Amazon.com – A Vengeful, Simplistic God?

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From author Adam Dreece:

Last week (Thurs – Jan 12, 2017), I received an email from Amazon around 11pm. They were “reaching out to me” to inform me that they had detected something called “system generated accounts” and thus, were immediately deleting my account. I’ve recently learned that there were a number of us hit, and all of us had the same thing happen.

Welcome to the world of eBook siege weapons. Launchable by any anti-fan or jealous competitor, an indie author or small press can be utterly destroyed on Amazon without defense or recourse.

Every book, every book review, everything I’ve built up over years, is gone. No proof was provided, no opportunity to defend myself given. Like an ancient, vengeful god who had been tricked, Amazon acted as judge and executioner, with no need for jury or trial.

In December, I’d decided to enter their KDP Select program. This was my reward.

When I got the email, I sprang out of bed and emailed them immediately (They were “kind enough” to provide an email address “in case I had any questions.”). It thought it had been bad enough that I had been hammered with emails by them over the Xmas holidays to prove I had the copyright of each of my books, but I did. Now, things had gone nuclear.

I included in that email to them, an email thread between me and one of their KDP support people from a few weeks earlier. I’d noticed a weird spiky behaviour in KU reads, 25k, 0, 10k. It looked suspicious to me, so being the boy-scout that I am, I raised it. I even posted about it on FB, as it was really weird.

The KDP Support person’s response was clearly they thought me cute and naive, and they assured me there was no problem. I said I was scared that the Fiverr promo I’d used (which was new to me, but had over 650 reviews and was a top seller) could have been a scam or something, and they told me no. I even DOUBLE checked with them to please check everything, and I was told everything was fine. I’ve since learned that scammers have been pointing their bots at other authors, often targeting the #1 in smaller categories, so to throw suspicion away from their fake books. There’s no way for me to know though, because Amazon gave me no information.

The reply I got back from them was terse, “We will need some time to investigate this matter.”

. . . .

Last night when I was on FB, I read in a group that a woman just saw the same pattern happen. An inexplicable, 25k page read bump. She was wondering whether she should report it or not. I was going to share what happened to me, but I didn’t want to freak her out or presume that I was right. I then read elsewhere someone else getting hit with an unexpected 5k bump that was ‘instant’. I wondered what was happening. Then a friend pointed out another author she knew had been nuked by Amazon last week too. I read his FB post, and it was exactly the same as what happened to me. However, he’d been following this story a bit longer than me, and had heard of this type of thing happening. Now, he was a victim of it.

I realized that anyone can do this to anyone, and there’s no defense. Amazon assumes and acts, and doesn’t even leave us a means for proving our innocence. A friend asked if I had a lawyer, and I laughed. Have you ever seen someone go up against a titan? You’re bankrupt before you get anywhere near anything resembling justice.

. . . .

I understand Amazon needing to stop scammers from taking any share of the money from their KU money pool, absolutely, but WTF?! If you can detect these “systematic generated accounts” or whatever, then filter them the F out! Don’t make authors like me collateral damage in your simplistic approach. Give us little guys some kind of defense! Or how about a means to prove our innocence? Is it simply that there are so many authors out there that you don’t have to care? How about looking at all of those legal documents and copyright notices you asked me to provide just before nuking me?

Link to the rest at Adam Dreece and thanks to Randall and several others for the tip.

Unfortunately, PG has heard similar stories from other authors in recent months.

One of the things that most impressed PG when he first met a group of Amazon employees who managed KDP several years ago was their statement, repeated several times, that they regarded authors as their customers. Given Amazon’s stellar customer service, this was an impressive attitude toward authors, far different than the perspective traditional publishing has about all but its bestselling authors.

PG is concerned that this attitude may have eroded into something much less author-friendly.

On some occasions, law enforcement officers sink to a cynical view of the communities in which they operate, forgetting that, even in the worst neighborhoods, most people are not criminals. This is part of an emotional burnout that can effect those who spend a lot of time dealing with bad actors.

OTOH, there are people who try to game KDP Select and Amazon’s sales rank algorithms in ways that are inimical to both readers and honest authors. For obvious reasons, readers and honest authors would like such scammers kicked off Amazon. They stink up the place in many different ways.

PG suggests that Amazon needs to put some additional work on both its back-end systems designed to catch bad behavior and on the people side of scammer detection operations. The company needs to up its game to maintain operational excellence in this facet of its business.

One of the fundamental tenets of customer relations is that it’s much easier to keep an existing customer than to attract a new one. Another tenet is that handling small customer transactions well is important because a satisfied customer is much more likely to return.

The sum of small transactions adds up to a larger and larger number over time and the lifetime value of a customer, including an author who is an Amazon customer, is huge.

 

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71 thoughts on “Amazon.com – A Vengeful, Simplistic God?”

  1. Exclusivity hurts readers by limiting their purchasing options.

    Exclusivity hurts non-exclusive authors by putting their books at a disadvantage.

    And now exclusivity hurts the very authors who sign up for it, because the system itself is broken and the parasites (scammers) are killing the host.

    • And now exclusivity hurts the very authors who sign up for it, because the system itself is broken and the parasites (scammers) are killing the host.

      Isn’t that something each author would determine for himself?

      • Exactly.
        All authors are not the same. They have different goals, follow different strategies, go after different markets, tell different stories. The results will invariably be different.

        Don’t we continually hear about authors doing better at Apple, Kobo, or even Nook than at Kindle? Some of it is luck of the draw but some of it has to do with the nature of the store and its customer base. And some of it is a function of how each market is used by the author.

        With the gold rush days (maybe) over it may be time to take a closer look at the various tools and channels and their nuances, from Apple to KU to D2D and even Scout, and consider which strategies best fit each author.

    • The more it’s “fixed”, the worse it gets. KUv1 was bad enough, then KUv2 was slipped in, without a single email that I’ve ever heard of notifying anyone that the rules had changed. We’re apparently in KUv3 now, still with no official notice that they’ve done anything.

      Still, scamming abounds, though it seems most of them won’t get any All Star bonuses now. What a relief! Unless you got your account shut down for no reason, and with no notice. But, hey, we can take our ball and go home, no harm, no foul, right? It won’t matter to Amazon, because for every one of us that leaves KU, a dozen sign up.

      • Until they don’t.

        Humans are weird, and wired to gamble on risks, but even the most game humans will eventually shy away from something in which the consequences are dire. If this keeps happening (and keeps getting talked about) with authentic authors, people will think twice.

        More importantly, those who ride the midlist will shy away first. Amazon needs the indie midlist badly, though I don’t think they’re aware of that.

        The biggest sellers (think Hugh or Bella) would be immune to this kind of unthinking repercussion, but no matter how prolific, they aren’t enough to keep millions in KU and happily reading new material. The lowest selling books aren’t offering enough temptation to readers, so while there are plenty of new books, they won’t be enough to tempt KU readers either. They’ll turn away and sniff, saying there are only dregs in KU.

        That leaves the midlist. Those authors at least selling several hundred copies and an equal number of reads are the vast midlist. They earn from 1K to 10K a month and there are a lot of them. Those keep readers in KU with fresh material to consume.

        But those are the ones who will MOST be harmed by this Amazon behavior. Why? Because they don’t earn enough to be on the whitelist or have “handle with respect” labels and personal reps at Amazon, yet they have significant monies to lose if they’re shut down. Often midlisters are working incredibly hard to move up in the vast midlist range and even *one* such event that shuttles their progress (losing ranks, sales, momentum) is a career killer. They will look for alternatives. They’ll explore new venues like Pronoun. They’ll looks for other promo sites and risk less money now for more safety forever.

        • More importantly, those who ride the midlist will shy away first. Amazon needs the indie midlist badly, though I don’t think they’re aware of that.

          I’m sure they are aware of everything we are. But, perhaps they simply don’t agree about the midlist and KU? Lack of agreement is often mistaken for ignorance of the situation.

          My speculation is that KU is designed to be a source to find books that have a high probability of satisfying the consumer. This is because it will be a curated collection.

          The curation is based on the past experience of consumers, demonstrated by how many pages they read of any given book. Consider an index of the average pages read per download. One could consider books with a high index to be more satisfying to consumers than low index books.

          In order to create a curated selection, Amazon sets up a system that rewards high index books. That’s what they have done. High index books make more money. They want the high index books to stay, and want the low index books to leave. They also want computers to manage it all.

          Why do all this? It creates a place where consumers can find good books more easily than by looking at the entire KDP collection. Amazon gets its own cadre of high selling authors who are happy to keep KU going. Consumers get books that they like.

          How to get the low index books to leave KU? Just publish the index next to the title. Who wants to leave their book in KU if everyone gets to see that nobody reads it after downloading it? This would be put forward as an aid to consumers.

          So, Amazon’s task would be to rid KU of both scammers and low index books by authentic authors.

          • Nicely thought out! Except…why aren’t they doing it?

            And consider this. If just one person with a KU account reads the entirety of a novel that has only had one person read it, then that novel now has a 100% index rate. It is now the best book in the universe according to the machine gods.

            And click farms? Well, they read the entire book every time…in about 20 seconds. Again, all scam books filled with synonomized nonsense are now the best books in the universe.

            In short, as things stand now, they can’t do this curation. Only real authors with a wide variety of readers would be harmed by such a system. Bad authors with a mom wielding a KU membership and click farmed nonsense tomes would win.

            • In short, as things stand now, they can’t do this curation.

              Agree. I look at their actions, and try to determine what rational objective fits with them. They do have to deal with click farms and scammers, and given their past performance in many areas, I expect they are moving on it. They stopped calling me for advice, so I confess to being a bit in the dark.

              So, I see them in a process that will result in Select really being a select collection. Meanwhile, KDP(non-select) will offer everything.

  3. I agree with PG’s assessment and analysis. I’ve heard similar disturbing reports from multiple sources. Unfortunately, Amazon’s response is similar to how it has responded to other scamming incidents – namely, ignoring the worst offenders for months, and then coming up with a brainless automated system that generates tons of false positives, and then coming down hard on the innocent.

    I’ve approached Amazon multiple times on this and related issues, imploring them to come up with better systems, identifying the worst scammers, suggesting workable solutions. And I can’t get anywhere. It’s incredibly frustrating. So much so that I had to give up. Good luck to anyone else trying…

  4. I agree with PG’s suggestion that Amazon needs to up its game in the scammer department–if nothing else, because scammers are ruining the customer experience. If something looks fishy, put human eyeballs and brains on it. Lock it down (briefly) until a human being can review it, and create some kind of appeal mechanism for the innocent caught in the net, which is bound, unfortunately, to happen from time to time.

    This situation is among the several reasons I’m no longer in Select. Not only does it not offer enough bang for my buck, it also risks my ability to offer my books at all on the largest retailer.

  5. I’m relieved to inform you that it seems (Jan 17 – 5pm MDT) that Amazon has restored my ebooks. It is because of people like you sharing and spreading the message, and I greatly appreciate it.

    I’m awaiting their official email.

    • It looks like they restored your reviews too. So they didn’t destroy your account, they did put it on some kind of hold or temporary removal status … but it doesn’t sound like they told you that.

      I hope Amazon gives you an accurate explanation. It would be to Amazon’s benefit as well as yours to be transparent about the reason for the removal, what is required of authors to contest such a removal, the procedure to contest the removal, the expected timeline of such a process, and how to avoid it happening again if that is possible. Speculation that restoration is the result of public pressure is not in Amazon’s best interest and in an ideal world they would address that.

  6. I suspect that eventually authors will no longer be considered Amazon’s customers … rather we are suppliers of product. Jeff Bezos’s opinion towards suppliers is well known … squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Or to put it more properly, we are gazelles and Amazon is the biggest, fastest lion on the savanna.

  7. PG, I’m just wondering if there’s a way for authors, who are currently working with KDP, to apply for some kind of authentication? Perhaps if there was something in place like this then we could avoid accidentally being locked out of an account, or delisted, or whatever.

    The thing is most of us will go on as usual assuming that nothing like this would happen to our accounts, but for that one person that this occasionally may happen to… I’m wondering if we should request for some kind of verification with Amazon, as a preventative measure.

    • This isn’t about being real or not, which is the crazy part. Those being closed due to systemically generated accounts aren’t the systemically generated accounts. Rather, they’ve been read by a load of systemically generated accounts.

      In other words, a click farm chose their book to hide their farming activities.

      For almost all the real authors this has happened to, it’s been after a promo. The farmers find books on services that are legit and farm them to hide their other illicit activity.

      Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t appear to understand this reality and is punishing all the victims.

      • Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t appear to understand this reality and is punishing all the victims.

        If a bunch of independent authors can figure it out, so can Amazon. They know much more about it.

          • Having dealt with Amazon directly on this issue, I don’t think you can make that assumption Terrence.

            I’m assuming it. I have no reason to think independent authors are smarter than the Amazon folks. I’d also assume Amazon has much more information on the issue than any independent author.

            Another assumption is that Amazon has no reason to share everything they know and plan with outsiders.

            An observation about large companies: Not everyone in the company knows what everyone else in the company knows.

            I realize independent authors have a pretty high opinion of themselves. They routinely tell us what publishers don’t know that they do know, what Amazon doesn’t know that they do know, and what B&N doesn’t know that they do know.

          • That’s even worse, Terrence. If it’s so easy for them to sort out, why aren’t they even trying?

            What makes it easy? Knowledge of a problem is usually necessary to solve it, but that knowledge tells us nothing about how easy it is to solve.

            I’d also question how we know Amazon isn’t trying to solve it. How do we know?

    • It is a little about being “real” or not, if we assume that Dreece was not the original target of fake page reads.

      If Amazon created a list of trusted publishers, that would be a good start. Also, I think it would be easier to police 10,000 publishers than 5,000,000 books or 10,000,000 readers.

      As publishers, I’m sure we could agree that sometimes pages read needed to be adjusted downward because of unusual activity. They should be able to clean house when need be. But I don’t see why we need to live in fear of sudden account closures because we’re opting into their exclusivity arrangement.

      • It’s almost like being punished for being exclusive with them. “On the up side, you get free days and countdown deals. On the down side, you’re standing on a rope bridge and anyone can cut the rope at any time.”

  8. This post put me over the edge, and I just removed the last of my and my wife’s books from KDP Select. It is scary to think that even one book on there could get your entire account closed.

    • Me too. I’ve been on the fence for a while. Now I’m out. This is just one too many reports of trouble in the neighborhood. I’m not going to wait until I’m the victim.

    • I’ve had 3 of my 18 titles in KU for the last year, but I’m re-thinking that now, leaning strongly toward pulling those 3 books out of Select and distributing them widely like the other 15.

  9. Is this the same Amazon that people like to curse because they are too slow at taking actions against scammers of various kinds?

    Some people were warning that you would not want Amazon to move quickly on such matters, here’s why

  10. This is a chilling story for me b/c I’m unable to see how Amazon could weed out Jeff Deece’s sales from the scammers. Unless they have some way of tracking the downloads of specific KU customers.

    As a former cop who HAS done pretty much exactly what Allen F described at the top of the comments, my heart goes out to Jeff. Because at least when such a thing happened IRL, the cops in most cases were able to sort stuff out after a while. Locking up the wrong guy is way, way worse than not catching the bad guy.

    But in Jeff’s case, is it even possible for Amazon to be able to cull him from the mutts?

    One thing that sort of sticks out here is that he said he had some kind of run in while uploading over copyright questions. I’m concerned that may have caused some wanna be G-man’s Spidey Sense to tingle, which then when he appeared shady, they pulled the trigger.

    THAT sort of dynamic I’ve seen. To add to Allen F’s comparison, they found the smoking gun and knew you and the victim didn’t get along.

    Uh-oh.
    Let us know how you make out, Jeff. This sort of episode is what keeps me up at night. I’m all in w/ KU, and writing’s all I do.

  11. After Amazon mysteriously recorded 0 sales and borrows for me for a week, then claimed (via email formletter and telephone support and email formletter once again) that there was nothing wrong on their end, I realized KU was too unreliable and risky to continue.

    The recent account closures are chilling. They want us out, guys. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to ascertain whether an account is a real publisher or a scammer. If they’re willing to engage in these practices, I have to believe it’s calculated. They’re trying to napalm the KU jungle.

    Remember the creepy kid in every horror movie ever? The ghost who says “get out?” Obey the ghost. Get out.

    • If they get rid of you and others the readers want to read they’ll start losing those KU subscriptions, which they won’t want — unless they are trying to just wind KU down and out.

      I have no horse in this race, but I’m not sure how Amazon could lock ‘most’ of the scams out without there being some non-scammers getting caught in the same net. Then you have the added fun of the scammers doing the same ‘block reads’ on those not of their group to throw off Amazon. Of course someone reading several books per hour is most likely a scam, but Amazon might have detection problems if it appears that each book was sent to a different device (which makes me wonder how many ‘accounts’ these guys have doing the ‘reading’ and why Amazon can’t see the patterns with all the data they collect.)

    • The recent account closures are chilling. They want us out, guys.

      Seems it would be a lot easier to just send all the guys an email ending Amazon’s service. They can do that anytime they want.

  12. This is something that a whole lot of us have been warning would happen. Scammers who use clickfarms realized back in April when they were outed that the only way to hide a click-farm is to make it read *all* the books.

    So, yeah, clickfarms now target different promo services (one day Freebooksy, the next BookBub…etc) and pick books to harvest using their bots. Then they go on to the scam books they’ve been hired to farm that day.

    Why?

    Easy! When a book has a Bookbub or some other big promo, the author *and* Amazon will expect to see a huge spike in reads. So, the click-farm’s activity will look legit…just another 100 accounts downloading a freebie off the bub…and their farmed activity can go undetected for longer.

    Of the authors that have been caught in this, about half of them did absolutely nothing wrong. There are a few promo services that advertise on Fiverr that are legit, but just getting started with smaller lists. They were targeted by click farms due to a perceived lack of power to communicate with Amazon if something bad happens.

    And that worked.

    So they moved up to larger services. The list of safe promo sites is decreasing as this method expands.

      • Joe – As of right now, I’m only seeing this as an issue for KU books. Specifically, the scam centers on inflating page reads for scam books (or hired books) as the ultimate goal. So, only a *real* book by a real author in KU would work as a smokescreen for the farmer to hide behind.

        At least, for this scam.

        There’s another scam brewing, though I don’t anticipate major impact for a while yet with it. Let me just tell you this: get your *actual* copyright done officially. Just do it. Keep the receipt and paperwork.

  13. The funny thing is, these sound like the actions of IT, not CS

    IT Tech: The software says his account is fraudulent.
    IT Manager: Delete it.

    It wouldn’t take much to investigate these a little bit to see. Part of the problem is, there are LEGITIMATE authors who are using scamy methods. It isn’t always as obvious as looking at their books.

    • And they may not have actually ‘deleted’ it as they could have just ‘locked’ it out until someone decides if it’s fraud (though admitting to Amazon to using Fiverr probably will make it hard to claim he did ‘nothing’ to warrant this.)

  14. “PG suggests that Amazon needs to put some additional work on both its back-end systems designed to catch bad behavior and on the people side of scammer detection operations. The company needs to up its game to maintain operational excellence in this facet of its business.”

    Have to agree with you here, PG, but I’m wondering if Amazon is a bit too reliant on their software to detect scammers. There seems to be a policy of shoot first and ask questions later, only the questions never get asked. I would think the decision of whether to pull an account or not would be reviewed and approved by an actual human before that action took place. Hopefully after making contact with the party in question.

    “One of the fundamental tenets of customer relations is that it’s much easier to keep an existing customer than to attract a new one.” This takes us back to the question of Amazon having a monopolistic advantage in the ebook market again. For this statement to apply the customer, or author in this case, has to have an alternative place to go.

    I think these cases are rare,and will hopefully become more so in the future as Amazon has a history of fixing things.

    But that doesn’t mean they should be ignored.

    This prompts another question: Is KDP getting better? Most things Amazon just keep getting better. Is that true for KDP too?

  15. A little bird recently told me that KDP has been mostly India-managed for several years now.

    I found that interesting, as the KDP “customer service” hasn’t exactly been fantastic when it comes to reporting issues (the standard response is almost always “everything’s working fine”) or having questions answered instead of some sort of copypasta response (that NEVER answers your actual question).

    • Makes a lot of sense, and doesn’t inspire confidence now that it appears that they’re sunsetting CreateSpace. The customer service at CreateSpace is the best that I have experienced in my life.

      • When I was putting out my second album, I complained about CreateSpace’s interface in a fairly detailed email. I had progressively more important people actually contact me about it, even though I wasn’t trying to get anyone to do anything. I was just sending a suggestion email, basically. Finally, I had a 35-minute conversation with some VP at the company at the time. By the time my third album was out, they’d fixed about half of what I’d complained about.

        Not only was their customer service great, but they actually took the time to listen to what I was saying, and see if there was value in it, rather than just make me happy. Which was pretty amazing.

  16. [Quote PG: are inimical to both readers and honest authors.]

    Thank you, PG! It isn’t often I am able to learn a new word! Inimical… awesome!

    • You’re welcome, Jeff. I knocked my only paper dictionary off the desk and it happened to open to the I’s. 😉

  17. Vengeful God? Or just an uncaring one? (Though I hadn’t noticed Jeff demanding you kneel when you come into his presence.)

    A man was shot and the smoking gun was found in your room. Of course you claim you’re being framed, but the cops might limit your mobility for a bit while they look for facts and run some tests.

    As this has been happening more and more it seems, I expect either KU3 — which many will bemoan as unfair to ‘them’ — or Amazon dropping/changing KU altogether.

    • Thanks for sharing this, PG.

      The analogy I keep thinking of is someone breaks into your house, so the cops arrest for you theft. It doesn’t matter that you were on stage, before video cameras, it doesn’t matter that you have a million witnesses, your house was broken into, so clearly you did it.

    • I forgot to add that I found it amusing that he claims to be a ‘boy-scout’ yet he feared using the ‘Fiverr promo’ may have tripped something on Amazon — who I think sued Fiverr for their little scams — didn’t they?

      Not quite as lily white as he wants us to think. (Though I have to wonder if having used Fiverr was what put him on the attacker’s radar.)

          • I read it this way too. I don’t think he was using Fiverr to buy reviews. He used Fiverr to promo his book, which a lot of authors do legally and well within Amazon’s guidelines. A promo is not the same as buying reviews.

            All that said, I’m really skeptical now of Fiverr on the whole after the number of Fiverr-related account closings of late.

      • He said promo service, not review service. There are plenty of legit promotional FB groups and newsletters that are the smaller versions of BookBub that sell their services through Fiverr.

        I realize people here tend to knee-jerk defend Amazon, but perhaps try to withhold judgement before verifying the full story.

      • Allen – that is a *completely* unwarranted assumption. There are many legitimate promo services on Fiverr. You really shouldn’t throw around insinuations like that without some kind of evidence.

      • What’s next, Allen? Going to ask him when he stopped beating his wife?

        It seems he got caught up in Amazon’s usual drop a nuke because the bots can’t recognize real sales and downloads. All of these issues could be avoided, or at least minimized, if they’d simply hire some people and train them in how to spot scams. The bots could flag a file, but it would have to be examined by a competent human being.

        It took months and months of reporting obvious scam books before they even attempted to do anything about them, and now they’ll eliminate anyone, even people who are being used by the very scammers Amazon can’t seem to figure out.

    • It seems that a strand of Amazon Derangement Syndrome has mutated and infected some of the PG regulars. The Amazon fanboys are starting to sound exactly like the Apple fanatics when the Apple ebooks collusion case was still ongoing.

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