The Great Amazon Battle of ’17

31 thoughts on “The Great Amazon Battle of ’17”

1. With the number of stories we’ve read about this very thing, I have to wonder how much it happens to people we HAVEN’T read about. Ten times more? Twenty? Same with the number of people leaving or declining to opt into Select. It may very well be droves.

   • That’s the part that scares me. How many of these situations are occurring to authors who don’t belong to popular podcasts or are members of KBoards? Given the sheer number of authors in KDP, it would be logical to conclude that there are a whole lot more than we’re hearing about.

     And that’s scary, because we don’t know what happened to them. Popular podcast = wide audience to spread the word. Belonging to KBoards = more likely that Amazon will see the posts.

     Being random prawny author who already sells little = no one seeing or caring.

     • And how many of indies that do belong and did get hit but didn’t bother broadcasting about it because getting things corrected was easier than dealing with their bank? Not everyone feels that their every little issue needs to be shouted from the hilltops or tweeted on facepalm.

       And people are leaving because it’s turning out not to be the magic ticket they were hoping it was. (Which in turn is actually a good thing for those staying.)

       (No horse in this race as my stories were out there before I tried Amazon, and they’ll stay out there, but it’s fun to watch all the ‘chicken littles’ run about every time Amazon does just about anything at all.)

       YMMV in this as in all things.

     • Judging from posts on the KDP forums, it’s happening to quite a few people. These are newbies who don’t post anywhere else, and often come there to create an account just to ask about it. So they aren’t being seen by people who frequent other forums. These aren’t big sellers, or people with lots of page reads, they don’t have reps or any understanding about how to get this fixed. They’re panicking, usually.

       The thing about Amazon is they need to police the Select program. Make it have some qualifications to enter (decent formatting, good writing, good cover, proper choice of categories). It shouldn’t be any book anybody can figure out how to upload. “Select” means something, which Amazon interprets as merely “exclusive”. Not quite the same thing, Jeff B.

       And it’s going to take trained humans who know how to spot the difference between the scammers the bots pick out, and the innocent people who’ve done nothing to deserve having their accounts closed with no warning and little recourse.

       • “The thing about Amazon is they need to police the Select program.”

         Will writers be willing to put up with the delays and less pay this policing will require? (Considering all the stuff already in Select that they ‘should’ go through before adding any new.)

         It’s all a balancing act, if Amazon pushes it too far one way or the other it all comes down.

         • I’m not sure such a big wait is actually what will happen. Given how quickly Apple gets books up, and Google Play, having a person check it doesn’t seem like such a drag. I mean, they aren’t reading it. They check to be sure it’s a book, run their scam detector (or plagiarize checker) and then pass it on.

           • I didn’t realize Apple and Google had anything like Amazon’s KU — or Select.

             Regular ebooks aren’t as useful to scammers because people will complain when they ‘buy’ an ebook that turns out to be crap (and unlike KU, the scammers would actually have to ‘buy’ it to get paid, unlike ‘reading’ the pages in KU.)

             When/if Amazon locks things down enough to actually stop/slow the scammers, then the scammers will bother with Apple/Google, but by then the people reading these pages will be howling because to stop the scammers Amazon had to stop/slow the indies too.

             • I should have been clearer, but I’m terrible at that!

               There was a scam before KU, but it was much smaller and higher risk. What they did was put up scrapes or books that were plagiarized in part or created by google translate…etc and so on…but price them attractively at 0.99. The scam was that many people won’t bother (or won’t know) that you can return an ebook. They did this for a little while, then took down the book, slapped on a new cover, and re-published under a new name.

               Because KU is now so popular with scammers, I don’t know if they are doing it with the other vendors, but I know it would be harder to do because they have eyeballs on books.

               Also, (but this is another topic entirely), it’s been recommended over and over that Amazon create a whitelist of authors with track records of decent books or long history with verified reviews. That really would make it a lot easier.

               • No problem, but having watched far too many people ‘break’ things trying to fix them I’m always playing the ‘devil’s advocate’ and looking to see if they’re not trying to saw off the limb they’re standing on.

                 There will be scams always, the old ‘money for nothing and the chicks for free’ types, like playing ‘wak-ah-mole’ you do what you can.

                 Whitelists aren’t perfect either. That means new writers can’t get in through the gatekeeper until they have a ‘track record’ — which they can’t get because they can’t get in! Then there’s the fun of having a scammer manage to fly under the radar and get ‘vetted’ before they start doing their bigger scams now that they’re ‘whitelisted’.

                 And ‘long history’ takes us back to barring new writers and ‘verified reviews’ can be gamed from the outside.

                 As I said earlier, I’m much prefer Amazon keep making little steps to fixing things — without making them worse. And let’s face it, we don’t have any idea just how bad the scammers are/were and what tricks Amazon is using to go after them. (And I’d just as soon ‘not’ know what Amazon is doing because if I can find out then so can the scammers and the best way to beat the system is to understand the rules it works under.)

2. > the truth is that Amazon’s algorithms
   > have no way of distinguishing
   > [at the moment]
   > between one author and another

   actually, i think their algorithms _do_
   do a pretty good job of distinguishing.

   or we would hear more horror stories.

   but occasionally a real honest author
   will get targeted, and scream loudly,
   so people notice, and we do notice,
   and then amazon goes and fixes it,
   hopefully, because they know that
   the algorithms aren’t totally perfect.

   we don’t know how many scammers
   they’ve taken down. it could be a lot.
   those guys don’t scream when caught.

   the thing is, if you want to disguise
   yourself from an algorithm, and you
   have good knowledge about how to
   make yourself look innocent, it’s easy.

   which makes amazon’s job much harder.

   do honest publishers have fewer books?
   then we’ll make our scam publisher
   have fewer books, so he looks “real”.

   do honest publishers have longer books?
   then we’ll make our scam publisher
   have longer books, that’s fairly easy.

   there’s just not a lot of things that
   honest publishers do that scammers
   can’t mimic with their scam publishers.

   now, obviously, amazon has to focus
   on both sides of the equation, both
   scam-readers and scam-publishers,
   but i think their main priority will be
   trying to ferret out the scam-readers.

   but same thing there. the scammers
   will try to make their readers resemble
   real honest readers, as much as possible.

   -bowerbird

   • I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, and hope that Amazon can, in fact, tame the scammers without too much collateral damage. 🙁

3. I’m sure someone has thought of this before but…why doesn’t Amazon use the army of free eyes and ears it already has at its disposal – i.e. /us/ and readers in general?

   I know the scammers use bogus accounts to inflate readings etc, but surely some real readers are caught up in the scam as well? They must get pretty annoyed to discover they’ve been diddled.

   If I were in charge, I’d institute a tiered approach:

   step 1. add a ‘SCAM’ button to both the ebook itself /and/ its Amazon page.
   step 2. have each report of a ‘scam’ looked at by an automated algorithm.
   step 3. the algorithm would look first at the author, checking said author’s ‘trusted’ rating. If the algorithm confirmed that a particular book /might/ be a scam, the problem could then be brought to the attention of a human.
   Step 4 This human would sample the book and decide whether it’s a scam or not.
   step 5. Only if the human confirmed the book was a scam would the book/account be suspended.

   I admit that having a ‘SCAM’ button on each book page would also lead to abuse – trolls, rival authors, people with an axe to grind etc – but with the right algorithm, most of these abuses could be ignored.

   I’m no programmer but surely Amazon already has enough data on us to be able to quantify ‘trust’? Author X, years with Amazon, plus quantity of books, plus number of reviews flagged as genuine, plus other activity [purchase of books? other items] = score. A score between this and that = trusted, therefore scam unlikely.

   Such an algorithm would work on genuine data instead of trying to catch a moving target where the data changes all the time [i.e. the scammer].

   The tiered system would still require people to make the final decision, but you would need far less of them to improve the system for everyone.

   • you might well be underestimating
     the sophistication of these scams…

     while i have zero familiarity with them,
     they were subtle enough to fool amazon
     for a relatively long period of time, and
     extracted a rather large amount of cash.

     i think the books posted by the scammers
     are not all works that are obviously bogus.
     you can extract enough text from places
     like real books, wikipedia, and websites,
     that a scam-book could “make sense”,
     especially viewing only individual pages.

     and a “reader” from a scam account can
     obviously sample pages from real books
     — indeed, a large number of them —
     not just the scam-books, for disguise.
     the cost for that will remain the same.

     there is so much gray area, existing
     on both sides of the equation, that
     sorting it accurately is very difficult.

     -bowerbird

     • You make some good points, Bowerbird, but I still think that tackling the problem from the opposite angle would help. At the moment, authors have a sales ranking but that’s about it. Yet in reading the this article, the thing that jumped out at me was that the author felt that he was someone in good standing…and that Amazon should have known better.

       I understand that outrage, and I’m sure I’d feel the same way if it happened to me – you’d feel like a criminal – yet the truth is that Amazon’s algorithms have no way of distinguishing [at the moment] between one author and another, a genuine writer and a scammer. That is why this is so scary – because we could all be accused of misconduct.

   • You’ve heard the expression ‘devil’s advocate’?

     Any scheme has to be as ‘devil’ proof as you can make it. As in can it still catch the wrong people in its trap while catching the right ones?

     Any net that can catch ‘most’ of the bad will catch a few ‘good’, any net loose enough to not catch the good will let the bad through too.

     Think of the fun the scammers could have if some of them or their friends managed to get themselves pegged as some of those ‘eyes’ reporting scam ebooks — not only could they mark their own as ‘okay’ they can mark yours and mine as ‘scams’. If you think Amazon’s algorithms are bad, do you really want them to farm out the okay/scam buttons to random people or a third party company? (I can promise you it will take longer to clear any errors the more warm bodies you throw at it, and humans make mistakes too.)

     To your later post about ‘feeling like a criminal’, this is no different than the cops stopping you because a car of your make/model/color was just used in a bank heist a few miles away and they would like to have a few words with you.

     Myself, I’d prefer Amazon move in baby steps, little fixes here and there and then testing and letting them run for a while before tweaking it/trying the next step.

4. Most of my books are widely distributed and thus not in Select or KU. However, I had three lingering in the Select program. I took two of those three out today, and I am thinking long and hard about taking the last one out as well.

5. Stories like this and the whole Pages Read meltdown — Amazon seems to be totally overreacting to something or things it perceives as a threat to its Select model. I’m just glad I pulled all my books when things started hitting the fan in autumn of last year.

   The attitude of fraudulent until proven otherwise is driving vendors out of Select in droves. But who knows, maybe that’s what they want?

   • Amazon’s overreacting? Or are we?

     Sadly I don’t think Data Guy can help us with this one, but out of all the thousands of writers on KU I wonder how many false positives they’ve actually tripped?

     And we don’t have to go back a year to read of KU writers whining that Amazon needs to cut those spammers off at the knees. And that was kill the account for ‘any’ scamming since it seems at the time Amazon seemed to be only killing them one ebook at a time.

     And it took less than two days to correct things this time — I wish my local bank was that fast at fixing their errors.

     I’m not in KU, but are the scammers getting kicked out? Iknow we’ve now had two writers report getting locked out, but I don’t remember if the other was fixed or still fighting it.

     Though you might be right, they might by turning KU into a dog’s breakfast so everyone leaves and they can close it down (and refund those that are paying to read KU.)

   • Are suppliers leaving in droves?

     To qualify as a drove, I would say the number would need to be above 10% of the total. So, if Amazon has thousands of individual book suppliers, that would be hundreds. If there are tens of thousands of individual book suppliers, that would be thousands. Are vendors leaving in those numbers?

     Also, Amazon doesn’t care about number of titles but volume of sales. Amazon is not going to nuke the account of an Amazon Imprint if a title is targeted by scam reader accounts. Nor will it nuke Hugh Howey’s account if one of his books is targeted. They know who is behind those supplier accounts and they trust them. The suppliers at risk of becoming collateral damage are the John Does who are completely unknown to Amazon other than as a name on a TOS agreement. These John Does have maybe 1/100th the sales power of a Hugh Howey. Amazon can afford to lose a great many of them without noticing it on the sales sheet.

     At the moment it seems more cost effective for Amazon to fix mistakes after they happen than to prevent the mistakes. Fixing mistakes requires checking a few dozen accounts. Pre-vetting all accounts requires checking thousands or tens of thousands of accounts. Somewhere between is the workload of checking every book targeted by scam reader accounts. There is not enough publicly available data to estimate this within an order of magnitude. (Hundreds? Thousands?)

6. OP Poole said “They (Amazon) accused me of creating bogus accounts to boost page reads of Case of the One-Eyed Tiger (CCF#1).”

   Actually, Poole is accusing Amazon of something they didn’t do. Their initial “reaching out” email to him says that they have detected bogus borrows and due to that borrowing activity they are closing his account. It doesn’t say anything about him creating or using the bogus accounts.

   A very stressful email to receive certainly, but a good approach is almost always to read it closely in order to determine how to proceed, and Poole didn’t.

   It was good to see that he got a phone call when his account was reinstated, and that the caller said he hadn’t needed to email Jeff. This shows that departments feel the heat from above, and maybe this will lead them to eventually figure out they need to invest in better winnowing of fraudulent activity.

   • Hello, Robert –

     You’re right. The email didn’t accuse me of creating bogus accounts, but implying I am solely responsible for them because, as the author, I need to be certain I monitor third party sites. If I hire someone – or some PR firm – then I am the one in the crosshairs if they screw up.

     Follow up emails, and the one phone call I received, said the same. That’s why I was so very glad to be able to say I didn’t use any of that. A few FB ads when the book first came out, but that was months ago. No, the only promotional services I used was Amazon’s.

     Did I do the right thing in the proper order? Probably not. Since I didn’t have an emotional breakdown, I’d say I did all right. I have no regrets for how I handled any of it. The end result was my ability to prove to Amazon I was innocent and they were wrong to cancel my account.

     J.

7. Surely there are patterns of behavior that distinguish fraudsters from real book purchasers.

   There are. Unfortunately, fraudsters think they can disguise their activities on the books they want to boost by also targeting a few innocent third party books. This doesn’t mask the pattern on any one title, just spread it around, and the innocent third party gets suspended for fraud.

   Publisher accounts are harder to set up than reader accounts. By suspending a targeted publisher account in addition to the fake reader accounts, Amazon supposedly removes the incentive for fake reader accounts by removing the ability of the fraudster to profit via their publisher account. However, not all targeted publisher accounts are linked to the fake reader accounts. A few are simply chosen randomly as camouflage. Since fake reader accounts are much more easily replaced, the innocent stooge is punished much more harshly than the fraudster.

   The fraudsters might have been thinking Amazon would stop suspending publisher accounts targeted by fake readers if Amazon could not be certain they were not suspending an innocent third party. Amazon has shown no such reluctance.

   Amazon could identify legitimate publisher accounts by reviewing the material published and the account publishing history. That requires humans and subjective judgement calls. Who’s to say 1000 pages of the letter Q is not high concept art?

   Until Amazon decides collateral damage is not a good thing and assigns some humans to the problem, the only way to protect yourself is to not be in KU. That’s where the fraudsters are operating. That’s where the war is being fought. Amazon’s current approach to the problem is like DRM. It hurts legitimate suppliers much more than fraudsters.

   • 1000 pages of the letter Q is not high concept art.

     There, I’ve said it.

8. I was seriously considering putting my latest novel in KU. It would have been the first time, and I hoped it might give my very niche book a boost up. But I’ve read too many horror stories lately, and no way in hell would I take the risk of losing my account and having all my work shuttled off to what most people consider oblivion. I reactivated my Smashwords account because I do get sales every now and then from the sites they distribute to. For all the statistics about Amazon being the largest source of sales for indie authors, not going wide is just insane.

9. Another reason I’ve decided not to touch Kindle Select with a ten foot pole for a long, long time.

   Since Amazon switched to paying for pages read, it seems there’s been nothing but problems. Page reads not being counted, the “reading” scam farms, and accounts being terminated over them when the actual authors aren’t using such tactics, but get caught up in the attempts to slide under Amazon’s radar.

10. “PG says this is becoming a serious customer service problem for Amazon.”

    Supplier problem, PG, we aren’t Amazon’s customers from this side of the fence.

    The OP doesn’t mention/admit to having used any third party for promoting their books, but I’m wondering if one type/way of doing it has become an automatic red flag when Amazon sees it in action.

    It’s sad/funny how you don’t have to go too far back in these pages to find writers demanding Amazon ‘do something and do it quickly’ to ‘stamp out’ the scammers without considering what might happen if those same tools/rules were used on them.

    One reason for the delay might be because when a scammer is detected/blocked they just change their name and go at it again. So Amazon now has to watch and wait to see if those they block try using other tricks to get back to making money.

    “Is there any reason that Amazon could not temporarily suspend payments for page-based reading bonuses for specific books while still permitting authors to sell their other books as a more detailed investigation moves forward?”

    That strangely enough was covered here too, someone was upset that Amazon took down one bad spammer ebook, but left other bad ebooks from the same spammer up and the complaint was: “Amazon ‘knows’ that account is doing bad things — why don’t they just close it down?”

    Almost makes you wonder if Jeff reads TPV for ideas every now and then.

    • It’s just one of those Dammed if you do Dammed if you don’t situations.
      No matter what action Amazon takes, there will always be someone from either side of the argument ready to criticise And eventually, Amazon will probably just stop listening altogether.

      • “Today (Thursday), I get the email from Amazon stating my account is reinstated. My books reappear by 5pm.”

        And it actually only took a couple days it seems.

      • With KU, Amazon gave scammers a license to print money.

        Now they’re upset that scammers are using it to print money.

        They could just stop letting scammers do that.

    • Read the entire post. The OP clearly states the only promo he did was Amazon’s own AMS.

      • And we know the scammers are now targeting non-scammer ebooks to try to throw Amazon off their scent.

        And we’ve had the ‘Amazon needs to depend on their AI less and on people more’ chat as well. They could do it by paying less per page read.

        Or of course you can always decide that the best move is not to play at all. As old Lazarus Long would say: “Of course the game is rigged! But you can’t win if you don’t bet!”

        With any luck, Amazon will start vetting any ebook offered on Amazon. Since this will require a real live person to actually read the ebook before it’s allowed to be sold, it may be 4-8 weeks before your new book in up and it will be worth less per page in KU, and the 35-70% will be reduced to 25-55% due to all the extra man-hours spent weeding out the scammers.

        I’m sure everyone here can’t wait for this to begin — right? 😉

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