Did You Post A Spam Book on Amazon?

Amazon's Kindle store was flooded with spam books almost from the moment they opened the portal. In fact, I talked about private label rights and the fallout last August. Then there were the people scraping websites, those who made books out of blurbs and reviews out of popular tomes, etc.

Well, Amazon FINALLY decided to crack down last week. And it wasn't just an announcement this time.

How do I know? I got an e-mail from the folks at Amazon KDP asking for proof that I hold the copyright to Creating a Business Plan for the Indie Writer (2nd ed.).

In a way, it was kind of funny. The original book was created from a series of blog posts I did here and from some guest posts that I did for other folks. So the Amazon folks were right when they pointed out that CABP 2.0 had a lot of public content in it.

What wasn't funny was the couple of hours I had to spend digging up the documentation I needed to prove that I was the copyright holder of the text. (If you saw my office right, now, you'd understand. It makes the 'Before' pictures of Casa Nuevo Rancho Lake look like Martha Stewart's house.)

I finally got everything together to show that only the first edition was available to Jane Public, and that the second edition was only available by e-book or through a pay wall. Amazon sent me a polite thank you e-mail and said CAPB 2.0 will remain for sale on KDP.

So the lesson in this? Make sure you document the hell out of any book you create from your blog. The Amazon police are watching.

Amazon Introduces KDP Select

If you self-publish through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, you should have the e-mail from them by now.

If you don't, here's the scoop: Amazon is extending to self-published authors an offer to be included in the Amazon Prime Lending Library ("APLL").  Payment will be made from a pool of money based on the total number of self-published books borrowed from the APLL versus the number of times your particular book was borrowed.

In other words, if no one borrows your book regardless of total borrows, you make nothing. The pool for December is $500,000. If there are a million total downloads in December and your book is borrowed once, then you'll make $0.50.

The other side of this little offer is the exclusivity clause. Your book can only be available for sale only on Amazon, no other retailers, while it is part of the APLL.

For those of you who have jamming sales on Smashwords, the iBookstore, or Barnes & Noble, it doesn't make much sense to jump on this offer.

Something else to consider is that you may have 100 borrows from the APLL, but no sales.  You'll be gambling that your ratio in the pool is high enough to offset the lack of sales.

On the other hand, if you're simply looking for visibility, this might be the program for you.  If anyone tries it, I'd love to hear how it worked for you.