Have you heard about the scammers who are creating dummy books or translating someone else’s old book into a different language and then getting them to move up the charts on Amazon? The idea is that they are putting their “Books” (I use the term loosely) into Kindle Unlimited and getting people all over the world to “read” their books so that they can make money off of the page reads. This is not only wrong and against Amazon policies, but it is immoral to take money from the KU pot that is set aside to pay the real authors a share of what was read during the month. It also has stolen #1 spots on various best seller lists from real authors.
Until today i did not understand how they were doing this, i didn’t even know what a “click farm” was. I am appalled at what people come up with just to scam others out of their hard earned dollars.
Here is a link to Ann Christy’s blog where she actually has screen shots and goes into detail on what these scammers are doing. Now I want to go and look at those books which kept me from getting a top 5 spot on the Amazon bestseller list and see if any of them were scams! I think two might have been!
Independant authors work very hard to write their books and then market them. We don’t have a team of professionals behind us. In fact, most of us work harder as an author then we did in our previous jobs. I know i do! If you see this behaviour please report it to Amazon and be sure to leave a review that shows what is going on, call out SCAMMER in your review so others don’t fall for this garbage. The books aren’t worth reading anyway.
The featured image on this blog is one example from the article by Ann.
