Stuffed with Words

This is a long tale.  Very long.  There's a great deal of time to cover, details to catch up on. Grab a cup of coffee, and have the pot handy for a refill.  Or a glass of wine and the bottle.  Or whatever beverage of choice you prefer.  And settle in.

Let's swing back to 2013, to the infamous Goodreads Purge.  The whole thing started in August over a 2-star review posted to a book that hadn't yet been released.  The author threw a hissy fit, wanted the review removed, wouldn't accept that GR had a policy of allowing reviews for unreleased books.  Her temper tantrum ended up garnering hundreds and hundreds of 5-star reviews for the book . . . which she then never released.  The book and its reviews remain on Goodreads to this day as far as I know.

Over the next several months, Goodreads, which had been purchased by Amazon in June of that year, began to tighten the rules on reviewing, specifically in the area of not allowing negative reviews based on the author's behavior if that behavior was unrelated to the writing in the book.  If, for instance, the author was spamming the various discussion groups on Goodreads and a reader wanted to note for her own reference that she didn't ever want to buy or read anything by that author because he was a spammer, she couldn't do it.  Shelf names indicating author misbehavior -- "Author spams," "Review troll," "Don't buy" --  were no longer allowed.  (Well, they weren't allowed for some reviewers though others got away with it.)  Slowly but surely, a lot of reviewers were either removed or silenced.

For the most part, those removed were reviewers who more often took a hard line when it came to poorly written books and/or poor author behavior.

I was one of those reviewers.

Between August 2013, when the whiny author fiasco started, and November 2014 when I was finally banned from Goodreads, I had become very active researching authors who purchased reviews from fiverr.com and the reviewers from whom they purchased those reviews.  Purchased reviews were absolutely forbidden on both Goodreads and Amazon, as being against both Terms of Service on the respective sites and against Federal Trade Commission guidelines on Amazon, where the books were actually sold.  With assistance from a small cadre of other reviewers, I got over 6,000 fraudulent reviews removed from Goodreads.  Several reviewers were banned from both Goodreads and Amazon, though most of them found ways to come back.  Some authors also had their GR accounts removed.  A couple of years later I was able to confirm that several of the reviewers were still in business under other names; I haven't bothered to research it further since then.

I don't mind admitting that there was a certain amount of self-righteousness involved in my crusade against the fake reviews.  For the most part, the books were published by their authors, often with little or no professional-level editing.  In other words, they were badly written. The authors couldn't generate positive reviews on the books' merits alone, so they bought reviews to gain visibility.  Some of them, I'm sure, believed that what they were doing was perfectly legitimate promotion.  Or they justified it somehow.

Most readers knew nothing about this, and there was nowhere to let them know.  They'd see a book with glowing reviews, buy it, and find out it was a dud.  But how were they to know?  And how many of them, not understanding that the five-star reviews were lies, thought it was their own fault for not liking the books?  Many of the paid reviewers had achieved high ranking in the Top 1000, Top 500, or even Top 100 Amazon reviewers.

What I realized through this experience was that too few people are willing to write a negative review.  They offer a lot of reasons, too, and I've discussed that often enough before that I won't go into great detail again here.  Suffice to say that there are issues with hurting the author's feelings or not knowing how to justify a negative review or even just wanting to make sure the free ARCs keep coming.

Taking into consideration that Amazon and Goodreads ultimately have the same bottom line, and that as a combined entity they are the single largest platform for book buying, book selling, book publishing, and book reviewing online, any author who steps in to review takes an enormous risk.

Under the same FTC guidelines mentioned above, authors are not allowed to review on the Amazon platform unless they are reviewing outside their own genre or they leave a positive review.  Most authors, for reasons of promotion and general public relations, tend not to write negative reviews anyway, even though in many cases they are the best qualified to do so.  Negative reviews from authors are more legal on Goodreads, but that's also the more social venue, so there are reasons why negative reviews from authors are less likely there.

Since that 2013 purge at Goodreads, the stand-alone review blogs have become more prolific, and by their very nature they are more likely to promote new books with positive reviews than they are to be analytical or critical of the not-so-good ones.  Well, that's the nature of the beast, and frankly, my disagreement with the philosophy that drives it doesn't really amount to a hill of beans.  I was booted off Goodreads in November 2014 (or thereabouts) and that was the end of it.

I had found a home of sorts at BookLikes.  I brought over some of my issues with bad books and skeevy reviewing, but there was less drama at BookLikes and that was fine.  A few odd little coincidences within the group I had joined there ended up leading me back to actual writing, and in July 2016, I published The Looking-Glass Portrait via Kindle Direct Publishing.  I had never had much luck with Smashwords, the only other platform I'd used for self-publishing, so I didn't even bother with it for LGP.  I had all my books on Amazon, and the five novels were all enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.  LGP did surprisingly well for me over the next eighteen months or so; I had no complaints at all.

What little reviewing I did on BookLikes was mostly related to books I read that I felt like sharing with others or to books I read for the games we played on BookLikes.  I didn't review everything I read, in part because I read a lot of stuff I knew no one else would be interested in.  I didn't have a huge following.

A good deal of my energy went into my crafting hobbies, and then my resurrected writing.

But I was also burned out on reviewing.  Not for the reasons you might think, however.  Or maybe so.

I had read a lot of crap.  I don't have a huge budget for book buying, so my digital purchases are pretty much restricted to the free stuff with the occasional bargain when something is on sale for $1.99 or less.  Rarely will I spend more than that on a digital book, unless it's a much-wanted non-fiction selection for research.

Reviewing a bad book is hard work, and given how few people would see it on BookLikes, I couldn't justify putting in the time and effort.  The negative reviews I had posted on Goodreads had brought a lot of negative feedback, some of it vicious to the point of death threats.  My own older books that I had republished on Amazon took the hit of dozens of one-star reviews, even though I knew none of the reviewers had read them.  I have a philosophy of never ever ever reading reviews of my work, which I maintain to this day, so I never read the nasty remarks, never reported them, never did anything.  Again, as far as I know most of those reviews are still there, on Goodreads and on Amazon, though some of the accounts were subsequently removed because other people reported them.  I never did.

And though I'm old and accustomed to that kind of stupid behavior, after November 2014 I had gradually lost contact with the writing and publishing aspect of the book world and I didn't make a special effort to renew that contact while writing LGP or even after publishing it.  The Amazon discussion boards, where I used to read a lot but never posted, became vicious when they weren't stupid; I walked away from even reading them long before Amazon shut them down.  I had never followed the Kboard platform very much, nor had I been more than peripherally involved with sites such as The Passive Voice or Absolute Write.  My time on social media became more and more devoted to arts and crafts via Etsy and Facebook.

Things took a slight turn in August 2016.  After I had published The Looking-Glass Portrait and was working on what I hoped would be my next book, I took a break one afternoon to browse through the freebies on Amazon.  I found this:

It's gone from Amazon now, but it was free that particular day and it looked harmless enough, so I downloaded it.  But I couldn't believe what I found.

It was garbage.

I won't bore you with the whole review -- which you can read on BookLikes here -- but it was pretty darn bad.  And I knew there were a whole bunch more like it, because I had downloaded them too.  I just didn't know what they were!

This was August of 2016.  Almost two years ago.  And if you read the comments posted to that review, even then there were questions about the Kindle Unlimited page views.  If I had stayed in the writing community, maybe I would have followed up on it.  I didn't.

This particular book was a collection of unrelated stories, a veritable hodgepodge of romances set in different eras and locations, with varying degrees of "heat."  Mafia romances, biker romances, shifter romances, Regency romances.  All of them poorly written, poorly formatted.  I had already downloaded several more of Sarah Thorn's other books, but I didn't even open them.  They weren't worth my time.

But I couldn't review on Amazon.  I was banned from Goodreads.  So I reviewed it on BookLikes where nothing much happened.  I didn't expect anything to happen.  BookLikes is too small a platform in terms of number of users.  There was no way for the word to spread about this type of
"book."

It wasn't until October 2017 that I encountered the next odd book on Kindle.  It, too, has disappeared from Amazon, but it was there last October. 

Again, the product was so . . . odd that I reviewed it on BookLikes in substantial detail.  And this time the comments were eye-popping.  One of them included a link to a David Gaughran blog post about book stuffers.  In that post, Gaughran stated that he had been in contact with Amazon about this problem for sixteen months.  Gaughran's post is dated July 2017.  So this issue of bookstuffing has been known and discussed with Amazon since at least March 2016.

I suspect Mr. Gaughran has gone way beyond frustrated by now.

I know a little bit about how he feels.  I went through the same thing when reporting on review buyers and sellers to Goodreads.  It became a bit of an obsession, and I wasn't even really writing at the time.  A few of my books had been republished on KDP, but I didn't really have a horse in the race.  It was all a matter of principle.

A principle that I should have risen to defend in October 2017, but I didn't.  And therefore I owe a huge apology to David Gaughran.

Because as I realized today, it's all related.  Or at least maybe it is.

So many critical voices were silenced as a result of the 2013 Goodreads Purge that maybe there were few to sound the alarms over the bookstuffing.

I had to stop and ask myself, as I pulled all this out of my personal wayback machine, how I had failed to pick up on it.  The answer was, sadly, pretty damn obvious.  In October 2017 I was just starting my annual season of arts and crafts shows.  When I wasn't preparing for one show, I was often recovering from another.  I went through several agonizing bouts of back spasms that often had me laid up for a week or more.  I was trying to write, too.  My brain was just going in too many directions.

Now here we are at June 2018.  My show season is over; outdoor temperatures are hitting triple digits so I'm comfortably settled for the summer.  Oh, I still have work to do to prepare for the 2018-2019 show season, but I shouldn't be bothered with back spasms or the tendonitis that flared up this winter in my left elbow.

As they say, getting old isn't for sissies.

I've been thinking for the past few months that it was time to resurrect this writing blog anyway.  So here I am, wondering what we do next about the book stuffing.  #GETLOUD at Twitter is, I guess one way.  But what are we up against?  And who cares?

Well, the authors sure ought to care.


Let's look at some numbers, just for fun.  The pot of Amazon money set aside for the Kindle Unlimited (and to a lesser extent the Kindle Owners Lending Library, or KOLL) is currently at $21.2 million for April 2018, to be paid in June.  At $10 per month for the KU subscription, that represents at least two million subscribers.  We can safely assume Amazon isn't turning over all the KU money to the fund, so if that $21.2 million is only $8 out of each subscription, that adds another half a million readers.  Plus all those who in any given month sign up for the free month and then cancel.

Is there anything scientific about this estimate?  No, not really.  What it does, however, is give an idea of how vast the pool of readers is out there who might care about book stuffing.

The KU subscriber who encounters a stuffed book might not care.  She's already paid her fee, so if she gets a dud book, it's no real loss.  She returns it and checks out another.  In that sense, she's not out anything and could be said to not have a dog in this race.

What about the non-KU reader?  She shells out $2.99 or $4.99 or even $0.99 for a stuffed book, discovers it's full of "stuff" she's already read, and she returns it.

Or will she?

Remember that Amazon recently instituted new policies about limiting returns.  What if the reader is now faced with the risk of returning a stuffed book . . . or losing her Amazon account altogether?

If she chooses not to return it, she's out the money, and the author is rewarded for his scam.  The reader may decide to be less eager to spend money on self-publishing authors and stick with the better-known, familiar names from the traditional publishers.  (This is why trad publishers are not likely to come to the assistance of readers or writers of author published material.  As long as the indie stuff remains bad, it sends more readers to the trad publishers.)

If the readers don't appear to be hurt by the book stuffing scam, what about the non-stuffing writers?  They're the ones who are really hurt.

At the current limit of 3000 KENPC per book, the stuffer is paid $15 for each "first" read.  It's very easy to slip in a link at the beginning of the book that takes the reader immediately to the end.  It may be a link to a newsletter sign-up or even a link to a Table of Contents that's at the end of the book instead of the beginning!  Regardless what it is, as soon as the reader reaches the end of the book, the author is credited with a full read, even if 99.9% of the book has been skipped over.  Instant $15 profit.

Next month, the author shuffles the order of the "stories" in the book, slaps on a new cover and new title, and publishes again.  Another $15 royalty, even though none of the content is new!

Some of the stuffer/scammers boast of six-figure monthly incomes from their books.  That money comes out of the general pool, meaning it's less for the non-stuffing authors -- like me!  It's not just the per-page payout that's affected.  Amazon also pays All-Star bonuses for the most pages read.  My book at 637 pages doesn't stand a chance against those 3,000 KENPC stuffed monsters, with links that take the reader to the end from page one.  So the pool shrinks further.

Not to mention, of course, that Amazon sales are driven by reviews and reads and algorithms.  A book that gets lots of page reads will generate its own visibility, and when the book stuffers are all grouped together, they corral all the visibility to themselves.

A check of Tia Siren's Love Next Door: A Romance Compilation shows that the first four "Customers who bought this book also bought" recommendations are also stuffed books:

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What happens as a result is that independent, self-publishing authors find themselves unable to earn enough to keep writing.  Some have (reluctantly?) turned to book stuffing themselves, gaming a system that's rigged in favor of the gamesters.  Others have turned to other publishing platforms where at least they don't have to compete with the stuffers. Others have given up entirely.

Readers lose out and writers lose out, and the scammers win big.  Now that some people are speaking out, is it too late?  The scammers are being reported to Amazon, but is it doing any good?

If you look at a selection of these books, they get few negative reviews, if any.  So how is anyone to know they're not well-written, not well-formatted for the digital reader, and not stuffed with old stories?

Looking at just one at random, I can immediately see from the "Look Inside" preview that the formatting is off.

I downloaded the free sample to my plain Kindle, and the double spacing between paragraphs made the reading experience uncomfortable, but not impossible.  I've seen worse.

But here's the thing -- the writing is bad.  It's bad from the beginning.  It's bad on the micro level that few readers pay attention to.  It's bad on the level that would keep the writer from ever being considered by a traditional, gatekeeping publisher.

Parades don't arrive from the town square.  If there were to be a parade for the home-coming hero, he would be in it and it would go to the town square.  Is this important?  Is it nit-picky?  Yes, to both.

Unless, of course, this is just crappy erotica to be read for the titillation and the profit.

But the second paragraph is worse, because weapons aren't automated.  They're automatic, or semi-automatic.  This error tells me the author doesn't give a shit about the quality of the writing.

The few negative reviews contain references to the level of sexual content in the book as being quite high.  One review refers to it as porn.  I'd be willing to bet that most of the stuffed books that are topping the Amazon sales charts are also high on the sex level.

Is that what it's come down to?  Is it all just porn?  Is it all just fuck books with no attempt to write well, craft a story, create an imaginary world for the reader to slip into for a while?

I'd like to think not.

But no one criticizes these books.  No one points out how badly written they are.  Is it because no one cares?  Or is it because no one knows how to tell bad writing from good?  Is it because those who do know the difference have been bludgeoned into silence by the hordes of "Think of the author's feelings!" and "If you can't say something nice. . . " and "I have to leave good reviews if I want to keep getting free ARCs from the authors!"

The silence at Goodreads and Amazon when it comes to badly written and/or badly published books is at least part of what allowed this to happen.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because they want to keep getting free books?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because they don't want to hurt the authors' feelings?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because even though the books are bad they don't know how to tell anyone they're bad?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because they're afraid of the backlash from fans or authors if they publish a negative review?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because they are also authors and don't want anyone to give their books negative reviews in revenge?  Yes, they do.

Do readers have the right to read honest reviews of both good and bad books so they can make informed decisions on how to spend their money and their time?

Yes, they do.

If books are badly written, if they are poorly researched, if they are stuffed with other material to boost KU page reads, they deserve to be reviewed as such.  Readers deserve to know this.

#GETLOUD

Part 1: The price of buying -- and selling -- words

This is going to be a very long work in progress.  Rather than wait until I have the whole thing written, I'm going to post each part as it's completed and then post updates and/or corrections as needed.

The quick background is this:  Effective 1 January 2015, the European Union ("EU") will require all sellers of digital media to include Value Added Tax ("VAT") in the listed prices of the item being sold, to collect the VAT from the buyer, and to remit the VAT collected to the appropriate authority.  This requirement has been public knowledge for at least six months as of this date (18 December 2014) and some sellers of digital media have taken steps to comply.  Others have not.  Others are trying to but cannot.  There appears to be a huge amount of misinformation, misunderstanding, ignorance, and, well, a lot of other stuff.

I don't have all the answers, and don't claim to.  I'm just trying to ask the questions and put whatever information I find into some coherent order.


The concept of VAT has been around for quite a while.  It functions as a national sales tax for some 28 European countries, and ranges from a low of 3% to a high of 27%.  Much like state, county, and local sales taxes in the U.S., VAT is imposed on the buyer of physical merchandise at the time of purchase.  The merchant collects the tax at the rate imposed on the location where the purchase is made and then remits the monies to the appropriate authorities.  The purchaser may be from another country (or state, county, or city) where the rate is different -- higher or lower -- but the rate is charged based on where the actual transaction (where the buyer actually takes possession) takes place.

Unlike U.S. sales taxes, however, the VAT is included ("VAT inclusive") in the advertised price.  Assuming a 20% VAT rate for the United Kingdom, an item with a price of £5.00 would be displayed/advertised/listed at £6.00.  The customer thus knows up front what the total price is.

With physical goods, this isn't difficult to understand.  VAT being a national tax, even such things as printed books could (but in actuality may not) carry the correct VAT-inclusive price printed right on them.  Merchants collect the taxes at the time of the sale and then later report and pay them.

The U.S. having so many different taxing authorities -- state, county, city -- as well as various exemptions within those authorities, sales taxes are calculated after all the retail prices are added up.  Again, the merchants collect the taxes and remit them to the appropriate authorities.  Large retail merchants who sell a variety of goods at various tax rates have much of the complicated calculations programmed into their scanners and cash registers.  Smaller merchants who only sell one category of merchandise are permitted to calculate manually; in some jurisdictions they may even be allowed to calculate tax as a percentage of the list price paid rather than adding it to the list price.

You may think I'm writing this on the wrong blog and that this applies more to selling my arts and crafts than to writing books.  In fact, this has everything to do with books, and almost nothing to do with selling jewelry or wooden bowls at an art show.  Well, almost nothing.  We'll get to that later.


What worked for physical commodities sold in physical stores/locations was one thing.  Online selling of physical merchandise posed a different scenario.  In the U.S. as well as the EU, application of taxes to physical goods that were ordered online and delivered from one taxing location to another required some new requirements and strategies as well as implementation procedures.  In some cases it works, and in some it doesn't.

Digital distribution of digital products across jurisdictional boundaries was a bit trickier, for a variety of reasons.  The most obvious issue was that since there was no physical object being transferred, there was no physical point at which the taxing authority could intercept a package and demand payment (or evidence of prior payment) of taxes before turning the merchandise over to the purchaser.

Digital downloading via the Internet also meant that buyers and sellers could be in different states, even different countries.  Which taxing authorities then applied?  What rates?  How could the funds be collected and remitted?  What currencies would be involved?

The rapidity with which digital selling of digital products has increased apparently caught the EU taxing authorities sort of flat footed.  Especially when digital behemoth -- and infamous tax avoider -- Amazon got involved.

For one thing, the EU were upset that Amazon was taking over retail markets of physical goods and not paying any VAT at all, nor was Amazon paying any corporate taxes.  While various negotiations were taking place to rectify those situations, the EU took steps to begin collecting VAT on one market where Amazon had a very visible market dominance: ebooks.

The EU, in order to capture revenue from huge digital sellers and Amazon in particular, declared that VAT on digital media would be assessed based on the location of the seller.  Amazon then chose to set their EU location as Luxembourg (so did Nook and Kobo) whose VAT rate on ebooks is 3%, even though such a low VAT rate apparently contravened EU directives.  (France's rate of 5.5% on ebooks has also been deemed in violation.)

Effective 1 January 2015, that will no longer be the case.  Because of the amount of VAT funds being lost, the European Commission has stated that sales of digital products -- electronic books, crochet and knitting patterns, music recordings, digital training materials, etc. -- will have to be taxed by the seller but the rate will be based on the purchaser's home location, or at least the IP registered location of the computer or ereader device to which the file is downloaded.   This is similar to how U.S. sales taxes have generally been assessed on physical goods:  It's not the point of sale that matters; it's the point of purchase.  As online purchases of physical goods have increased, many taxing authorities (usually the individual states) have implemented measures by which sales taxes can be collected based on the buyer's location, especially if the seller has any physical presence in that particular state.  But again, it all depends on the taxing authority.  They're the collectors; they set the rules.  (Enforcing them may be a different matter.  We'll save that for another post, I think,)

There are several stipulations involved in all this beyond just the assessing, collecting, and remitting of the tax itself.

1. The listed price posted by the digital seller must include the specific VAT amount for the prospective purchaser and that VAT-inclusive price must be posted prior to any sale.  The VAT amount can't be tacked on afterward the way sales taxes in the U.S. are.
2. The seller must be registered with the EU and each member state (there are 28) in order to collect and remit the funds.  (There are some procedures in place for "one stop shopping" programs to allow digital merchants to remit VAT monies to just one location, which will then distribute according to the merchant's tax return.)
3. Returns must be filed quarterly to those 28 member states.
4. Records identifying each and every purchaser's location via IP as well as corroborating indentification evidence must be kept a minimum of 10 years and it must be stored on a server in the EU for auditing purposes. 
5. Sellers' records must be auditable.
6. And so on.

Amazon is complying with the order, albeit imperfectly.  Some other distributors of digital publications are not.

Amazon's fix is not, as I said, perfect, and that lack of perfection will have a direct and potentially serious impact on the digital self-publishing author.

Digital publication has allowed author-publishers to put their digital products online via a single distributor and then sell virtually anywhere in the world.  Amazon's Kindle dominates the ebook market.  One report suggested that 9 out of every 10 ebooks purchased in the UK came from Amazon.  But Amazon isn't alone.  There are other ebook distributors such as Smashwords, Nook, and Kobo, but there are also craft-oriented sites such as Etsy.com that allow "shop" owners to upload and sell digital files such as knitting patterns and downloadable graphics files.  The files are held on the website's servers -- not the seller's -- and downloaded automatically upon payment, usually through PayPal or another automated payment platform.  The EU and the UK's taxing authority HMRC have stated that such platforms constitute "3rd party" sellers who are liable, as is Amazon, for the collection and remittance of the taxes as well as the recordkeeping.  I'll get to the details of that distinction in a subsequent post, but I wanted you readers to know that Amazon isn't alone.

But getting back to ebooks in the EU.  The VAT rates on ebooks in the European Union range from 3% (Luxembourg) to 27% (Hungary).  There are 28 taxing bodies.  (Because most of those member states have more than one rate, there are actually the possibilities for 75 or so different rates on various products, but this post is only concerned with ebooks.)

Let me reiterate part of this:  The law that is slated to go into effect on 1 January 2015 (two weeks from today) includes the stipulation that each digital product be priced to include the appropriate VAT amount.  Thus, to use one example, a digital book priced by the publisher/author at £5.00 in the U.K. would have to be listed at £6.00 to cover the 20% VAT rate.  Amazon has its amazon.co.uk website, so the Kindle edition of the book would appear there at £6.00.  Amazon would collect that amount, remit the £1.00 VAT to the taxing authority (HMRC), and pay the author's royalties based on the selling price of £5.00, which the publisher/author set.

In the event, however, that a copy of the book is purchased from the amazon.co.uk site by a customer in Ireland, the numbers change.  The Republic of Ireland has a VAT rate of 23%, which on that book would be £1.15.  Since there is no separate Kindle pricing available for Ireland, the Irish VAT would be assessed and paid out of the posted price of £6.00, but now the publisher/author's selling price is docked to cover the shortfall, and subsequently her royalty from Amazon is based on £4.85.  In effect, the author in the U.S. has subsidized the higher Irish VAT rate.  The author can set a higher price, of course, to cover the Irish VAT, but that means the UK buyers will also be paying the higher price, too, and higher than they really need to.  Amazon will essentially split the difference with the publisher/author.

Amazon does not provide sufficient information to the publisher/author distinguishing the number of sales to Ireland and the number of sales to the UK.  The publisher/author just has to make a guess.

The VAT was never intended to be paid by the producers of the goods but by the consumers.

Amazon does have a variety of websites for Kindle publishing and publisher/authors are able to set the prices for each of those venues to cover the VAT rates.  But those venues do not cover all the taxing situations.  Amazon.de would presumably cover the 19% rate for Germany as well as the 20% rate for Austria, since Amazon doesn't have a unique Austrian platform.   The publisher/author will have to cover the 1% shortfall.

No big deal, right?

But what about situations involving France?  Amazon.fr will presumably require ebooks to be priced to include the 5.5% French VAT on ebooks.  Can a Kindle buyer from Sweden buy Kindle books from Amazon.fr?  If so -- I've searched and haven't been able to find anything definite yet -- who pays the difference between the French 5.5% VAT on ebooks and the Swedish 25%?

So far, I have not been able to find out if buyers from Sweden even can purchase from Amazon.fr, or are they restricted to Amazon.co.uk, or can they buy Kindle books at all?

If there is a shortfall, even if it's 19.5% between the VAT-inclusive French price and the 25% Swedish VAT rate, how much you wanta bet it's gonna be charged to the publisher/author as a deduction from the selling price of the book, with a resultant diminution of the publisher/author's royalties?

So far, only France, Luxembourg, and Malta have applied a substantially reduced VAT rate on ebooks.  Austria, however, only applies a 10% VAT to physical books and periodicals.  Other EU member states also have lower rates on books, magazines, newspapers.  Ireland and the UK impose no VAT at all to physical books and periodicals.  That reduced rate does not apply to digital books and periodicals, per the EU declaration that it's not really clear that digital and print media are equal, the same, equivalent.  (They are discussing the issue, however.)  After all, digital books have linkable indexes and so on.  (Never mind that digital books require some kind of digital reading device; physical books don't.  Or that digital books cannot be legally resold because they aren't legally "owned."  Did you know that?  You really don't own any of those Kindle books.  All you have is a license to read them. . . .)

If the Kindle books are sold(sic) and taxed at the rate posted on the Amazon marketplace website but purchased by someone in another country with a different VAT rate, the tax is going to be applied unfairly.  Either the publisher/author will have to subsidize the buyer if the posted rate is too low, or other buyers will be paying more than they should.

There is another effect of this variability in taxation:  The publisher/author may take an even greater hit when it comes to royalties because of KDP's two-tiered royalty schedule.  That issue is just full of math (or maths) so let's save it for Part 2, shall we?

And another dangerous word

Honesty.

It does not pay to be honest.  It is not safe to be honest.  Honesty is a very dangerous commodity.

In the past, with my blogs and reviews and other writing, I have tried to be as honest as I can.  I believed very sincerely that that was what was needed.

Honesty may have been needed, but it was not wanted.  I learned that over a year ago when Goodreads instituted the infamous September 2013 Purge.  I learned it again last month when Goodreads permanently banned me. 

It doesn't make any difference.  I don't know how to be dishonest about these things.  I can lie about other things -- I assure you, I'm no saint -- but what point is there to lying in a book review?  Or in a discussion related to books and writing and reading?  What's the freaking point?

Authors need to get a clue.  I am amazed, yes truly amazed, that there is so much ignorance out there still, after all this time.  Maybe it's more willful ignorance than the innocent kind.  And yes, this is the kind of not-nice-but-honest comment that gets me into trouble.  No doubt I will get into trouble again before this post is finished.

Reviews are not commercials.  Reviewers are not there -- wherever there is -- to write ad copy for authors.  How difficult is this to understand?  Leaving out the semi-pro reviewers -- by which I mean those who have formal book blogs and regularly obtain advance copies for the explicit purpose of reviewing -- most reviewers are just readers.  They're consumers.  They bought the damn book, or obtained it free when the author was giving it away, or checked it out of the library, or whatever, and then they read it.  Where in that commercial transaction is it decreed that the reader owes the writer anything at all?  Where is the requirement that the reader help the author sell her book to other readers?  Or help the author become a better writer?  Or fix the mistakes in the present book?

That's right.  It's not there.  Readers do not have any obligation to review at all.  They don't have any obligation to rate a book on Goodreads, or shelve it on Leafmarks, or proofread it or anything else.  None. At. All.

And readers are most certainly not obligated to lie for you, the author of a terrible book.

You know who you are.  I don't have to put your name out here for everyone to see.  You know who you are.

I've read your books.  Or at least I've tried to.  And they're terrible.  And you just can't stand to have that truth held up in front of you.  You just can't stand it.

Truth is a very powerful thing.  It can be painful, very painful, but if it has the power to hurt, then it must indeed be very powerful.

You will hate me, if you don't already, but you cannot stop me from being honest.  You can, like someone else about whom I dared to tell the truth, take revenge against me.  I already know, however, because I am capable of at least a certain amount of honesty with myself, that I cannot be anything but honest with others, especially if they are being dishonest in a way that would hurt the innocent.  I know, because I do try to be as honest with myself as I am with others, that this makes me Not a Nice Person.  I know that people will dislike me because of it.  I know that I have almost no defense against them or that revenge, because my only defense is the same damn honesty that got me into the mess in the first place.

Your book is terrible.  Whether you're so ignorant that you can't see it for yourself, or you're in total emotional denial, or you know it but you've decided to just lie about it anyway, the fact remains:  Your book is terrible.  But you want me to lie about it so someone else will buy it?  Is that the name of your game?  You want me to try to get someone to believe that they will be sufficiently entertained by this piece of tripe you have written and published so that they will fork over $2.99 or $3.99 or whatever the asking price is?  The only way anyone will think this piece of garbage is readable is if people lie about it.  People like me.   Well, no, not exactly.   People like me won't do it.  We won't lie.

What will you do then?  You can, if you so choose, pay people to lie about it.  You will pay them to post online that they loved your book, that it's the greatest thing ever written, that it should be made into a movie starring George Clooney, Orlando Bloom, Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian.  Some people will believe those lies.  Most, however, won't.

Your writing stinks.  But you don't want anyone to point that out.  Rather than be honest and want honest "reviews" of your book, you want to silence the honest voices.  You throw up a litany of reasons why low ratings and negative reviews are by definition  invalid.  You think no one should read books they aren't enjoying, that they should not rate or review books they have not completely read, that they should think of the author's feelings and only review books they can give five stars to.  You declare only other authors are qualified to write negative reviews because they are the only ones who know how much blood, sweat, and agony goes into the writing of a book, any book.  And then you accuse any author who posts a negative review of being jealous and cruel and unsupportive of her "fellow authors."

By that standard, authors are only allowed to post positive reviews . . . or none at all.  And readers, who by that definition are disqualified from leaving negative reviews, can only post positive ones.

You want readers to lie by omission.  You want them to shut up and say nothing about your awful book, as though that will make your writing any better.  It won't.

Your book is indeed awful.  You can't write.  Your story is banal, your characters are wooden, your plot is implausible.  Your cover looks like something knocked together by a couple of 12-year-olds, and your formatting is an embarrassment to MSWord.  This product has no redeeming features whatsoever.

Yet if I say that, and if I provide evidence to substantiate my claims, you will call me a troll and a bully and a meanie.  You've done it in the past.  You will accuse me of jealousy, and I will laugh hysterically because there is no reason for someone who is reasonably competent with the English language to be jealous of you and this file of putrescent gibberish that you call a book.

You will tell me that I should think of your tender feelings, but I should not care at all about the potential readers to whom my silence is a lie of tacit approval.  Those readers are nothing to you, or at least nothing more than their credit card numbers on their one-click accounts.  To you they have no feelings worthy of respect, worthy of honesty.

You want me to be what I am not.  I am not a liar.  And I will not lie for you. 

A few people stood up with me when I took on Goodreads (which is well on its way to becoming nothing more than the advertising arm of Amazon if it isn't already) but most did not.  A few have spoken out since my banning, but most of gone back to their previous silence.  It is one thing to "take one for the team" by reading and then reviewing a terrible book, because of course that is done voluntarily and there are a lot of laughs to go around in the process.  And one really doesn't take any kind of risk when doing that.

I took one for the team over and over and over.  Under my real name.  The blog posts are still on Booklikes.  And here.  And there are screenshots of many of the now-erased posts on Goodreads.

I put my Goodreads account on the line in the name of honesty.  I am not one to blow my own horn when it comes to my books, but I will blow my horn 'til the cows come home over what I did on Goodreads:  I documented the dishonesty.  And that's what I was banned for.

The excuse that will probably be given, if there ever is one, is that I wasn't nice enough.  And that much is true.  I wasn't nice.  I was honest, but I wasn't nice.

When authors came onto Goodreads threads and asked whether or not they should buy reviews, I was honest:  I told them they shouldn't.  I told them those reviews might be removed.  I told them those reviews could be identified and then their books would be labeled as "This one is so bad the author has to pay people to pretend they read it."

Could I have been nicer?  Could I have written, "Oh, dear, I don't think that would be a very good idea.  What if people found out you bought those reviews?  What would they think of your book?  What would they think of you?"  Yes, I suppose I could have written it that way.  Would it have got the point across?  Maybe, or maybe not.  Would it have been me? 

No, it would not.

I understand the allure of reviews.  I recognize that they are repeatedly touted as the key to making sales.  One has only to read the posts of the frankly desperate authors who beg for reviews because reviews are, they believe, needed to generate sales.  They believe this as surely as they believe night follows day.  Except that night really does follow day; unfortunately, reviews do not generate sales.

Amazon, however, has a vested interest in fostering that belief. 

Amazon wants people to keep uploading books.  The cost to Amazon is negligible, since they do none of the actual work of publishing.  They do not edit, provide artwork, or market those author-published works.  They do, however, get a cut of each one that's purchased.

Though these are rough numbers and there are exceptions on all, these are the basic figures.  On a 99-cent Kindle book, the author's royalty rate is 35%.   Amazon keeps 65 cents off the top, the author gets 34 cents.  The same percentages hold up to $2.98.  At $2.99 and up, the author can elect a 70% royalty, which means Amazon's cut is 90 cents plus they charge a few cents to cover the cost of digital storage and delivery. 

Amazon is much better positioned to cover the minuscule costs of those thousands of free downloads than the authors are, even the perma-free titles.  Will that benefit someday disappear?  I expect it probably will, but that's another discussion.

So who benefits from the Kindle Direct Publishing platform the most?  Amazon.   And it doesn't matter how good or how bad the product is, Amazon still gets a cut.

Crappy books do not sell.  Not even hundreds of glowing 5-star reviews can push crappy books into best-seller status -- and profits for the authors.  Some of you who are reading this are very well aware of what you've done to rack up those reviews and ratings.

Have you given the books away free and then asked readers to leave a review?  Have you used social media to make friends with your readers, in Facebook groups or on Twitter, on Goodreads and Amazon and Booklikes, and then solicited just a short review from them, telling them how much it would help you?  Did you make them feel obligated to do so?  Of course you weren't really pressuring them.  You just sort of left the suggestion in their minds, and they of course being flattered were more than eager to do so.

Why is it then that the next book, the one you didn't give away free and didn't pressure readers to buy and read, didn't get hundreds of 5-star ratings on Amazon and Goodreads?  Why do you suppose that is?  Maybe because people didn't like it?  Maybe they lied in their reviews on the first book because they'd been flattered by your attention, but in reality they knew the book was garbage?

Amazon doesn't care why your second book didn't sell.  Or your third, fourth, or any of the subsequent titles.  Did it ever occur to you that maybe Amazon is using you as their loss leaders to put the competition out of business?  Probably not.  Probably not any more than it ever occurred to you to read the 1- and 2-star reviews that were left for your crappy books on Amazon and Goodreads, on Leafmarks and Booklikes.

Nor does Amazon care if you buy reviews.  Many of you do, of course.  Many of you have been caught red-handed on fiverr.com.  Many of those reviews have been removed from Goodreads and the reviewers' accounts have been terminated, but very few of you have lost your author status there, unless like Michael Beas and Cheryl Persons you were also selling reviews on Goodreads.  But do you remember how this paragraph started?  "Nor does Amazon care if you buy reviews."

Amazon doesn't care because they've got that wonderful "Verified Purchase" button.  It's supposed to imply that the accompanying review is a legitimate consumer opinion, the kind that's required under Federal Trade Commission guidelines.  There are probably a lot of genuine consumers who trust that label.  But you've figured out a way around that, which is exactly what Amazon wanted you to do.  So now when you buy your "reviews" from fiverr and the other shill outfits, you buy another "gig" so the reviewer can buy your book and get that "Verified Purchase" stamp.  And Amazon gets their cut and they're happy to turn a blind eye to the transaction. 

How's that working for you?  Two fiverr gigs are going to cost you $10.  On your $2.99 book you'll net roughly $2.00.  You'll get that back when the reviewer buys your book, and then you have to hope they don't return it and pocket the extra $2.99.  Even if they honor the agreement and don't ask for a refund, that review has to generate four more sales just for you to break even.

Amazon got 90-some cents for doing pretty much nothing.  That's why they don't care if you buy reviews that say your paranormal YA chicklit book is better than Tolkien and Herbert and Martin and Gabaldon and Rowling all wrapped up together even if anyone with more than twelve functioning brain cells can see it's absolute dreck.  Amazon has a vested interest in not caring about, well, about honesty or integrity or ethics or quality or any of that bullshit.  Honesty and integrity and ethics aren't profitable.  And Amazon, like all corporations, is all about profit.

None of the Amazon accounts identified as belonging to fiverr "reviewers" have been removed from Amazon by Amazon.  None of their reviews have been removed by Amazon.  Some of those individuals attempted to establish new Goodreads accounts but were quickly identified and quickly removed.  However, Amazon doesn't remove them.  Even though Amazon's review guidelines explicitly state that paid reviews are a violation, no amount of reporting "abuse" will get them removed.  I know this because I've reported them.  Repeatedly.  They're still there.

During the months that I routinely monitored Goodreads and Amazon reviews to connect them with fiverr "reviewers," I came to be very familiar with the names under which they posted their reviews.   They're still posting.  That means you're still buying. 

And yes, in case you're wondering, I'm still monitoring.  I'm still taking screen shots, though not as many as I did before.  And of course I'm not reporting to Goodreads.  Why should I?

I already took one for the team, a big one.  I did my part.  Now it's someone else's turn, if they care enough that it.  My guess is that they don't.

Does that mean you're in the clear?  Well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't.  Maybe I'll get angry enough with you again and start posting more screenshots to Booklikes.   Because remember,  I'm not a nice person.  I have no reason to be nice any more.  My being nice or not nice really has nothing to do with it, does it?  No, the real issue is that I'm honest, and you just can't stand that.  You just can't stand it at all, can you.

Maybe you're one of those authors who self-righteously brags that you never bought a review and you didn't stoop so low as to give your books away to anyone.  You put time and effort into your books and you don't think you should let someone benefit from your effort without, by God, paying you for the right to read it. 

But when I look at your book on Amazon, I see more familiar names.  No, not fiverr shills but the names of other authors, other self-publishing authors, other self-publishing authors who have been desperately looking for people to buy and read and review their books and they'll do the same in return.  It's different, you insist, when you agree to swap honest reviews with each other. 

You and I both know those reviews aren't honest in the least.  You and the other author are going to stroke each other's egos because you're afraid that if you don't tell him his steaming pile of manure is the next Hunger Games, he'll retaliate and let the world know your book isn't the next Interview with a Vampire.  Both of you believe that 5-star reviews will generate sales, and that's what it's all about.  You're no different from Amazon in that respect (pun intended).  You don't care one fig about honesty.  You only care about sales.  You will lie, and you will ask someone else to lie, in the name of selling your terrible, terrible book.

The CJRR continues -- that nefarious group of self-publishing authors who rate each other's absolutely suckworthy spewings with unalloyed 5-star ratings and attack anyone who dares do otherwise.  The sockpuppet ratings continue unabated.  The fiverr shills haven't missed a beat.  It gets worse instead of better on Goodreads and Amazon, because that's the way Amazon wants it.

Readers may ask, "But why?  Why does Amazon want to promote crap?"

Because it sells.  If it doesn't sell itself, it at least sells advertising.  Every time a reader clicks on a free book, other items pop up.  Try it sometime.  Recommended.  Readers who bought this also bought.  And so on.  And Goodreads is just an advertising platform for Amazon.  So Goodreads doesn't really care either.

They cared a little bit for a little while.  They cared long enough to remove a few of the shadier accounts.  Michael Beas with more than 350 purchased reviews.  "Meghan" from Manila with almost 800.  The publicist and her sock puppet army who had over 2500 5-star reviews posted on Goodreads.  Did someone from Amazon come along and tell the Goodreads staff that they had to axe Linda Hilton's account because Linda Hilton wasn't being nice? 

Did Amazon not like it that I was posting screen shots that linked Amazon "Top Reviewers" to fiverr accounts? 

Were publicists like Kelsey McBride buying enough ads for their clients on Goodreads and Amazon that those websites took the cash over ethics to let those publicists, their employees, their sockpuppets, continue to post reviews in violation of FTC regulations and didn't want Linda Hilton to publicize (pun intended) that information?

Yes, I'm angry at you uploaders -- you're not really authors at all -- because you've fouled the nest we all need to live in.  I despise you, and I know the risk I'm taking even in posting this screed.  Amazon is big enough and powerful enough, and I am insignificant enough, that they could refuse to publish my books.  Believe me, the loss of my sales wouldn't hurt them financially.  (Actually, it probably wouldn't hurt me financially very much either.)  If they do that, you'll know and I'll know that what I've written here is important enough for them to want to silence me. 

They don't go out of their way to silence the insignificant.  Honesty is never insignificant.  It's too dangerous to be insignificant.

How to start taking ownership of your stolen words

 

DISCLAIMER:  I am not a lawyer and the following should not be taken as nor substituted for professional legal advice.  This is only a compilation of information that is readily available online.
 
If you think someone is publishing your work without your permission, there are steps you can take to protect yourself before -- but not instead of -- going to a lawyer. 

If the infringing work has been published on Amazon by the Kindle Direct Publishing program (KDP), you can notify Amazon directly. 

On the book's Kindle listing page, all the way down at the bottom, past the reviews and everything else, is a box with four Feedback options.

The fourth option is "Do you believe this item violates a copyright?"  If you believe YOUR work has been infringed, click here for additional information.  Remember:  You cannot report a violation of anyone else's copyright, only your own.  And no one else can report a violation of your copyright;  you must do it yourself.

Clicking on the link will take you to the page on Amazon's Terms of Service with the information on reporting a copyright violation. 

In addition to the physical address for mailing notification, there is an email address:

copyright@Amazon.com

The sooner you initiate the reporting, the sooner the infringing work can be removed from the Amazon site.

Be prepared to provide evidence of your ownership of your words.  Did you write someone an email and they published it without your knowledge?  That's infringement; you may need to provide a copy of the email.  Did someone copy a page from your blog and publish it on KDP without your permission?  That's infringement; provide Amazon with a link to your blogpost.

If you gave someone verbal permission to use your work but there is no written evidence of that consent, then there is no valid contract and they have no legal right to publish your work.  That is infringement.

If you have any evidence of written permission, even if it is just an email to the person saying "Yes, feel free to use my story in your collection," that may not be sufficient legal standing for the person to continue to publish your work.  If the infringer is offering the work for sale, there should (and in some cases must )  be a written contract that spells out all the specific details of how the work is going to be used, where it is going to be published, how the copyright holder will be compensated, and what derivative rights are involved.

One of the downsides of instant digital publishing is that many people are using this marvelous technology without understanding the fine legal points of what it means to put something into the public marketplace.  Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's free for the taking and publishing.  Just because there's an informal agreement doesn't mean that agreement will hold up in a court of law.

And speaking of courts of law, the laws pertaining to copyright differ from one country to another.  Amazon is a U.S. company, but it operates and sells in many countries and its KDP program likewise crosses many international boundaries.  You absolutely must get professional legal advice regarding any further steps, but contacting Amazon/KDP immediately is one step you can take on your own.

What have they done to my words? The Amazon formatting fraud continues

What follows is the text of my email to Amazon customer service regarding the Kindle content I downloaded last night.  I will post the relevant screen shots later today.


The Kindle content is "Stone of the Goddess" by Grizel Standilands.  I looked at the Look Inside sample, and it appeared fine.  The sample download, however, is formatted differently than the Look Inside feature.  It is in a different font and has no paragraph indents.  It is not easily readable.
I would like to buy this book, but I'm tired of getting Kindle content that looks good on the Look Inside feature and then turns out to be junk when I try to read it on my Kindle for PC.

I have deregistered, uninstalled, and reinstalled the Kindle for PC application literally dozens of times since these problems first appeared in July 2012.  Not a single one of the problems has been solved. 

Angels at Midnight by Norma Beishir
Danger at Mellin Cove by Rena George
Embrace the Wild Dawn by S.K. McClafferty
among others.

Amazon has taken hours and hours of my time in online chat and promise resolution, but nothing has been done.  I have been promised responses in three days, five days, a week, but I never get anything.  The people I chat with pay little attention to what I'm telling them.  For instance, the last time I got into an online chat, it lasted three hours, even though the question I asked at 20 minutes into the conversation could have been answered then, if the person had only been paying attention.

I have sent screen shots of sample pages showing what happens.  I have been told over and over and over that there is a team of specialists working on the problem and that it is an Amazon software problem.  I began reporting this in July 2012 and I have logs of all the chats to show that.
I know that it is perfectly possible for Kindle content to be formatted just fine to show correctly on the Kindle for PC app, because I read that content all the time.  If indeed the problem is in the software, as I have repeatedly been told by Amazon representatives that it is, then Amazon needs to fix it.  If, on the other hand, the problem is with the authors' formatting of the document that's uploaded to the Kindle platform, then that needs to be determined so the authors can fix their product.

I have the Kindle for PC app on two computers, an HP laptop operating Windows Vista and a Lenovo desktop using Windows 7.  I get exactly the same results on both of them when I look at the affected content.

The Amazon representatives have granted me some Kindle credit in compensation for my frustration and the time I've spent online with them.  I'm tired of giving up my time to this.  There is absolutely no reason why these books don't display properly on my devices.  And I am not going to go out and spend money for a Kindle device that I don't want and don't need and don't have the time to use, because I no longer have faith that these products would display correctly even on the Amazon hardware.

I am also a Kindle Direct Publishing author.  I have no way of knowing if Amazon has delivered my product in readable or unreadable condition to readers.  I have no way of knowing -- other than trusting the "preview" feature -- what my product looks like on any other device.  All I do know is that Amazon has been cheating authors out of sales by not addressing this issue for six months.

This email will be posted on my blog. 

And yet another update: Your words, my words, and Amazon

Okay, folks, this saga just goes on and on and on, with no resolution in sight.  And yes, this is in progress and will be updated as I get more information.

A second lengthy online chat with an Amazon service representative on Friday, 13 July 2012, yielded more misinformation, but it did not provide a workable solution to the problem.

Amazon is still saying that the problem with the formatting of Norma Beishir's Angels at Midnight as it appears on my Kindle for PC is caused by my Kindle for PC and that the only way to fix it is to de-register all the various Kindle for PC apps that have somehow appeared on my laptop computer, uninstall them, delete all of my Kindle content, and start from scratch.  This would involve redownloading 628 books.

When I tried actually installing the Kindle for PC app on my desktop computer, guess what happened?  ALL THE OTHER KINDLE FOR PC APPS also appeared.  Worse, however, was that some 54 of my downloaded books DISappeared.  Or so it seemed.  The suggestion I made to Amazon -- and documented in the chat log -- was that it looked like the 54 missing books could very well be free samples that I had downloaded, and some of them were for books that were no longer available on Amazon.  I had no desire to lose those free samples, at which point the Amazon rep told me there was nothing they could do about it.

In fact, she had no clue what she was talking about, because it turned out those missing books were NOT the free samples.  I still have no idea why there is a discrepancy of 54 books between my Kindle library as it shows for the Kindle for PC that I downloaded to my desktop computer and the Kindle for PC app on my laptop.

So I spent a good portion of yesterday -- Saturday, 14 July 2012 -- making sure I had back-ups of all my Kindle content.  Don't ask me how I did it.  You don't want to know.  At least not right now.  I finished that project this morning, which involved deleting and redownloading approximately 25 of the 627 books already on the device.

No one seems to know why that was necessary.

Sidebar update:  It appears, but it is not confirmed, that an update to the Kindle for PC app was made sometime in March 2012 and this may have caused all existing Kindle content to require the delete-and-redownload process.  Again, this is what appears to have happened, but I have no confirmation.  For some reason or other approximately 25 of my Kindle books had not been redownloaded at that time, and they required that process in order to facilitate the back-up process.  All of my Kindle content has now been backed up.


But with everything backed up as securely as I could make it, I decided to try downloading a new book.  On today's free list was Danger at Mellin Cove by Rena George.  I downloaded it and opened it in my Kindle for PC.  And the formatting was screwed up.

Although it's not easy to see on this screen shot, the problem is so bad that I cannot read the book:  At the beginning of each line of text on the left margin, about half of the first letter is missing.  The first letters of indented lines are fine; only the very left edge is affected.  And this goes through the entire book, making it unreadable.  One has to stop at the beginning of each line to figure out what the missing letter should be.

Here's the "Look Inside" version:

As you can see, this version has indented paragraphs, and all the letters are clearly visible.  Not at all like the version that showed up on my Kindle for PC with its indented block paragraphs and chopped off letters.

The  first thing I did was report this to Amazon via the book's page.  I explained what the problem was and that it was through the entire book.  About an hour later, I received a stock message from Amazon asking me where in the book the problem was and what the problem was.  As you can imagine, I was not particularly polite in my reply, since that is exactly what I had already told them.

About two hours later, I received another canned reply from Amazon informing me that due to the formatting error, Danger at Mellin Cove was being pulled until the problem could be fixed.  As far as I've been able to determine, the book has not been pulled and the problem has not been fixed.  Again, the problem doesn't show up on the "Look Inside" preview. 


Update:  16 July 2012:  Danger at Mellin Cove was briefly unavailable in the Kindle edition.  It is currently available for $1.54, which may be a conversion of the UK price.  I don't know. 

In the space of a week now, I've discovered two self-published books that are not showing up correctly on the Amazon Kindle for PC application.  I already know about the problems that cropped up with Firefly and which I now have no real way of verifying if all is well.  There was a huge and very nasty brouhaha in the Amazon "Badly Behaving Authors" thread a week or so ago because of another book that didn't show correctly on all devices; it was actually removed from circulation and some changes made, but that book, Wisteria Falls, remains not-quite-right on my Kindle for PC.

Self-published authors should not have to purchase every single variety of Kindle device in order to be sure their product is being published correctly.

Amazon formatting, part 2: Why the form of the words matters

For those who stumbled here without knowing what happened, here's the technical background on what Amazon's Kindle program appears to be doing to at least some of the books that are published via the KDP program.

Now, the next part of the discussion is, why does it matter?

Presentation of a digital book is important.  It's important for the reader, because the proper presentation makes the reading experience far more pleasant.  In fact, a poorly presented book can be virtually unreadable.  Readers notice.  Reviewers notice.

As I've already documented, I got negative reviews on Firefly for formatting errrors.  I learned subsequently that there may have been nothing I could have done.  Certainly I now know that neither the KDP preview nor the "Look Inside" may have provided an accurate picture of what the final product would look like.  And as I documented with the Smashwords edition, the various programs produce very different results from the same original document!

Many, many, many authors have received bad reviews because of the bad formatting of their products on Amazon.  How many of them, however, had no way of knowing what their product would look like?  How many of them were ultimately victims of an Amazon product that did not faithfully reproduce what the authors believed was a clean document?

Many readers have been turned off independent, small-press, and self-published authors because their products just don't look as good as a traditionally published book does when it is converted to digital.  And while the problems with competent writing and proofreading still have to be resolved by the authors, Amazon should not be contributing to a problem that may ultimately be costing them sales.

More later.  Yes, I'm publishing this blog serially, because I don't want to wait until I "get around to it."

Another update: Is Amazon messing with your words?

I am going to publish this in an incomplete form because I want to get this information out as soon as I can.  The basics are here now, and I will be providing the balance over the next day or so.  Unfortunately, I have to devote some time to my day job.



At the moment, Thursday evening, 12 July 2012, I'm so angry I can scarcely type.  And considering my day job consists of transcribing recorded interviews and I'm several hours behind on today's work, I'd better get my fingers back under control.

I just spent an hour and a half "chatting" with "Shiela" at Amazon.  She may be a real person, or she may be a cleverly programmed bit of software designed to answer customer questions.  I don't know for sure.  But here's what happened.

This morning, while I was at my favorite coffee shop, I downloaded the free Kindle edition of Norma Beishir's Angels at Midnight.  I already have a print copy of the 1989 edition, but I'm trying to clean out some of my paper books and this looked like a way to eliminate one more.  After downloading, I popped open the Kindle for PC app and sat back to read for a while.

Unfortunately, I couldn't read it.  The formatting was totally messed up.  I went back and checked the "Look Inside" preview on the book's listing to see if I had missed something, because what I was looking at on my Kindle for PC was totally unlike what I'd seen in the "Look Inside" feature.

Here's what I saw when I looked at the preview:

Standard Times Roman font, indented paragraphs, just like one would see in a "real" book.  Since Norma Beishir is a long-time publishing professional, this was nothing less than I expected.

What showed up on my Kindle was something entirely different!  Arial font, double spaced indented paragraphs, it was horrible! 

So I reported the formatting problem to Amazon via the book's page, and not too long after that I got an emailed reply from Amazon with directions on how to fix it:  Remove and redownload the book, and if that didn't work, make sure I had the current Kindle for PC installed on my computer.

By the time I got that reply, I was at home on the main computer and couldn't access the laptop where my Kindle app resides, so it wasn't until this evening that I got around to trying that fix.  Ultimately, it didn't work -- the Kindle version was still horrible.   I first did the remove and redownload of the book.  Then I installed the latest update to the Kindle for PC app.  Still no change.  I deleted the book and downloaded it again.  No change.

And so I got on an Amazon chat with a technician to fix it.

Guess what.  It can't be fixed.  Period.

The first solution "Shiela" offered me was to de-register and re-register my Kindle for PC.  That would involve removing and re-downloading all 626 books I've already downloaded.  Since some of those books are no longer available at Amazon and I didn't want to lose them,  this was not a preferred option.

As it turned out, it wouldn't have worked anyway.

When I told "Shiela" I wasn't willing to do that just to fix a formatting glitch on one book out of 626, she went to find another solution.

The second option involved her checking to see if the file had been properly formatted.

After putting me on hold for several minutes, she came back and told me she had checked the document as Beishir intended it, and that's what I was seeing.  In other words, best-selling author Norma Beishir is uploading documents to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform that don't look any better than what the most rank amateur SPA does when she/he uploads a badly written short story.

Somehow or other, I just didn't trust this answer.

I then asked why the "Look Inside" preview was fine, if the actual document wasn't?  Again, I was on cyber hold for a long time, and finally the answer came out:  ALL BOOKS are converted to Times Roman font for the "Look Inside" preview, regardless what they look like in actuality.  When I pointed out that there was no such disclaimer, "Shiela" gave some rambling nonsense but eventually agreed.  She said someone in another department would be informed.  And that was pretty much it.

Now, remember the suggestion that I de-register my Kindle app and re-register it?  Well, that proved to be more than a little bit problematic as well.

The original email from Amazon after I reported the problem said to delete the book and redownload it.  I tried that, and it didn't work.

The second part of that email said to make sure I had the most current Kindle for PC version.  The email contained a link to the Amazon page to do that.  I tried that, went back to the new version of Angels at Midnight but the problem persisted.  The font was still Arial and the paragraphs were still double-spaced.

I then tried deleting and redownloading the book again.  Still no improvement.

And I know I'm repeating myself here, but I want to make sure I'm not leaving anything out.

In the process of doing this, however, I discovered that somehow or other I had four versions of Kindle for PC on my computer and on my account.  I have no idea where they came from, but I did know that I had set mine for automatic updates.

"Shiela" informed me that updates require that the existing Kindle for PC app be uninstalled and the new one installed.  But I had personally never done that manually, and so I asked if it had been done automatically via the "Tools" button.  Her answer made no sense.

Shiela:For updates, we need to uninstall and re-install the application.8:52:22 PM

Me:That didn't answer my question: Do I have to de-register, re-register, and redownload 626 items when you do an automatic update?8:53:23 PM

Shiela:If we will re-register an application, we will be needing to re-download the books. There is actually no automatic updates for Kindle application for PC.8:55:02 PM

Me:Then why does it have a box to check for automatic updates? And how did I get all of these applications on one computer if I only installed it once?8:55:42 PM

Me:(Oh, by the way, the box for automatic updates cannot be not checked.)8:57:39 PM

I will post the entire conversation on another post so anyone who wants to can follow the entire conversation.  What eventually came out of it was this:

1.  All "Look Inside" previews of all books on Amazon are displayed in Times Roman font, regardless what the actual book will look like.  Neither readers nor authors get an accurate view this way.

2.  There is no disclaimer anywhere on Amazon that explains the "Look Inside" preview may in fact be significantly different from the actual product.

3.  The Kindle for PC application may or may not be automatically updated by Amazon.  The button on the program for opting out does not operate, leaving the user to believe that automatic updates are, well, automatic.  At least one service rep has stated, however, that Amazon does not automatically update the Kindle for PC application.

4.  I currently have four installed Kindle for PC applications on my computer.  Earlier this morning I had six, because I have managed to deregister two of them.  At no time when I downloaded the "newest" version last night did Amazon ask me if I wanted to replace the existing application.

If you've stayed with me through all this, you're probably wondering why this matters.  Well, check out the next blog post and you'll find out why.

Which of these words don't you understand?

As often happens, reading someone else's writing sparks my own thoughts, and I suppose that's not unusual in a community of writers and readers.  Writers were, after all, readers first and still read.  Readers read what the writers have written.  There will always be cross-pollination.

So I'm going to start this rant with a link to Sunita's original blogpost here which was further disseminated via Dear Author here and explain that the subject is titled (by my predecessors, not I) "When I bought your book, I didn't sign up to be your beta reader."


I added several posts of my own to the Dear Author thread, so I'll only briefly here restate that I think it is very wrong for authors who are digitally self-publishing to engage in this particular practice, which consists of:

1. E-publishing an uncorrected, unedited, unproofread rough draft of their "book" and charging cash money for it, without noting in a prominent way so the reader is aware before purchasing that it is in fact a rough (or very early) draft.

2.  Revising said work based on reviews and/or comments made by people who have purchased said work, such revisions to include but not be limited to fixing typos and other mechanical errors, revising plot lines to improve logical progression, altering characters and/or character motivation, changing the ending to make it more popular with readers, adding or removing significant events from the story.

3.  Re-publishing the work as a new edition and charging new readers for the privilege, with or without notifying previous purchasers that a new edition is available.


Those are the basics.  There are other corollary things the author can do to make the experience even worse, but those will wait for later enumeration.

I'm also going to offer a couple of qualifiers to the three main points, one of which has already been mentioned in #1.

If the author makes it clear that the publication is a work in progress that's one thing.  Then the reader knows that she should not be expecting a polished product.  It's probably still bad form to do this, but at least the author is being honest and the reader can make an informed decision whether to buy or not.

Offering the work for free is not an excuse.  Again, if the author makes clear that the work is unpolished, that's one thing, but merely offering it at no charge without such an announcement is unfair to the reader.  The reader expects that the product, free or not, is finished.  A rough draft is not a finished product.

I can't stress this enough.  The reader buys expecting a finished product, ready to read, to all intents and purposes it's DONE.  In essence, it's ready to provide a reading experience in which the text becomes invisible (see my blogpost about invisible words here) and the reader is immersed in the story.

But what appears to be happening more and more often is that the reader buys something that's not finished.

Here's a review of The Duke's Reform by Fenella J. Miller, in which the reviewer laments:

Spoiler alert: I hate to write a bad review so I will start out with the good. This was a good story. Could have been a much better story. It was poorly told, punctuation and vocabulary and missing words and words added in that did not relate to the sentence they were in combined to make this a very difficult read. When I read a story, I want to read what the author wanted to tell, I don't want to have to guess and fill in the story every other page.

. . .

This could have been a good read if only they had had an editor. The Kindle version has some serious formatting problems with new paragraphs beginning in the middle of sentences, some paragraphs in bold and other in italics for no apparent reason. Commas and other punctuation are just, willy nilly throughout the book. A stilted and unbelievable dialogue. I wanted to like both the H and the h. I really did.

I am left wondering why I read this book to the end except that, I really wanted to like the H and h and I wanted them to have an HEA.

But if you must, get a dictionary and keep it handy, you will need it. This is a long read and by the end I just wanted it to be over

Then there's The Taming of the Hart by Lorraine Burgess which was uploaded to Amazon sometime prior to 22 June 2012 based on the date of the earliest review.  Selected comments from the reviews:

Didn't anyone take a look at this book before it was uploaded to Amazon? This is a good story. It deserves better.

I don't only not recommend it, I caution against it because it literally gave me a headache while trying to read it.

Please use a proper dictionary and check the spelling of even small words like seem and such. It is a large hindrance when the technical parts of writing get in the way of the story.

A few days later the author issued an apology and stated this was her uncorrected version written for herself and she would have a corrected version uploaded "within 24 hours."  Three days later, that corrected version has not yet appeared.



As you can see even in this not-very-clear screen shot, the version Ms. Burgess uploaded contains errors in the very first sentence.  The bold italic font continues through the entire text, sometimes Times Roman, sometimes Arial or a similar sans-serif font.  She claims this uncorrected version was uploaded "by accident," and it's obvious from the text of her apology that she's still having problems with spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation.  None of her friends told her of the problems, which suggests either her friends never looked at it or they weren't skilled enough to recognize them or they chose not to tell her; but none of those explanations explains why she herself didn't take even the quickest glance at what she uploaded.

When she did upload a "revised" version a few days later, most of the problems remained.  A few of the usage and spelling errors were fixed, and it's no longer in Italic font but the bold text continues throughout and it's a mess.  It's a horrible mess.

Now, allow me to throw this out here:  Yes, I uploaded a slightly imperfect version of Firefly to Amazon, an error I related here, and had I purchased a copy and checked it all out, I probably would have discovered the problem.  However, I did at least make sure I hadn't uploaded a version that contained numerous spelling errors.  I also made sure the version that was uploaded was reasonably well formatted, and in fact on my Kindle for PC app, the font was a standard Times Roman, not "ugly courier" noted in the early reviews.  The courier font and font-related glitches only appeared, as far as I'm able to determine, on the actual Kindle device.  It did take some extra finagling for me to get the right version to show up on the Kindle, but at least I did check somewhat before I put the thing live.  Yes, I could have checked more, but as I have learned since then, even purchasing a copy might not have revealed all the problems.

And regardless, I would never have uploaded something that had such appalling errors as "belt of lightening."  Come to think of it, I would never write "belt of lightening" when I really meant "bolt of lightning" in the first place.  My fingers wouldn't let me.

Sometimes these books have many, many, many five-star reviews that rave about how wonderful the book is and how the reviewers just can't wait for the author's next book.  There may be a few that point out errors and only grant one or two stars, but frequently the author (or their surrogates???) counter these negative reviews with staunch defenses of the wonderfulness of the story, or they attack the reviewer personally.  Often the errors cited are never addressed, or even admitted to.  It's as if the authors are in absolute denial of the problems in their books.

When I did my original analysis of self-published books that had garnered a bunch of five star as well as one star reviews, I was specifically looking for titles that had both because I wanted to try to get some sense of whether the five-star reviews had any suspicion of being planted by friends, family members, the authors themselves, or "shills" who were actually paid to write glowing reports whether they had liked or even read the book or not.  As I expanded my data base (if you will) of these titles, I did indeed begin to see a pattern with the works that were original to the digital self-publishing platform.  In other words, the books by authors who had never published in print prior to uploading their books to Amazon.  (And of course the qualifier here is that I had not looked at any other e-publishing format.  More about that later.)

Secrets of Moonshine, by Denise Daisy is one of those books with a lot of five-star reviews but is still very badly formatted.  Although the author claims she paid an "editor" $900 to turn this into a "squeaky clean" product, typos and punctuation and syntax errors abound.  I feel like telling Ms. Daisy it wouldn't have mattered to me if she had paid $9,000 or even ninety million dollars for that editing job: The book remained a pathetic mess.  Telling the reader that it was edited does not make it so.

Asking -- or worse, expecting -- the reader to fix the errors is grossly unfair.  Remember what that reviewer of Fenella Miller's The Duke's Reform wrote:  When I read a story, I want to read what the author wanted to tell, I don't want to have to guess and fill in the story every other page.

It is the author's job to tell that story.  That is what the reader has paid the author to do, with payment being made sometimes in cash but always in time and in trust.

Many years ago, in an article published in Writer's Digest magazine, authors George Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer, and John Ashmead reiterated what they called "The Ultimate Rule," which was an expansion on instructions laid out by Robert Heinlein.  I personally took that Rule to heart, and I have passed it along, always with attribution, to every aspiring writer I have ever come into contact with.

1.  You must write.
2.  You must finish what you write.
3.  You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
4.  You must put your work in front of an editor who might buy it.
5.  You must keep it on the market until it is sold.

Obviously, with the rise of digital publishing, #4 and #5 are no longer as "ultimate" as they used to be.  And given how my attitude toward traditional publishers has soured, I'd have issues with those orders anyway.

But how does Heinlein's dictum apply to today's publishing scene? 

First of all, #3 specifically refers to the traditional publishing professional who, as the middleman between writer and reader, is trained to acquire those properties most likely to turn a profit for the publisher and is trained to put those properties into publishable shape.  Unlike the random reader who looks at the free sample of a book digitally published on Amazon and who may or may not know anything at all about writing, about editing, or about the factual accuracy of the book and whose suggestions may be completely wrong, at least under the traditional publishing model the editor is probably going to do much more to improve the work than make it worse.  What the shift to digital self-publishing has done is to split the gatekeeper function from that of purchaser by eliminating that editorial middleman.  And that means that the author must now take full responsibility for all of that editorial function, while purchasing is directly in the hands of the final user.

Second of all. Heinlein's #3 never meant the author should complete the roughest of first drafts and immediately start schlepping it around to the top editors and agents.  It does mean that when you have a clean and polished version of your work, stop messing with it and get it out there.  It does mean that you need to develop the professional writing skills that will allow your prospective reader -- whether that is an agent, a publishing house editor, a small e-press editor, or the person who downloads your digital book from Amazon -- to read your story as if it were ready to be set in type.  It does mean only listen to the complaints and criticisms and orders from those who are competent to voice and demand them.

Third of all, the writer must understand what #4 really means in the age of digital publishing.  Again, that "editor" now becomes any potential reader, and just as the traditional publishing industry demanded that the author deliver a manuscript as spotless as possible when trying to land an editor, today the digital shopper fills that role, not as editor but as acquirer.  The author must take on the responsibility that formerly fell to the publisher: making certain that the product is ready for the consumer to use.

Unfortunately, so many of the people putting out digital books are so lacking in even basic writing skills that they should never get past #1.  And they don't understand that #2 doesn't just mean writing "The End" after the first draft is cranked out.  "Finished" means ready for real people to read it.

Essentially, self-publishing means that the author has to take on all the roles of the publisher, and that doesn't mean foisting them off on an unsuspecting and perhaps unqualified reader.  The author must either be qualified to be editor, proofreader, copyeditor, line editor, cover artist, publicist, accountant, and legal specialist, or she must find and pay other professionals to perform those tasks.  Self-publishing is not just uploading a text file to Amazon or Pub-it or Smashwords. 

Nor should self-publishing be a vehicle for authorial deception.  We've already seen too many instances of authors just plain stealing other people's words and trying to sell them.  Whether it's Janet Dailey or Cassie Edwards, Cassandra Clare or anyone else, plagiarism/copyright infringement is just plain wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.  No excuse, no defense, no forgiveness.

But also wrong is this ongoing business of posting deceptive reviews to self-published books.  The reader who browses the Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Kobo or Apple catalogue should not be bombarded with bullshit "reviews" that are nothing but the author's friends and family members and paid ad copy writers posing as unbiased reviewers.  Of course your mother is going to give you a good review!  We know that.  As readers, we want to know what other real readers thought. 

However, some authors are now turning to another tactic, and it's not being done to make their books better but rather just to sell them.

Among the intial group of novels I analyzed back in March was one that, as I began to read the free sample, struck me as having enormous potential to be a really, really good book.  Unfortunately, it was riddled with errors of just about every type: typos, wrong words used, historical inaccuracy, bad formatting.  And I noticed that while there were a whole bunch of kind of generic five-star reviews, there were also a lot of one- and two-star reviews that cited those problems. 

Now, if I were an author whose book received numerous detailed criticisms about specific errors, I'd be sure to consider those issues very carefully, research to find out if perhaps the critics were right, and then I would do my very best to fix them.  And as a matter of fact, the few reviews I've received on Firefly have brought up the issue of that Arizona ice cream -- but there's nothing historically wrong with it!  And I addressed that in the Afterword.  No, of course Del and Julie didn't take Willy to the local Baskin Robbins or Coldstone Creamery, but ice cream was not anachronism.

What I wouldn't do, however, is ignore a slew of criticisms and just remove the book from Amazon, then republish it as is on Smashwords, with a new title and a new pseudonym, with no reference to the original on Amazon and no correction of the errrors, which is what I discovered the author had done.  I only noticed it because she republished her book almost the same time I published Shadows by Starlight at Smashwords, and I saw hers as I was checking the status of mine. 

When an author does something like that, at that point the whole operation becomes nothing but deception and a ploy to make money off the gullible.  That, too, is wrong.  It's even more wrong when she chooses a title identical to that of another historical romance and a pseudonym very very similar to that of the author of that book.

Once again, self-publishing means the writer takes on the responsibility of fulfilling all the tasks traditional publishers would have done.  As far as I know, that never included making the reader do the work or intentionally deceiving the reader.

Now, self-publishing authors, what about this don't you get?