June Blog Post
Hey there, Dixie Darlings!
On June 25th, I’m releasing Black as Night, Nox’s book. Hold onto your drawers, because it’s a sexy one. I had a lot of fun spending the month of May with Nox.
Controversy
These past few weeks have been interesting in Romancelandia. So, let’s talk about the latest indie publishing scandal. You’ve probably heard of #cockygate, but have you heard about #tiffanygate ? Wanna read up on these? Check out this post.
Apparently, this is a wild time in publishing. Those other controversies are on the road to being handled, but let’s talk about book stuffing, the latest issue. This sucker is a huge problem and everybody’s talking about it.
What is page stuffing or book stuffing?
This happens when a Kindle Unlimited author slaps other books as “bonuses” into a new release to increase the page count. KU authors are paid per page. There is a communal pot of money and it’s divided up evenly, among the authors
These KU scammers will put “sneak peeks” of upcoming books in the back, so readers will flip the pages to read it. And bam! They’ve had 1,000 extra page reads, nobody actually read. By the way, this is against Amazon’s Terms of Service. but Amazon doesn’t enforce the policy.
Heather explains it better than I ever could. Go to 11:09, to get straight to the point.
What can we do?
If you don’t like this practice, consider reporting it to Amazon. Scroll to the bottom of the book’s page and let Amazon know, it’s been stuffed. [image error]
And then mark the issue as violating Amazon Terms of Service.
[image error]
My Thoughts
Indie publishing has only been around a few years, so it’s experiencing growing pains. Issues like this are bound to crop up. I’m happy to see indie authors succeeding, but I don’t think you have to engage in scuzzy practices to do it. By the way, check out all those hashtags above on Twitter, there are a lot of authors sounding off about it. I’m hanging out in the #cockygate #pagestuffing #tiffanygate hashtags.
What do y’all think? I’ve gotta say, it pisses me off…
The post June Blog Post appeared first on Cynthia Rayne.
