When Greed Trumps Civility: Amazon Spam Revisited

I've blogged several times about Amazon's new rules forbidding promotion outside of the "Meet our Authors" forum. But that hasn't stopped people from trying--and trying again. A few days ago, one author promoted his self-pubbed book on the Kindle forum. He was told politely to stop. Rather than apologize, and make a move to become part of the forum community, he emailed one of the women who'd advised him to stop promoting. He then posted this rant (reproduced in part) on his personal blog. Other than the stalkerish misogyny, his viewpoint is quite typical of the spurned spammer:

I strolled into Amazon this weekend to browse around... I’d unwittingly wandered into the Amazon equivalent of a pack of street thugs, roving bands of opportunists taking advantage of the faceless anonymity of the web to prey upon others. Seems I’d broken a rule by self-promoting my book in there.

...So I looked into some of their backgrounds, and found that one woman (the apparent leader who seemed to set the tone) liked to give hatchet-job book reviews. 
..

I contacted the authors on the receiving end of several of these reviews...One voiced the probability that she has a dog because she can’t keep a man around because none will have her, and this is her revenge and bitter outlet for her rage. After experiencing her and her little pack tearing away at me, that thought carries some real merit, and does seem probable, with her aptly-chosen nic “[name deleted by January]" Another author indicated that she needed to get L^!d, which I found a bit offensive – for the poor soul "saddled" with that distasteful task.

...once we step outside the invisible walls of our literary world, we are - upon occasion - going to encounter a less enlightened element. [Those unsavory few] live to create chaos - the way writers live to create art, poetry, and beauty.

Hey dude! Another name for those street thugs and "less enlightened element" is a reader.

Links

Amazon Kindle Spam: Direct Publishing System Gets Gummed By Influx Of Junk eBooks

From the Huffington Post:

The wave of ebook spam crashing over the Kindle could undermine [Amazon's] push into self-publishing.

Here spam refers to crap ebooks or plagiarized content, uploaded to Amazon only to make a quick profit. According to James McQuivey, an eReader analyst at Forrester Research, the solution to the problem is a form of Amazon social networking.

If the company can let readers see book recommendations from people they know, or people whose reviews they liked in the past, that would help them track down the content they want and avoid misleading recommendations.

That sounds a whole lot like Goodreads, an existing social network for readers.

Perhaps Amazon's new enforcement of community guidelines (including deleting sock puppet reviews and spam book announcements) is phase one of Amazon's new, more valuable, social networking system.


The Real Force Behind Ebook Sales: Heaving Bosoms

FoxNews.com provides a nice collection of tired cliches about romance readers, including referencing romance fiction as "salacious chick lit". Fox has evidently just discovered romance drives the fiction market.

What's with treating authors like piranha?

As I mentioned in a previous post, the amazon forums are a mess. The genre forums are swamped by promotional threads and posts. The only notable exception is the romance forum.

Amazon finally took stronger anti-spam steps this week. It has outright forbidden book promotion on the existing forums, creating a new "Meet Our Authors Forum." The promotions are now segregated from the book discussions, which I believe is a good thing.

Needless to say, the new spam directive is causing a furor, particularly among the self-published writers who relied on such promotion to let readers know about their books. The title of my blog post is a quote from one of the unhappy writers. (I suspect the author meant to say pariah, not piranha.) Hyperbole rules in the MOA forum.

The spammers are hopping mad, never considering their masterpiece is one of thousands and thousands and thousands. Rather than look for new marketing avenues (like blogs or review sites), many continue to scheme. Most notable are the "tag parties" to artificially inflate Amazon book tag inventories, or using sock puppets to recommend books on the genre forums. The tag parties may have been busted. The Kindle books don't seem to have tags anymore.

Worst of all, many of the spammers blame the readers for their banishment. The angriest of the bunch are driving away the very readers who might buy their books.