Amazon Scammers — An Unregulated Group Pushing out Women, LGBT+, and African American Authors in Romance Fiction
By: Margaret Bates
Tags: Sexism, Diversity, Publishing, LGBT Rights, Amazon

II. Amazon is a powerhouse in publishing. Every day, publishers are closing. Barnes and Noble has consolidated over the years, the publishing houses in New York are down to just five after Random House and Penguin merged, and some small presses are floundering. Everyone has wanted a piece of that Amazon pie, but it doesn’t appear to be regulated well enough for it to be divided fairly. Kindle Unlimited has been through a few iterations to try and weed out fake book and scam issues. Originally, it was just amount of books read, so the name of the game was putting out short stories and novellas as fast as possible. Then when page reads came out, it seemed to help benefit real authors and writers for a time, until scammers figured out how to marry two things together — ghostwriters and stuffing quickly churned out books into 1000 page-plus files.

Sites like Upwork are no secret. I’ve worked there for years to pick up odd jobs in editing and ghosting, myself. That’s when I first noticed the change from people who needed ghosts for one real novella every so often, to those who were demanding 50–70k works in under a month so that they could later be marketed under (usually) female pen names as the lead-off title in a book that was posing as a single story, but in reality was 80% stuffed with old books for page reads and money making ability. The lead story that ghosts are hired to write get combined with older stories past ghosts have written into giant tomes that have tables of contents as long as phone books:

Since a few particular groups of these scammers have banded together to set the tone of the books coming out in romance, coordinate the branding, and even set the themes and topics, they’ve become actually more transparent and easy to spot. At the same time, they’ve used the botting, click farming, ghosts en masse, and the book stuffing to monopolize Kindle Unlimited and push authors from the platform and into destitution.

Again, these scammers want to create a volume game so not only are they going to couple the new work by the ghost with tons of old ones for a stuffed book that’s against Amazon contract law, they’re also demanding the works be done in about 3 weeks so they’re always churning out new material to stay on top (Amazon algorithms favor every 30 day output) and to outmaneuver real authors.

A more disturbing trend I’ve witnessed first hand is that many of the individuals who hire and retain ghosts don’t just take on women’s pen names. They are often overwhelmingly male marketers who are creating a way to manipulate the KU system for profits and to shove out actual, usually women romance authors who are trying to make a living, especially in a landscape where more and more Amazon is publishing.

And these newsletters the scammer-writers send to fans can be disturbing. Female fans can get fooled and led to assume their favorite authors are just women doing “girl talk” or “dishing” when asking invasively sexual stories. I’ve seen these “writers” in their emails ask their readers about how they discuss sexual topics with their teenage daughters and when the first time they discussed orgasms with them was as well. It can range from that to far more intense and frankly, XXX-rated inquiries.

Warning again for explicit content below sent by one author to their fan list that seems unaware their fave writer dishing for “girl talk” is an insidious marketer, but they go on to talk about things like “cummin on tits” and having anal sex in graphic detail. Other times, they’ll ask women about their first times or first orgasms or about sex advice they can share with fellow marketing email readers and followers.

Some of the “writers” will also solicit fan advice at Facebook fan groups, over Twitter, or in their own email newsletters so fans can share sex advice with other fans. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that there’s the lack of transparency, and women fans think they’re doing “girl talk” when they’re really having sexual discussions with someone potentially faking their real identity. If you want to have explicit sex secret trading with a guy author, great, but I think all readers deserve the chance to know exactly who they are interacting with.

Some of the authors who engage in this behavior have even gone to the indie author hangout space and public forum KBoards to talk about anonymously on sock accounts what they see as “normal” marketing behavior in order to reach their audience:

Here the anon author admits to engaging in “girl talk” with the readers who believe that he’s a woman as a way to build his success. He then actively admits that if readers knew the truth of who he was, then they’d be upset and might stop reading or interacting. He even cops to using a picture of his wife on his social media and author accounts to help perpetuate the image his author brand is really just a woman, golly gee engaging in some “girl talk.” As a side note why does this innocent “just girl talk” keep reminding me more and more of people dismissing the Access Hollywood bragging tape as just “locker room talk.” It all seems another way to diminish the sexual violation inherent in the lies and deceptions.

This goes, unfortunately, beyond just sometimes marketers who are often men pretending to be women to build invasive and sexy brands. There is also a movement for writers to create fake identities and accounts to pose as gay men and LGBT allies writing LGBT romance (when they’re not either of these things) as well as to seek out white ghosts to write for Urban Lit or pen names presented specifically as African American writers creating African American romance stories.