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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the scamming-the-big-guys dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

A few levels past the bestsellers and sci-fi/romance/adventure titles on Kindle Unlimited, in the darkest corners of the Kindle Direct Publishing market, there are books that are made entirely out of garbage designed to make scammers hundreds of dollars a day. One user, who called his or herself Chance Carter, was one of the biggest abusers of the KDP system and, more important, made over $15 per book they uploaded to the system, over and over, for books that contained no real content.

Carter, according to the Digital Reader, would create large novels out of other books. The books, which were simple hack jobs written by Fiverr writers, were hundreds of pages long and, on the first page, featured a recommendation to flip to the last page to get a free giveaway. KDP pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn't sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached. Therefore Chance's "readers" were instantly sending him or her about twenty dollars a read.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited-abuser-has-been-booted-from-the-bookstore/


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday June 12 2018, @07:44AM (1 child)

    by FakeBeldin (3360) on Tuesday June 12 2018, @07:44AM (#691819) Journal

    Another type of ebook spam I came across years ago basically relied on actually selling books - cheaply even.
    It was clearly less effective than this scheme per book ($1-$2).
    The trick was that the books had somewhat alluring titles ("getting the most from your tax return"-alike titles during tax season, etc.). The contents was basically copy-pasted together from all sorts of sources that you'd find if you were to search for keywords from (or related to) the title. So basically: 50-100 pages of content from the first obvious Google hits. Next to no formatting, butt-ugly layout, but: there is (copy-pasted) content in there.
    Moreover, spam authors had set up sock puppets to add reviews and promote the book, to make it (very) visible in search results.

    These type of spam books are priced so cheaply ($1-$2), that with all this random copy-pasting going on, it's hard to argue that a reader did NOT get that value. There's bound to be one or two pieces of advice / tips / tricks in there that warrant $1-$2.

    Apparently, the combination of aggressively polluting the regular review process combined with the extremely low price worked well enough to earn some money per book. I remember seeing authors that published multiple books per week... always a red flag.

    Haven't looked at this type of spam since 2010, so curious if it still exists and is still profitable. Does anyone around here know?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @09:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @09:04PM (#692528)

    Yeah, I got a "programming" book like that about 3 years ago. Not sure if it was for PHP or that Twitter CSS thing.