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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.
(Score: 2) by kaganar on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:21PM
Readers get unlimited books, authors get paid per pages read -- sounds good, right?
Like many other "optimizations" to mundane problems that involve large cash flow, the devil is in the details, and more and more the details are a hard-to-quantify algorithm. Counting what pages are "read" is not trivial as there are many non-trivial edge cases and opportunity for scamming. As a result of this complexity, a niche business has been created based around exploiting the mechanics, much like SEO. Furthermore, Amazon has repeatedly been slow to fix glaring problems with KU only widening the disbenefit to genuine authors.
Self-publishing and eBooks are great -- self-publishing has a similar author's expected return as going through a conventional publisher -- but at the end of the day KU benefits scammers more than authors.