#CopyPasteCris and the fight to stop writing from devolving into content marketing

Nora Roberts: “Not a Rant, But a Promise” blog post, that went live (and viral) 2/23/19:

I’m getting one hell of an education on the sick, greedy, opportunistic culture that games Amazon’s absurdly weak system. And everything I learn enrages me.

There are black hat teams, working together, who routinely hire ghosts on the cheap, have them throw books together, push them out–many and fast–to make money, to smother out competition from those self-pubbed writers who do their own work. Those who do their own work can’t possibly keep up with the volume these teams produce by these fraudulent tactics.

They tutor others how to scam the system.

If you’re curious why one of the world’s most famous, most prolific, most talented, and best-selling romance authors would call out Amazon on her blog, we need to rewind the clock about two months.

Romance readers are voracious consumers of their favorite authors, with some readers finishing a book each day. It should come as little surprise that it was a zealous reader who noticed something odd about passages in several of Courtney Milan’s books in February 2019. That reader was the first to discover evidence that Milan may have been plagiarized by another author…