Authors, Please Don’t Act Like Scammers

Check out this informative post from Nicholas Rossis’ blog cautioning authors not to act like scammers

Nicholas C. Rossis

I thought of this post when I heard of a problem plaguing one of the groups I belong to. People are using its Twitter hashtag without actually being members of said group. This both confuses readers and dilutes the group’s rather successful brand. Even worse, these authors are taking advantage of the hard work others have put in without ever contributing anything themselves.

This reminded me of a series of posts author David Gaughran has written since June 2017. In them, David complains about scammers breaking the Kindle Store and about Amazon’s frequently heavy-handed approach to dealing with the problem. The main culprit is so-called click-farmed titles and other dodgy marketing practices. Based on David’s observation, I, too, mentioned the issue in my post, Fake Books: Amazon’s Latest Headache.

Big Rewards, Big Hype

If anything, the problem seems to have grown worse since then. This is because of the…

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