“Kindle Unlimited Book Stuffing Scam Earns Millions and Amazon Isn’t Stopping It: Book Stuffer Chance Carter Is Gone. But Readers Are Still Paying for Books That Are 90% Filler.”, 2018-06-13 (; backlinks; similar):
…a distasteful practice called “book stuffing” by some Kindle Unlimited authors. Kindle Unlimited is an Amazon program that works like Netflix for books: You can read as much as you want for a flat monthly fee. For various reasons, Kindle Unlimited is filled with books written and self-published by independent authors, many of them in the romance genre.
How do authors get compensated when readers pay a flat fee for the service? Amazon has created a pool of funds that authors are paid from, currently around $22.5 million. Up until 2015, authors earned a flat fee for each download of their books. But the company noticed that many of these Kindle Unlimited books were very, very short. So instead, Amazon began paying a bit less than ¢0.5 cent for each page that was actually read. That’s how book stuffing was born.
It works like this. An Amazon author publishes a new book that’s, say, 300 pages long. At ¢0.5 per page, the author would earn about $1.50 every time that book was read to the end. To beef up their earnings, book stuffers add several other already-published books, or a long series of newsletters, to the end of the book as “bonus material.” Most stuffed books run near 3,000 pages, the maximum that Amazon will pay for. In the current system, an author could earn about $13.50 per book this way, which is more than most authors earn from traditional publishers when their books are sold as hardcovers.
$1.2 million a year?
Serious book stuffers acquire email lists that they sometimes share with each other. They boost their sales by sending out promotional email to hundreds of thousands of email addresses. They also spend a lot of money on Amazon Marketing Services, promoting their books as “sponsored” to Kindle Unlimited subscribers and other Kindle shoppers. These tactics, in combination with artificially producing positive reviews (against Amazon’s rules), help them rank high in Amazon’s romance category, crowding out authors who take a more traditional approach. Some book stuffers publish a new book every couple of weeks (they may use ghostwriters to actually write the books), doing a new promotion for each one. In this way, observers report, they can earn as much as $100,000 per month.
…Why would anyone read through 2,700 pages of uninteresting bonus material? They usually don’t, but many authors do something that gets people to turn to the last page of the book, such as promising a contest or giveaway (forbidden by Amazon rules), or putting some new and perhaps particularly racy content right at the end of the book. On some devices, Amazon may simply be using the last page opened as a measure of how much of a book was “read.” Thus, the author gets full credit for the book, even though the customer didn’t read all of it.
…Carter openly invited other authors to pay for the use of his “platform” to send out promotional emails to their own mailing lists and also share mailing lists and cross-promote with other authors/book stuffers. In fact, he was so proud of his book stuffing talents that he posted his credo for the world to see in a Kindle publishing forum:
Making content as long as possible.
Releasing as frequently as possible.
Advertising as hard as possible.
Ranking as high as possible.
And then doing it all over again.