Ripping Readers Off: Kindle Unlimited Scam eBooks

Copyright 2016 by Lisa Maliga

Last April, I wrote this article: Don’t Buy or Borrow Kindle Unlimited Rip-off eBooks. 

What’s changed since then?

In July 2015, Amazon launched KU2, which pays authors by pages read. KU1 was a fluctuating amount of at least $1 per eBook borrow. The Amazonians have altered the system for their benefit and the amount per page is less than a penny –.0049 per page or less. If an author wants to make any money, they need to write longer books. And those books need to get read.

Or do they?

Nope, the author offers a free book or gift card or something for nothing and has that clickable link take the reader to the back of the book. Like magic, all the pages are read!

With the KU program, Amazon is like long defunct author’s sites Themestream and the Vines – pay per click companies that went belly up. While some legitimate authors are doing quite well, others are faring far worse than they were in KU1.

One of the main problems I’ve seen in the KU program, and this is in the nonfiction area, are foreign plagiarists stuffing books full of repetitive “information.” Or they upload their entire catalogue into one title. I’ve also seen books where the contents are available in a dozen different languages. Can you guess that the translation is run through an online translator resulting in hilarious errors?

What inspired this article was a review request from an author: someone who had been “University” educated, and an expert in various fields dating back to the early 90’s. A quick search revealed nothing except the author’s books in various Amazon stores. Here’s the email:

As an avid buyer and author on Amazon, I want readers to feel they are getting value for money and would recommend to their friends and family. I feel this book meets that requirement.

 I was hoping you could review a books and leave an honest review.

If you are interested I can send you the book as a gift free of charge.

 I saw that the title wasn’t unique and when looking at the author page I noticed:

“She has a passion for sharing his experience…”

Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner? Nope, someone who just didn’t care about proofreading their bio or who wasn’t too fluent in English.

There are many excellent titles in the KU program. But I’m going to point out potential rip-off titles that are often plagiarized from websites, blogs and Pinterest. By reading this article, you’ll learn how to avoid downloading or wasting your time and money on rip-offs and supporting scammers.

If you’re a reader who wants to learn how to bake cupcakes, wouldn’t you want to read a book by someone who has baked the recipes and can provide photos along with helpful tips? I want that! A few weeks ago, I mistakenly downloaded a scam book. At first I thought, oh goodie, 600 pages of cupcake recipes and information—all for 0.00. Wrong! 600 pages of drivel, NO pictures, and recipe after recipe of things I didn’t want to bake. The few cupcake recipes were so generic that one of them listed cake mix. I deleted that eBook.

Spot Those Scammy eBooks

Here are some things to look for when shopping at Amazon.

 * No author biography

If there’s no bio, there’s no way of knowing how much knowledge they have pertaining to the subject they’ve written about. There won’t be an email address, website, Etsy page or social media information such as Twitter, Pinterest or Face Book. They have no blog or newsletter.

 * Fake Author Biography

Some of the scammers have gotten smarter and include biographies and even pictures or illustrations of themselves. Read it carefully and you’ll see it’s false if no professional training is indicated. Or they might mention a school or university. How is the bio worded—in proper English or does it read as if it was translated from another language?

 * Common American Names

This is another way to lure borrowers and buyers—by using familiar surnames like Thomas, Brown, Mitchell, White, etc. It’s also how those from other countries make names seem more acceptable than their own. Authors who use several pseudonyms may do so to avoid detection. It’s also a way of using a name like a keyword – to attract more borrows and sales.

 

 * Poor Translating

Foreign authors may have run the manuscript through an online translator resulting in unintentionally hilarious reading. My favorite was the one about heating your soap over a “weak fire.” Some of the faux fiction scam books have incredibly bad titles.

 * Offer FREE Bonus/Gift at the BACK of the eBook

This encourages you to click the link and get the page reads. You won’t be able to miss this offer as it’ll be shown in very large and colorful fonts. It may appear more than once.

 * Very LONG eBooks

KU1 featured scamlets of 50 pages or less. Now the less is more motto has been replaced with the more [pages] the merrier! One trick I discovered is seeing lengthy books enhanced by offering the book in a dozen different languages. You can also bet that a professional human translator doesn’t translate, as that would be very expensive and time consuming. Ultimately, no one benefits.

Another method is for the scamming “author” to take several books and rearrange the order so the book becomes bloated with excess pages. You get a bundle of books you [probably] don’t care to read.

 * LONG Titles Stuffed with Keywords

Example: Homemade Body Butter: 25 Natural Body Butter And Lotion Recipes To Keep Your Skin Smooth And Feeling Moisturized! (How To Body Butter, DIY Body Butter, Natural Body Butter And Lotion Recipes).

 * Enticing Cover Photo of the Product[s]

A rip-off will be revealed if the featured product[s] recipe and photo aren’t included inside the eBook. For example, a stack of oatmeal soap on the cover, yet there is no oatmeal soap recipe in the rip-off title. Also, most rip-off eBooks won’t contain any photos.

 * If recipes are included, they may be in a mixture of ounces, grams, tablespoons and teaspoons, which is very confusing for the reader.

 * No medical or legal disclaimer. No safety precautions.

 * The name on the cover may be spelled differently than the name on the book’s Amazon page.

In order to avoid being ripped off, please use this article as a checklist.

Also, read what author Ann Christy has written about this topic. She includes in-depth analysis along with screenshots of some flagrant examples. http://www.annchristy.com/anatomy-of-ku-scams

 

Writing for Pennies: The Dawn of Internet Writing

By Lisa Maliga 

© 2001-2015

I’ve been an Internet Writer since 2000. I began writing articles for a company named Write for Cash, which bought nonfiction on just about any topic imaginable and paid a one-time fee ranging from ten to twenty bucks. The articles were input into the major search engines and were there for all to see. A byline was optional. Three months later, I was able to view some of the articles I’d written and at the very bottom was my name, along with the keywords I’d supplied in order for it to show up efficiently in the engines. By year’s end, the company posted a ‘closed’ sign on their site: “We have temporarily stopped accepting new proposals and articles so that we can focus on publishing our backlog of articles.” I scrambled to find a new writing opportunity.

Themestream’s web site was brought to my attention. With 1,700 categories, many of my rewritten articles and several unpublished works could be placed on that site. The paltry two cents per click was bargain basement, but maybe if I posted a few, I’d earn something. I didn’t expect to be moving into a mansion or buying a Ferrari, but maybe there was a possibility of getting my work noticed.

Aromatherapy was a popular topic and as the hits grew, I added articles and recipes about bath and body products. Unlike Write for Cash, I was could post short stories and essays. I never lost track of one important factor: it was vanity publishing. This was even more obvious when I finally sold a story to a paying [online] magazine and the editor suggested some revisions. Was I grateful? Yes! On Themestream I rarely received constructive criticism. I’d find 😉 and thank you notes on my comments box beneath the article. My ego was routinely massaged with kind words and trite phrases.

In addition to writing, I was also a promoter. The Lisa Maliga Advertising & Publicity Agency was unofficially launched as I surfed message boards, posted free classifieds, contacted friends and relatives, submitted each article to the major search engines, and used my new web site as a veritable linking system to my articles. One of my recipes was continually racking up the numbers and I promoted that one further by using link exchanges with fellow crafters.

The expert Themestream Writers/Promoters wrote about writing more articles, which would increase clicks and revenue. I did, sometimes posting as many as three or four articles per day. Two months later, I had almost 80. Not all were bath and body recipes, although those continued to receive the most reads. There was a problem with my missing paycheck, which I was to have received in early February. I contacted the accounting department, only to be sent a form email. My doubts about the legitimacy of the company in Silicon Valley intensified as I noticed that after midnight the clicks were minimal or nonexistent. As I’d been contacted by people in such diverse locations as Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and South Africa, all places where at midnight Pacific Standard Time it was daytime for them, my nocturnal observations turned to suspicion.

On February 28, 2001, the death knell resounded throughout the Themestream community as a memo from the editors arrived in our mailboxes. It began by complimenting us, but around paragraph five the purpose became clear: “…we are implementing a significant change in how we compensate our contributors. Beginning March 1, 2001, 12:01 a.m. PT, Themestream will only pay for articles that are read by registered users.”

The memo assured the contributors of one thing: look elsewhere to earn money as writers. This affected every contributor. Especially those of us who had tried diligently to promote them utilizing every honest means cyberspace offered. While I didn’t mind surfing message boards in search of a person who needed a new craft idea, there were other things I could be doing with my time. Writing my new novel was one of them, yet it was put aside in order for me to act as an online cheerleader of my works in order to earn money.

I launched into the third part of my writing online adventure. I heard from disgruntled Themestream writers about The Vines Network, which paid up to three cents a click. As the labyrinthine site required lots of mouse movement to read an article, let alone publish one, the various ad banners that popped up informed the viewer/writer that someone was making money.  I posted about 20 of my articles, as I owned full rights. I was “posting” not “publishing.”  Payment for reading and rating articles, discussions, and creating new vines all guaranteed more income. After a few days, I ventured into my ‘info’ section to check my revenue. The number of page views was impressive – 997!  Wow, that was more than most of my articles over on Themestream. The earnings were less than stellar – fifty cents! I decided that no more articles would be posted on vanity sites. Like the article I had sold to a real e-magazine that paid me before it was published, I knew that writing for pennies didn’t mean navigating streams of themes or big bucks advertising vines of confusion – it meant writing for legitimate online and print publications.

I could relate to the late Jim Thompson, author of “The Getaway” and “After Dark, My Sweet” who wrote in his autobiography [“Rough Neck”] “I have many sharp memories of that winter in Oklahoma City. Of writing two novels and selling neither. Of selling 300,000 words of trade-journal material and collecting on less than a tenth of it. Of distributing circulars at ten cents an hour, and digging ditches at nothing per.” That was written during the Depression.

Have things really changed?

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