This is a little scary. Has this happened to anyone else?
There’s this indie author I know a little bit from the Kboards.com forum. Her name is Pauline Creeden, and she’s an ordinary midlister, like so many of us. I remember PMing her some time ago and gushing about how particularly beautiful one of her book covers is — the one for Chronicles of Steele: Raven.
Here, I’ll include an image. Gorgeous, eh?
Anyway, today I tuned in to Kboards and noticed that Pauline had started a thread. It contained what’s surely the worst news possible for an indie author: Amazon had closed her publishing account. All her ebooks had been taken off sale. Permanently. Here’s the email she got from Amazon:
We are reaching out to you because we have detected that borrows for your books are originating from systematically generated accounts. While we support the legitimate efforts of our publishers to promote their books, attempting to manipulate…
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Thanks for sharing this, Lynette. Recently I’ve seen my list of books on Kindle cluttered with “% read” numbers that, quite frankly, haven’t even remotely fit. I’ve complained about this to Amazon Japan (I live in Japan), and am going to be working with them to make some corrections. I’ve had history books I have read cover-to-cover noted (“evaluated”) as having been read 1%, 5% and other low numbers, when I can prove that I have read every page (I do a lot of underlining). Methinks I’m going to be very careful with my own book. I’m glad that I’ve never hired one of the dozens of promoters who contact me (and every other writer) on Facebook.
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I’m thinking the same thing–that I’m going to be very careful with my own book. I didn’t realize book promoters could be culprits, until now. As a self-publisher, it’s absolutely insane how many mine holes/booby traps an author has to watch out for.
It goes beyond promoter scams. There are click farms reproducing our pages and making money off our books, then Amazon persecutes the author. It’s getting really bad.