Fraud on Amazon Kindle has become a serious problem, and it is getting worse. Two troubling tactics are being used to skim money from Amazon’s customers and the authors who legitimately publish there.
- Fraud artists are placing links saying “Free Ipad” or some such thing in the front of their books which, when tapped, take the reader to the backs of the books, while the thousands of pages inside are filled with Lorem Ipsum or other nonsensical text.
- Scam artists, and even real authors who are drawn into advertisements promising instant success and thousands of readers, are using “click farms” to receive income from millions of pages read in the Kindle Unlimited Program. The problem is that no actual readers are reading the pages. Computer robots, using illegitimate accounts, are clicking through the pages of the books over and over again. Because Amazon pays authors by the “page read,” and the amount of money available to be paid to authors each month is fixed by Amazon based upon the amount of income Amazon receives from Kindle Unlimited subscriptions, the amount of money paid to legitimate authors is being severely diluted. This problem has become so severe that author earnings have dropped to $0.004223 per page. This is a 30% drop since the program began. It means that if a reader reads every page of a 200-page novel, an author receives a token 84 cents (and the way Amazon counts pages is not the way pages would be counted for a hardback novel these days).
See this concise article by David Gaughran for additional information: https://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/scammers-break-the-kindle-store/#more-4447
And please share this with your reading friends! The only way this can be stopped is if Amazon is aware of the problem.
-B.C.