some sort of automated click-bot? A warehouse stuffed with Malaysian sweatshop workers armed with Kindle devices and a download list? A hacking group in Kiev implanting fake Kindle tracking bots? A reading group in Tasmania focusing on a specific novel or groups of novel on assignment? I'm reaching, I don't know how the scammers are scamming the system but I am keen to hear.

As an observation, I would suspect it is a lot easier to target KU readers as a promotional target since they don't really have to 'buy' anything. AMS ads are next to worthless, from personal observation.

Helix · Jul 15, 2017

Again with the "Malaysian sweatshop".

Anyway, the issue of scams affecting KU has been going on for quite a while, so it should be fairly easy to Google it.

rwm4768 · Jul 15, 2017

Looks like there was a pretty big scam just recently. I think the author is going to find this backfiring. I understand the desire to get more people to read your books, but people need to have some integrity.

https://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/scammers-break-the-kindle-store/

J. Tanner · Jul 16, 2017

Al X. said:
I can't tell you what constitutes 'valid' as I don't know what constitutes 'invalid."

I meant in relation to your friend's personal experience. What promotions did she do? What specific responses did Amazon provide that resulted in these interpretations? That sort of thing.

The broad methodology of a variety of the scams is out there if you want to read about it. I see above there's a link to David Gaughran's site covering a lot of it. Phoenix Sullivan's posts on kboards are another great resource.

(To some extent, I think David is exaggerating when he opines that Amazon is doing nothing. There are plenty of anecdotal cases like your friend's popping up and plenty of scam books that quietly disappear. But I understand his frustration when Amazon is slow to react to obvious cases, even when brought to their attention.)

veinglory · Jul 16, 2017

Amazon can be very unresponsive and slow to react. This generally has more to do with having a huge site, highly automated systems, a lot of scammers trying to exploit them, and very few live technical staff. Until an exploit gets totally out of control they tend to play whack-a-mole with it.

Al X. · Jul 21, 2017

Interesting article on the subject.

https://www.change.org/p/amazon-com-kindle-unlimited-is-toxic-to-authors

J. Tanner · Jul 21, 2017

Al X. said:
Interesting article on the subject.

https://www.change.org/p/amazon-com-kindle-unlimited-is-toxic-to-authors

Note that Adam Dreece's account was restored. This petition was never updated to mention that.

J. Tanner · Jul 21, 2017

veinglory said:
Amazon can be very unresponsive and slow to react. This generally has more to do with having a huge site, highly automated systems, a lot of scammers trying to exploit them, and very few live technical staff. Until an exploit gets totally out of control they tend to play whack-a-mole with it.

They reacted big time this week. Apparently, all the authors/books mention in David Gaughran's post and some other suspicious ones that were not publicly outed disappeared from Amazon.

Helix · Jul 21, 2017

Al X. said:
Interesting article on the subject.

https://www.change.org/p/amazon-com-kindle-unlimited-is-toxic-to-authors

So the sales were actually affected by bots.

Fuchsia Groan · Jul 21, 2017

Wow. This thread (and the links) has been really informative. I sometimes get press releases from authors claiming to be "No. 1 bestsellers" who have zero reviews, zero online presence, and I wonder what is up. I'm not assuming these particular authors are scammers, of course — maybe they hit No. 1 in a small category at some point; maybe they have a genuine following. But to somebody who's never used KU, like many journalists, the whole system is mystifying.

J. Tanner · Jul 22, 2017

Fuchsia Groan said:
Wow. This thread (and the links) has been really informative. I sometimes get press releases from authors claiming to be "No. 1 bestsellers" who have zero reviews, zero online presence, and I wonder what is up. I'm not assuming these particular authors are scammers, of course — maybe they hit No. 1 in a small category at some point; maybe they have a genuine following. But to somebody who's never used KU, like many journalists, the whole system is mystifying.

Yep. It's gotten pretty bad.

For a while, you could at least look for NYT or USA Today bestseller claims to have some relevance, but now that's gone too with the host of 99 cent box sets with 20 authors in them all working together to hit the end of that list and minting 20 new "bestsellers". (Not that these lists were ever perfect, but it's down the toilet at this point...)

Al X. · Jul 22, 2017

Fuchsia Groan said:
Wow. This thread (and the links) has been really informative. I sometimes get press releases from authors claiming to be "No. 1 bestsellers" who have zero reviews, zero online presence, and I wonder what is up. I'm not assuming these particular authors are scammers, of course — maybe they hit No. 1 in a small category at some point; maybe they have a genuine following. But to somebody who's never used KU, like many journalists, the whole system is mystifying.

Bear in mind that it is becoming increasingly difficult for authors to get reviews on Amazon. The old metric that used to be thrown about was one review per two hundred sales. Currently, the review rate is a lot lower. So you can't really equate sales with the number of reviews. Also bear in mind that authors that have a low sales rank but a hundred reviews per title may well have got those reviews from an exchange service. As a reader, it's impossible to tell whether the sales rank was manipulated in some form, or perhaps KU reads were manipulated affecting the rank, or if they just sold books and got KU reads legitimately.

Amazon itself turned the market upside down, which is confounding to both readers AND authors. There are some that maintain that Amazon uses the KU program as a loss leader. I do not believe that for a second, because if it were true, then they really shot themselves in the foot. And I doubt they are in to shooting themselves in the foot.

WriterBN · Jul 22, 2017

Al X. said:
Amazon itself turned the market upside down, which is confounding to both readers AND authors. There are some that maintain that Amazon uses the KU program as a loss leader. I do not believe that for a second, because if it were true, then they really shot themselves in the foot. And I doubt they are in to shooting themselves in the foot.

The global fund for KU was $18 million last month. That's a drop in the bucket of overall revenues for Amazon, even if you restrict it to just books.

All other e-book subscription services have failed, partly thanks to KU. However, I suspect the real reason that KU exists is to kill the competition (iBooks, Google Play, and to a lesser extent, Nook).

Amazon stiffing authors on KU royalties?

Al X.

Anna Iguana

reading all the things

J. Tanner

Al X.

J. Tanner

veinglory

volitare nequeo

ASeiple

Livin' la vida biblia

Al X.

veinglory

volitare nequeo

lorna_w

Hybrid Grump

J. Tanner

Dhewco

Al X.

Helix

socially distancing

rwm4768

practical experience, FTW

J. Tanner

veinglory

volitare nequeo

Al X.

J. Tanner

J. Tanner

Helix

socially distancing

Fuchsia Groan

Becoming a laptop-human hybrid

J. Tanner

Al X.

WriterBN