Scammers benefit from Amazon Loophole

A new pay per page model that is letting scammers benefit from Amazon loophole has been discovered; the world leading eBook seller changed how it paid authors in June of last year and it has seen genuine authors’ earnings drop significantly whilst scammers abuse the system and earn far more than they deserve.

Prior to the change, authors were paid a flat rate per download which equated to an average of 89p ($1.30) per book ‘sold’ but this is no longer the case and authors are now paid per page read. This has been implemented in order to ensure those authors whose books are downloaded by customers using Kindle Unlimited are paid according to what is actually read rather than what is downloaded for free and then left unread on the customer’s Kindle. The new payment scheme equates to 2/5 of a penny or 2/3 of a cent per page read meaning that an author would have to provide a 220 page novel and have every single page read to earn the equivalent of their previous flat rate payments.

Sounds fair enough doesn’t it? The problem lies with the fact that Amazon has no idea what you actually read and can only judge how much of a book has been read by the latest syncing point their servers have logged. This means that you could if you wanted to, open a Kindle book, skip ahead to page 400 and Amazon would pay the book’s author for the entire novel. Of course, the average reader would have no reason to do this, but there are those who have found a way to abuse this system and defraud Amazon.

A favoured method of these scammers is to offer their book in a multi language format, ensuring the English version is at the back of the book, which of  course means that readers skip ahead to the 100 pages they want to read without realising that Amazon has registered the 300 pages of foreign language as being read and then paid the author accordingly.

Amazon is not unaware of this practice and has in fact banned any author they have found to be using this method of inflating their earnings. One noted example is Walter Jon Williams whose book Metropolitan has the table of contents at the back of the book. The New York Observer points out that when Williams ran a paid ad campaign, Amazon noticed and forced him to change the layout before it could be purchased again.

However many of these scam books don’t appear on Amazon’s radar and as the scam does not affect their earnings they have little reason to spend time searching for offenders.

Sadly this does not hold true for the honest authors whose books are also available on Kindle Unlimited as the price per page paid to all members is dictated by the size of the pool made available by Amazon to those using Kindle Unlimited and the more pages read from within that pool means that the price per page is smaller.  This then affects the earnings of those who are not scamming the system as the percentage of the pot they receive is significantly reduced by those who are cheating the system.

When Amazon moved to the per page read payments, it was believed that it was an effort to improve its bookstore and the change was designed to cut out erotica authors, whose short serialised works were considered poor quality. Unfortunately it seems to have had a knock on effect for the better quality, better content and more honest writers.

Amazon released this statement to The New York Observer in regards to these revelations. “It’s important to us to ensure that customers can trust our sales’ rankings and that those rankings accurately reflect legitimate customer activity. So as not to reveal anything to potential abusers, we don’t discuss the specifics of the tools we use to check for abuse, and we are constantly working to improve them.”

Personally, I do not use Kindle Unlimited and I am unaware if there is a facility to report authors who are abusing the ‘synced to’ aspect of measuring what has been read but if there is, please do report the scammers and in doing so support genuine and honest authors just trying to earn a decent living by providing us with so much wonderful literature.