Amazon stiffing authors on KU royalties?

J. Tanner said:

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

Click to expand...

Yeah, it was. It's pretty far down in the updates, but it's there. Look under the 'Fully Reinstated!' update.

J. Tanner said:

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.

Click to expand...

Good news. Link?

J. Tanner said:

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...)

Click to expand...

I heard that NYT does not count those toward the list anymore. But of course, who knows for sure when it comes to the NYT? But I do know that Bookbub at least, being a major source of exposure, no longer accept multi-author box sets. They will still accept box sets from single authors though.

cmhbob said:

Good news. Link?

Click to expand...

It's buried in the massive "scammers" thread on kboards.

To sum it up, Amazon removed a number of books for a short period, and then restored them with a punishment that is, I believe, new. The books no longer have a rank.

Some authors who claim to never have used bots were also caught up in this. There is some disagreement about what else may have been the cause of rank stripping, from a technical glitch, to the practice of "book stuffing" (arguably, a method of generating unearned KU page reads, and/or creating a poor customer experience), to including incentivized links to the back of the book (a practice Amazon has explicitly deemed unacceptable as it generates unearned KU page reads).

Has anyone else noted that the KU Reports page doesn't match what is shown in the Month to Date page? This month I see 29 sales to date for one of my books, but the Month to Date page only shows 26 sales. I haven't checked the KENP totals.

J. Tanner said:

It's buried in the massive "scammers" thread on kboards.

Click to expand...

Yeah, not wading through a 31-page thread. I was hoping for a link to a specific post about things. Maybe an Amazon press release or something.

The relation between month to date and the spreadsheet is not as direct as it appears. They do not always line up 1-1 for the current month.

cmhbob said:

Yeah, not wading through a 31-page thread. I was hoping for a link to a specific post about things. Maybe an Amazon press release or something.

Click to expand...

Amazon doesn't typically talk about this stuff publicly and that's true here. It's all authors talking with other authors and observing what Amazon has done after the fact and trying to intuit the why.

(Then authors contact KDP support and get diametrically opposed responses from different reps...)

Al X. said:

Game on. 100+ authors, major New York firm, this is going to be huge. Let's see what happens.

Click to expand...

Do you mean a class action lawsuit?