Over the next couple of months, all of my eBooks will be coming out of
Kindle Unlimited.
Other authors will be fully aware of the sh*tstorm
that is happening with KU right now (which has been going on for some
time) readers who don't write & publish may not be aware though.
There is a lot of scamming going on in various ways, some authors are
stuffing their books with other books, unrelated content & have even
more nefarious ways of adding pages to get more 'reads' per book, bots
are adding books with thousands of pages (possibly with one word per
page or a bunch of nonsense etc) & then scamming the system by
looking as though these books are being read, with bot-driven false page
turning.
These bots are then targeting genuine authors that don't
game the system, to hide their wrongdoing by 'bot reading' their books.
The result is that lots of authors (& I mean lots, not just a few)
are having a sudden surge of page reads & Amazon are stripping the
reads (which is ok if they're not genuine reads) & are punishing the
targeted authors in several ways (not ok).
If an author is
targeted, they see a sudden spurt of activity on their page reads but as
most (possibly all) of these people are doing promotions, Amazon ads
etc, they believe their advertising is working. It's only when Amazon
strip their reads & the payment for them, that they complain or read
up on this issue in writer's forums etc & learn a whole lot more
than they ever believed was possible. Rank is also stripped from the
affected authors but that's not even the worst bit... Authors are having
their books removed from sale & many are having their accounts
closed, after doing nothing wrong.
It's all got very ugly & people are leaving KU in droves.
Some of my books are enrolled in KU until the end of July but some will be coming out soon.
If you're an author & want to know more, a good forum to
visit is Author Support Network (on Facebook).
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