Amazon Issues Affecting Traditional Publishing Too

How you can help let your favorite publishers know about issues at Amazon

We’ve talked about the #Tiffanygate scandal this week. We’ve encouraged people to check out the #GETLOUD hashtag to protest Chance Carter and his FTC-law violating contest in which he offered a chance for readers to have an attempt to win an item of their choice from Tiffany and Co. in exchange for a purchased copy of Mr. Diamond from Amazon and a verified review. In other words, Mr. Carter ran a contest in which the only way to enter from May 26th — June 2nd was proof of purchase, which is not allowed under Federal Trade Commission rules.

He did change the rules with 48 hours left in the contest, but by then he had over 150 verified reviews on his book and was ranking in the top 70 of the entire Amazon ebooks store.

However there is a much deeper problem at Amazon. Mr. Carter seems to be one of a vast number of “writers” who are stuffing their books, creating huge file-sized ebooks against Kindle’s TOS that are based around the need to get readers to flip through literally 2000–3000 pages for huge payouts from Kindle Unlimited that will both pay per page flipped through/read *and* will reward the most read authors each month with huge bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars.

They also tend to shove their books into any category. Mr. Diamond for example was in American Literature — Satire. One Twitter user just looked at the supposed “sports romance” category and found that eight of the top ten romances there were mislabeled books that were most likely stuffed as well:

Amazon has top 100 charts in every category. If you want to be visible and found at Amazon and thus accessible to readers you want to be in the top 100 in your category. If these “books” are pushing out legitimate reads — both independently published or from traditional publishing houses — then readers can’t find quality books from who, in our opinion, are real writers. It’s not just independent authors being affected. It’s anyone, which is something that has to be cutting into the bottom line for the big publishing houses in New York as well as romance publisher, Harlequin.

Call to Action:

Let’s contact the big publishing houses and let them know that their bottom line is at risk too from stuffed books, miscategorized books, and from FTC-violating contests. After all, if one book gets away with a contest that received reviews in exchange for the promise of jewelry then others will try the same methods. Other authors just won’t be able to compete, which is part of the reason it’s against FTC rules.

1. Again to contact the FTC, call 1–877-FTC-Help

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2. Contact the Big Five Publishers on their social media:

• Penguin-Random House for Twitter (@penguinrandom) and Facebook
• Macmillan on Twitter (@macmillanUSA) and Facebook
• Hachette on Twitter (@hachettebooks)and Facebook
• Simon and Schuster on Twitter (@simonschuster) and Facebook
• HarperCollins on Twitter (@harpercollins) and Facebook

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3. Contact Harlequin at its Twitter (@HarlequinBooks) and Facebook

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4. Keep tweeting about this on #Getloud tag and bringing attention to the problems at Amazon and how they unfairly treat some authors but not others.