As the summer slump fades, self-published authors are ramping up their marketing efforts once again, and if you’ve been on Facebook lately, you’ve probably noticed the surge in eBook ads. Among them, one trend is sparking a heated debate—the use of AI-generated art. Is it a smart way to cut costs and boost engagement, or does it risk coming off as cheap and impersonal? In today’s blog, Ginger leaps right into this controversial topic, sharing two key reasons why he isn’t a fan of this approach.

While Ginger’s views aren’t unique among authors, the bigger question remains: how effective are these AI-generated ads? If they were proven to boost book sales and profits, would more authors be willing to embrace them despite their reservations? The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and not every decision has a clear-cut answer. Understanding the pros and cons can help you form your own opinion and make informed choices in your marketing strategy.

Fall has descended here in the upper northeast, and for a lot of self-published authors, that means the “summer slump” is finally over (if you even believe in such a thing.) As a result, many of us have started advertising our books more heavily on Facebook.

You’ve probably noticed it yourself. As you scroll through your Facebook feed, you’re probably seeing ads for eBooks much more regularly. I know I am – as well as writing books, I’m an avid reader of them, and that makes me my own target demographic.

Seeing all these books being advertised also allows me to see what trends are currently popular among self-published authors. I’m always interested to note if the books they’re advertising are in Kindle Unlimited or not, or whether the ad drives to a direct sales page rather than a product page on Amazon. Direct sales is definitely a growing trend, which is why I’m investing so much time and effort into it right now.

It’s also interesting to see which formats of ad are more popular. I’m always trying to figure out if static images or videos appear more frequently, and how much the length of the copy in the headlines affects click-through rates. I love seeing ads for eBooks that break the mold, too. There’s one author in particular who has full-length video ads featuring her talking directly to the camera, and I’m just dying to ask her whether they’re successful or not.

But not all the trends I see inspire such curiosity. There’s one very common advertising trend going around at the moment which I’m really not a fan of. You’ve probably seen examples of this kind of ad in your advertising feed (or as a self-published author, you might even be doing it yourself.)

That trend is authors using AI art in their Facebook advertising.

I hate it!

Now, this is just my opinion – it’s not like I’m the advertising police and have any right to tell authors what they can and can’t do when it comes to their advertising. 

I also don’t know how effective it is. I keep seeing authors doing it, so it might be a very successful strategy for driving clicks and engagements. Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

But I hate it!

I hate seeing authors use AI artwork for very subjective, very personal reasons – and while I’m certainly not saying I’m right, I’d still like to spend this week’s post stating my case about why I don’t like authors doing it. It’s a post meant to inspire and drive discussion – feel free to leave your own opinion in a comment underneath, especially if you want to explain to me why you think I’m wrong!

But, without further ado, here are the two main reasons why I hate seeing authors use AI art in their advertising:

Reason #1: It looks creepy and fake

AI generated art is still in its infancy, and yet already it can produce incredible results. I’ve seen some images created by AI that are impossible to tell from the real thing.

But they’re very much in the minority.

In most cases, it’s still really easy to spot AI-generated art. There’s something about the “uncanny valley” nature of AI that sets off subconscious triggers in our mind. One glance will have us counting fingers, examining words and numbers, and looking for all the other clues in the image that give away the fact that it was generated by a computer.

When you’re advertising your books, I don’t believe you should associate them with creepy, fake looking artwork. It might work well for a horror novel, perhaps – something Lovecraftian or a grisly body-horror tale. For most books, though, we want the reader to be immersed in the authenticity of the world we created. We want to achieve the opposite of the “uncanny valley” and write prose that resonates with our readers because of how real it seems.

Reason #2: It looks cheap and lazy

Okay, I’m probably going to sound pretentious and elitist here, but I think somebody’s got to say it. AI generated art looks cheap.

Because it is.

It’s often free, in fact – and when something is free, you generally get what you pay for.

AI-generated art is still so easy to identify that I believe its use in your Facebook advertising immediately sends a subconscious message to your potential readers: 

“This book is cheap and lazy.”

And it’s not! You know that and I know that!

I know you spent weeks, months, or even years writing your book – and that you imbued it with as much honesty, authenticity, and truth as you possibly could. I know you created a world within its pages that is still vividly real to you. You crafted characters within the narrative who seemed so real to you that they became your friends.

To write a book – even if it’s never commercially successful – is to have achieved something most humans will never have the creativity, discipline, or drive to accomplish. It’s a testament to your hard work and courage. It’s something real…

…and AI art is not.

The square-jawed action hero in your AI-generated ad never really existed. He was never born. He never went to school. He never fell in love, or lost a fight, or decided what his favorite flavor of ice-cream was. He’s just an amalgam of millions of different pictures that have been filtered and distilled through a few lines of digital “prompt.”

There wasn’t a photographer to take that picture. The sun never hit the green fields of grass in the distance behind him, because neither that sun nor those fields ever existed. Instead of all the people and lives involved in making that photo happen, you typed in a few keywords and clicked a few checkboxes and the image appeared as if by magic.

And I think that’s lazy.

But the worst part is that I think it makes your book look lazy, too. Once again, I believe it sends a subconscious message to your readers that makes them wonder if you took the same approach to writing and editing your book as you did when you created your ads.

Did you just take the lazy and cheap approach? Did you even write the book yourself? If you’re advertising it using AI-generated art, what’s to guarantee the book isn’t AI-generated as well?

I think using AI-generated art to advertise your book reflects horribly on your book and does nothing to represent the time, dedication, and passion you (hopefully) spent writing it.

Conclusion

I think those are two very solid reasons why I hate authors using AI-generated images to advertise their books – but as I said earlier, this is just my opinion.

There are two other things I think it’s important to mention, both of which undermine my argument. The first is whether or not advertising using AI-generated artwork actually works or not.

I couldn’t tell you.

I’ve never personally tried it. However, I’ve seen enough AI-generated ads in my feed recently to assume there must be something to it. The goal of an ad is to get potential readers clicking on it, after all, and if AI-generated art can deliver that, why shouldn’t authors use it? 

Trying to advertise self-published books is not for the faint of heart. It’s a very tricky business to make a profit in. If AI-generated art provides low-cost clicks and impressions, it becomes less a personal choice and more of a business imperative to use it. If it’s the difference between making a profit and losing money, how squeamish are you willing to get?

And secondly, AI-generated art is getting better all the time. Right now it’s generally pretty obvious when you’re looking at images generated by a computer. However, it’s not always obvious – and art generated by really smart designers, who really know how to write prompts, is practically impossible to tell from the real thing.

The AI-generated art we see now is the worst it’s going to look. Every single day, AI’s ability to create realistic images is getting better and better. Soon – perhaps disturbingly soon – you really won’t be able to tell the difference between an AI-generated image and reality.

And when that point is reached, what other reservations could an author have for not wanting to use it?

The appeal of writing and self-publishing has always been the low barrier to entry, and soon AI will give authors access to eye-catching graphics and bespoke images that would have once required a professional photoshoot to achieve. You’d have to be nuts not to want to take that opportunity. It’ll be a bigger industry disruption than the invention of the digital camera.

It terrifies me!

AI is growing more and more powerful each and every day, and perhaps that’s really the biggest reason I hate authors using it to generate art for their ads. It marks a transition from one era of storytelling into another, and while I can’t stop the march of technological progress, I can still rebel against it with every iota of my being.

But what do you think?

What are your opinions on authors using AI-generated art to promote their books? Do you use it yourself? We’d love to hear your opinions, your results, and your thoughts on how AI is going to impact the future of digital self-publishing.

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Like it or not, Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, but how does it impact authors? Can it really be used as a replacement to write books, and if so, should companies like Amazon be moving to ban AI-authors from their KDP platform?  With such a new and rapidly changing technology, there are often more questions than answers, especially when that technology seems to threaten jobs.

To help make sense of it all, Ginger is looking at the current state of Artificial Intelligence and how it applies to writing. Is it time for publishing companies to try and put a stop to it, or is it already too late? And more importantly, do authors really have anything to worry about?

It may still be in its infancy, but Artificial Intelligence is already changing the very nature of the world around us. It seems like we hear new examples of this daily, such as when IBM announced they were planning to replace 7,800 jobs with AI and automation in coming years, or when the UK’s British Telecom declared that they were planning to replace more than 10,000 jobs with new technology powered by AI.

For those in the creative fields, AI has proven to be something of a double-edged sword. Services like ChatGPT have been an incredible help for generating social media posts and suggesting taglines and titles. However, more and more self-published authors are concerned that AI-generated content could be about to replace books written by human beings.

It’s not a conspiracy theory, either. In February of this year, over 200 self-published ebooks listed ChatGPT as one of the authors – and it’s suspected that countless more were submitted that had been penned by AI-authors, but published under a real person’s name.

Given how highly competitive self publishing on Amazon has already become, many authors are concerned that their books will be overshadowed by titles generated by AI – and real writing will become obsolete.

The danger of AI writing

Elon Musk, one of the original founders of OpenAI was recently quoted saying: “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production, in the sense that it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction.”

For those of us who’ve watched the Terminator movies, or remember HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, this might seem like an ominous message. If artificial intelligence is the equivalent of Pandora’s Box, it’s already been opened and is already wreaking havoc across the world.

In terms of publishing, though, it’s still uncertain how big the impact of AI-written content will be.

Yes, there were 200 titles published using AI in February of this year alone – but it’s also worth pointing out that very few of them made much of an impact on the marketplace. Reuters reported on one author named Frank White, who published a 119-page novella written by artificial intelligence called Galactic Pimp. The book took him mere seconds to produce – but with a 2.3 rating on just three reviews, it’s arguable whether or not even those few seconds were productively spent.

The fact is that long-form content produced by AI-authors is still nowhere near as engaging, entertaining, or human as content written by real people – and readers are aware of that! In one of the book’s one-star reviews, Watchman writes that Galactic Pimp features: “…characters whose every action seems tinny and flat, as well as a plot that is at once ridiculous and predictable.”

So, given that AI-generated books are still unsatisfying for readers, it’s arguable that the influx of AI-content isn’t really going to impact self-published authors that much – especially since Amazon has already embedded advertising so extensively into their platform that books published without any marketing behind them are generally invisible.

But will that always be the case? As artificial intelligence becomes more and more sophisticated, should authors be concerned that the future of literature will be in robotic hands?

Should Amazon ban books written by AI-authors?

Understandably, as AI language models like ChatGPT become more advanced, questions have arisen regarding their impact on self-publishing – and whether platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing should ban titles written by AI.

There’s no doubt that AI-written titles undermine the authenticity and humanity that readers cherish in their books, and that publishing AI-generated content might continue to flood the market with low-quality and derivative titles. There’s also a concern about how these books fit into the legal context of self-publishing and intellectual property rights, with some fearing plagiarism and many questioning whether existing copyright laws can even be applied to AI generated work.

But at the moment Amazon has no rules regarding the publishing of AI-generated content, and no means to uphold such a rule even if it did exist. The more sophisticated AI-authors become, the more difficult it also becomes to pinpoint content written by programs like ChatGPT – which ultimately means that any limitations set by Amazon might be unenforceable.

But there are people arguing that the best response to the rise of AI is to embrace the technology, not spurn it – since the limitations of AI might mean it never gets to the point at which authors need to be in fear for their jobs.

The limitations of Artificial Intelligence

I’d argue that no matter how “good” artificial intelligence becomes, it’s never going to replace human beings when it comes to the production of meaningful, well-written, and (most importantly) commercially-successful fiction.

There’s evidence to support this belief, too. Recently GPT-3, the fourth version of ChatGPT, was used to complete several exams – including the Uniform Bar Exam, Law School Admission Test (LSAT), Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), and the Advanced Placement (AP) exams.

For the most part, the ChatGPT-engineered exams scored incredibly high. AI basically aced the LSATS and GRE. However, it failed both English language and English Literature exams – strongly suggesting that the cognitive complexity needed to contextualize and generate the written word is one that remains outside of its abilities; and perhaps always will be. (And in case you’re wondering, GPT-4 didn’t do much better on similar exams.)

After all, the most effective writing is that which generates an emotional response – and when it’s written by a computer program that cannot feel emotions, writing can’t help but feel inherently flat and unemotional. Reading AI-generated books like Galactic Pimp is fun precisely because of how weird, obscure, and inhuman the text is – and I’m not sure that’s likely to change any time soon!

Yes, there are authors finding success with AI by using tools like Novel AI (which we covered in a recent podcast) but these are essentially all tools. They can help authors write faster and more fluently, but the work they produce still needs that human direction to be engaging.

And writing a book remains only part of the battle. Given the prevalence of advertising on Amazon, and the oversaturation of self-published titles on the platform, it’s become clear that successful authors know how to write books that engage and make them visible to potential audiences through advertising and marketing.

For AI-written books to pose any real threat to authors, they’d have to be marketed just as aggressively – and there’s no quick and easy artificial intelligence tool created to do that (at least not yet.)

Plus, the secret to a successful book is for it to be good – and even if they were marketed effectively, books written by AI still aren’t the kind of thing that readers eagerly engage with. Lee Child and EL James don’t need to worry about their books being dethroned by AI-created content anytime soon because few people are reading complete AI-written content for anything other than amusement value.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m aware that things can change. However, I truly believe that AI will usher in a brighter future for aspiring authors and creators, and not the other way around. There are still so many ways to be successful in this industry, so rather than worry about AI-authors replacing us, we flesh and blood authors should instead be using the technology to help us work faster or more efficiently.

Do you agree? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below – and keep an eye on the blog, because we’ll definitely have more content about AI to come in the very near future.

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In part one of this blog, I went over an issue that recently affected a number of authors in which their Amazon accounts were wrongly terminated, and the hassle and pain they had to go through to exonerate themselves. I spent a lot of time discussing what happened, how and why I think the current system works the way it does, and the realities of what I believe is unlikely to ever change (and why).

But that doesn’t mean the system can’t be vastly improved upon, we just need to make sure to ask for the right things. Today I’ll go over the changes I think Amazon would have a hard time arguing against, while still providing authors with a defense against the devastating consequences of having their entire careers unfairly ripped away.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. – Reinhold Niebuhr

We’ve always lived in an imperfect world, although these days that’s truer than ever. As authors, we also work within an imperfect system. It can be stressful, as there are so many things outside of our control and accepting what we are powerless to change isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

Last week I went over some of those things.

Most authors hate how vague many of Amazon’s rules are, and think it’s ridiculous that even those accused of breaking them aren’t told exactly what they did wrong. Unfortunately, those things in particular are ones I believe authors need to accept as unchangeable, and wasting our time and energy arguing about them will go nowhere.

But just because those things won’t change doesn’t mean there aren’t changes that could be made to vastly improve the system and processes we have to deal with.

Authors shouldn’t live in fear of waking up to find that their entire careers have been wiped away, with little to no warning, with the onus on them to figure out who to contact, how to reach them, and what is needed to convince them to have another look at their case. Because just taking another look is sometimes all that’s needed, as it was in Lexi Ostrow’s case. The current system is flawed, leading to author accounts being terminated erroneously – either by some rogue algorithm that determined they had broken a rule they weren’t even aware of, or some poorly trained front-line rep getting something wrong.

Trying to build a perfect system is an exercise in futility. Mistakes will always be made, and both authors and Amazon need to accept that. Innocent people will sometimes get swept up and unfairly accused.

It’s how those mistakes are handled that needs to change. That’s what can change.

Warnings should always precede the more drastic account termination step. A clear and easy to follow process for resolving these issues should be available to the accused, and a properly trained group or committee must be formed that are dedicated to investigating and helping to resolve these issues in a timely manner, whenever they are appealed.

Those types of changes won’t hamper Amazon’s ongoing fight against the various scams and cons that target their system and customers. But they will make the system fairer and safer for those that are doing their best to play by the rules and simply make a living for themselves and their families.

What Needs to Change?

If we can’t expect clearer rules or to be told precisely what we did wrong, what can be done to make things better?

As I mentioned above, the changes that I think would make the most impact while still allowing Amazon to continue to keep scammers and true bad actors from exploiting their system all revolve around simply implementing a clear process of warnings and appeals, with a group of properly trained staff that can be easily contacted and ready to investigate issues in a timely manner.

Broken down, there are four main changes I’m suggesting, and I’ll detail out each one to explain why I think it’s important.

(One caveat here – I know Amazon is more than just books, and while I assume most of these issues are not unique to this category and thus many of the solutions could probably be applied elsewhere, I don’t know enough about any other products or areas to comment on them, and so my suggestions here will be written specifically as they pertain to authors and our concerns.)

1: Have a clearly defined number of warnings before account termination

Of the various accounts of authors that were hit with this issue that I’m aware of, only Lexi was sent an email that could be loosely described as a warning. The others had their accounts terminated immediately, at the first whiff of Amazon determining there was an issue.

It was Lexi that got an email prior to account termination, but I refer to that as a “loosely described” warning because it was actually resolved quickly, with Amazon admitting they made a mistake and there was no violation after all. From that perspective, it shouldn’t even be considered a warning but merely a mistakenly sent email. However, as her account termination happened shortly after, and the email indicated it was due to issues with the same book as the original warning email, it’s likely that the two were related.

You can read Lexi’s account for more details on how it all went down, but essentially what happened was that during the review process of a newly submitted book, she was sent a clearly automated email that indicated her book had violated some unspecific rule and wouldn’t be published. She replied saying she believed that to be in error and got a quick response admitting that after further review it was determined she had been incorrectly blocked. The book was then approved and published, but no further details were offered (despite Lexi asking for some).

Yet just a couple of days later, Lexi was sent an email informing her that her entire author account had been terminated for violations on that very same book that Amazon had already exonerated.

Hard to say what happened exactly, but despite their correlation in time, my best guess is that the initial violation email was completely unrelated to the account termination email. By that I mean that the termination didn’t come because Lexi had been previously warned. After all, not only did Amazon admit that the initial violation email was sent in error, but none of the other authors hit with account closures reported getting any warnings at all. To me, that indicates that whatever issue it was that triggered the account termination emails occurred after Lexi’s book had been published, but it used the same flawed criteria as was used to trigger her original violation email. This resulted in her getting swept up again (along with all the other affected authors).

This indicates that an author, regardless of whether they have ever been accused of any violations in the past, can, at any time, have their accounts closed, unpaid earnings withheld, and all books removed from sale.

That is absolutely unacceptable.

An account termination should be a last resort, and only applied after prior warnings.

Now, I’m aware that Amazon has rules designed to protect themselves, that basically say they can do all of these things for any reason whatsoever, yadda, yadda.  They have rules like that for the same reason they keep other rules vague, to give them the leeway to act when they need to act and dole out the most extreme punishments possible when necessary.

That gives them enormous power in the author/publisher relationship, but as Spiderman has taught us, with great power comes great responsibility. They need processes in place designed to ensure that this type of extreme punishment is only sent as a last resort.

No author should be hit with an account termination due to their first and only rule violation, and it probably shouldn’t be some forever existing running count, either. For example, let’s say the rule was one warning and then the second violation results in account termination.

If an author got a warning but then went on to publish without issue for a couple of years until some new violation was flagged, that should NOT be considered their second violation and trigger account closure.

Personally, I also think there should be more than one warning before an account is shut down, but I’m not going to come up with actual numbers because those would be completely arbitrary and definitely require a lot of thought and discussion. But assuming some number of warnings could be agreed upon, I think there are two further considerations that should be applied.

1. Warnings should have a clear appeals process (as outlined in the later steps below). If the violation is resolved (no obvious intentional wrongdoing found and problem fixed to Amazon’s satisfaction) or found to be incorrectly identified as a violation in the first place, that warning should be removed from the author’s account and not counted towards the limit needed before account closure.
2. Warnings should have some sort of expiration date. Even if the initial warning wasn’t resolved to Amazon’s satisfaction, there could be a variety of legitimate reasons for that, not the least of which is that due to the lack of clarity on what the issue was, the author may have been unable to resolve it properly and maybe just gave up on that book. If the author then published other books for some period of time and not had any further issues, that strike against them shouldn’t be counted forever. At some point it should expire. Maybe that’s after a month or two, or a year, or whatever. Again, I’m not proposing a specific expiration date, just that there should be one.

2: No author accounts should ever be closed automatically by AI (aka the Skynet clause)

I would love to believe that this is already the case, but I honestly don’t think that it is.

Now, I completely understand the need to resort to algorithms and artificial intelligence tools to help deal with the sheer volume of products that get submitted to Amazon on a daily basis. It’s probably the only way to really handle it, so I don’t fault them for it.

To put it in perspective, while it’s hard to find true numbers, one estimate puts the total number of new kindle books published per day around 7500. With those kinds of numbers, it really is unrealistic to think even Amazon could afford to employ humans to properly review each and every one.

However, there has to be a limit on how much power those automated processes are given. We’ve seen time and again that as good as those algorithms are, they make mistakes.  Not just in the cases that led to the recent account terminations, but we see them elsewhere as well. Readers often have reviews blocked or removed due to being wrongly targeted by some automated process. And we know that they were incorrectly identified because when and if they can finally reach the right people willing to investigate, the reviews are almost invariably restored.

I specifically say the “right people”, because Amazon’s training around many of these issues is very poor (or non-existent) and I’ve seen frequent examples of front line customer service reps getting even the clearly stated rules wrong, never mind how inconsistently they handle the more vague ones. This means that when an appeal is made to the only people that can be easily reached, the poorly trained first line of support, the appeal goes nowhere. We saw this in Lexi’s case as well, where she had about 20 responses denying her any help or recognition of the problem, and only once she got the attention of an executive willing to give her issue some attention was it finally resolved – along with an admission that she had done nothing wrong in the first place.

If we can’t even trust regular Amazon employees to properly judge these cases, we certainly shouldn’t trust them to an algorithm that is going to be making black and white decisions based on an unknown set of criteria and never able to follow up for further info or judge the nuances of specific situations. Using that as a first line of defense, to flag potential issues to be further reviewed by an actual team of trained humans is fine, but it should never be used to make any final decisions.

That’s why I refer to this one as the Skynet clause. In the Terminator franchise, Skynet was the AI created by the military as an automated defense program. It was designed to analyze and neutralize threats, but eventually turns on humanity when it decides that it was its own greatest threat.

So yeah, let’s not give these algos too much independence and the ability to Terminate author accounts. We’ve all seen how well that turns out.

3: All violations and appeals should lead to properly trained and accessible humans

As I said above, I totally understand the need to employ automation to handle the sheer number of new books that get submitted, but that should only ever be used to identify potential violations that are then passed over to a human for further review before any action is taken. But this only makes sense if that human is properly trained, with a clear understanding of the rules for the products they’re reviewing.

We’re talking specifically about books here, but I think it’s important to recognize that the rules around violations likely differ based on product categories.  For books you might have rules around copyright violations or offensive subject matter, for example, and those rules would not apply (at all, or at least in the same way) to other categories – for example, clothing and accessories. That category likely has other specific violations that could occur, such as counterfeit products.

It’s not enough to train a rep on violations in general, they need to be properly trained on the categories that they oversee, so that they have a clear understanding of the rules and issues of that category.

So what is really needed here is a team or committee of full time employees that are properly trained on the issues that surround books and publishing. How big this team is really depends on how many books get flagged in a day, and what they can investigate in a reasonable timeframe.

Ideally, this team would investigate every potential violation before a warning is sent, or an account is closed, but if that isn’t possible then at the very least, they should handle each and every appeal made by an author.

Even if the 7500 books a day is accurate, it’s hard to know how many of those would get flagged for review. I would like to believe that the number is very small, and thus this specialized team could investigate them all within a reasonably short turn around period. Without more information though, it’s impossible to guess. I suspect, however, that if the number is too high then that likely points to a different issue altogether. If most of those cases are false positives then your algos need to be tightened up or tweaked. If most of them are legit, then Amazon likely needs to find a more effective deterrent against people intentionally breaking the rules.

But even if they only looked at appeals, that would likely be good enough provided they could turn them around quickly – within hours or for the more complicated cases, a day or two. For those that might argue that they would still be overwhelmed because everyone, including the scammers, would appeal, I would have to disagree. I think the vast majority of appeals would come from those that were either innocent, or those technically guilty but unaware of the rule they broke and did so accidentally. In both cases, they deserve an appeal. Of the remaining offenders, the ones guilty of intentional wrongdoing as part of some scheme or scam, I would expect only the most brazen of those to ask for an appeal, and likely to their own downfall.  After all, if you are knowingly doing something you shouldn’t do, would you really invite further scrutiny by asking for your case to be looked at even deeper? It’s unlikely to result in anything other than an even harsher penalty than was originally handed out. It would be far safer for those scammers to just cut and run, and if they really wanted to try ripping Amazon or their customers off again, they could just create a new account.

The appeals team mandate

The mandate of this team should be protecting Amazon and Amazon customers from bad actors, NOT punishing authors that may have inadvertently done something they shouldn’t have done. The team should be tasked with upholding the SPIRIT of the rules far more than the letter of them. Especially knowing that without a proper understanding of precisely what they did wrong, authors are ill suited to defend themselves. That’s why it’s vital that this team understand that the authors are not the enemy. That it’s absolutely possible to advocate for them while still protecting Amazon from those that wish to take advantage of their platform.

To do this, the team needs a very good understanding of the rules. However, as I noted last week, it’s quite possible that there are no more clear set of rules internally or, at the very least, that anyone beyond the highest levels have access to. But that’s not a deal breaker here, because given the mandate above, it’s actually more important that this team understand the reasoning for the rules. And I don’t think there is any reason to keep those secret. For the most part, that simply means they should understand what sort of scams and advantages the rules are designed to prevent.

To really investigate this, the team should not be afraid to contact the author for more information, and remain accessible to the author to provide that info directly, whether it be by email or phone.

4: The Amazon appeals process should be clearly defined, easy to follow, and provide quick resolution

And then finally, whatever processes are ultimately put in place need to be very clearly defined, easy to follow, and promise a fair and timely resolution.

That means that, unlike the rules they’re enforcing, the Amazon appeals process should be very detailed and clear, with no room for ambiguity. A clear and easy to follow process will provide authors with the confidence they deserve in knowing they will be able to defend themselves and their work should the need arise. This process should be posted on Amazon somewhere, and each warning or termination email that is sent should include a link to it.

Most importantly, the process needs to move quickly. Every case of an author being unfairly blocked from publishing or having their accounts closed results in a loss of income for them and their family. The longer the case drags on, the larger the impact on their lives and careers it might have.

As I said earlier, if there are so many appeals that the team is overwhelmed, that points to a different problem entirely. In a fairly designed and properly staffed system, the number of authors needing to appeal a bad decision should be low enough that no turnaround should take more than a day or two at most, with most resolving far quicker.  Lexi’s case dragged on for over a week but not due to any  complexity around the actual investigation into the issue. Almost all of that time was her asking for help and being completely ignored or dismissed. Once she actually found someone willing to look into her case, the resolution was almost immediate.

What now?

In most free and democratic countries, the right for an accused to face their accuser and defend themselves is pretty firmly baked in, and without being told precisely what it is you are accused of makes it almost impossible to properly defend yourself. Unfortunately, Amazon isn’t a country (even though their market cap compared to GDP makes them larger than most countries) and breaking their rules is not treated the same as committing a crime, which effectively means they can do whatever they want.  You’re playing in their sandbox, you have to play by their rules.

But maybe that needs to change.  

Whatever your feelings are about Amazon in general, it would be tough to argue that the eBook and self-publishing landscape would be where it is today without them. They had a large hand in building it into what it is, and many of us that work in this industry have much to thank them for.

But along with all of that comes a responsibility that Amazon needs to start taking more seriously.  Yes, they have and continue to do a lot towards making their platform more secure and free from the scammers and crooks that seek to take advantage of it, but they’ve also done their best to monopolize the market and stifle their competition, limiting the options that authors have in making a living self-publishing elsewhere.

This has put many authors in a position where they rely on Amazon for their entire income, or at least a very large part of it. But as has become painfully obvious over the last few weeks, Amazon’s system provides no assurances that some rogue bit of code, or human error, won’t result in everything being taken away, with no warning whatsoever. What’s more, if that does happen, they’ve provided no process for getting everything back, leaving the onus on the author to simply flounder around, begging for their case to be heard by someone with the power to actually help.

Look, no one is expecting an infallible system incapable of error. But it’s how those mistakes are handled, how the accused are treated, that is at issue here. Even if we accept the notion that for this system to work they have to turn conventional wisdom on its head and assume all accused are “guilty until proven innocent”, there must still be a way for the innocent to be exonerated fairly and quickly. And that’s what is missing from this whole process.

There are ways to improve the system. Ways that really don’t put too much of a burden on Amazon or inhibit their ability to fight against scammers, yet would still make a world of difference for the people that choose or are forced to work within their ecosystem.

We might be working in a digital world, but the authors behind all of those eBooks are real people, many of whom rely on their writing as a sole source of income to provide for their family. Providing a clear and fair appeals process for those accused of wrongdoing is not only reasonable, but should be obvious and is completely overdue.

The only way any of this will happen, though, is if authors take a stand. Make some noise about this issue. Ensure that Amazon hears us and takes this issue seriously. We need to start talking about this issue publicly, since these days that’s the best way to get the attention of a behemoth like Amazon.

But it doesn’t have to be done in a negative way. If you go on the attack, they’ll be forced to defend, and then nothing will get done. Talk honestly and rationally. If what we’re asking for are realistic changes that are simply designed to make a one-sided system a bit fairer for the community providing the content for that system, we’ll be much harder to ignore.

What I’ve proposed are just my ideas and thoughts on what I personally think would work and be acceptable – certainly not perfect, but better, at least, than what we have now.  And if you agree with these then please share this blog around on social media or to your author friends so that we can keep the discussion going and make enough noise to be heard.  Or if you have your own thoughts and ideas about what should and can change, then feel free to share those instead – or even add them to the comment section below. 

Either way, it’s time to stop sitting on the sidelines and expecting something to change instead of actively working towards making it happen.

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The post An Amazon Appeals Process is Long Overdue – Part 2 appeared first on HiddenGemsBooks.

A couple of weeks ago, some authors were surprised by a disturbing email from Amazon informing them that due to some vague and unspecific rule violations, their author accounts had been terminated and any outstanding payments would be withheld. These authors did nothing wrong, after a lot of time and effort on their part most were eventually exonerated and had things restored, but the fact that this can happen to anyone at anytime and for no good reason should not only serve as a harsh reminder of the dangers of having all your eggs in one basket, but as further evidence that Amazon needs a proper appeals process for when they inevitably get things wrong again.

There are various arguments for “going wide” and publishing books on multiple online storefronts, but one of the big ones is the diversification you get by not having to rely on just one site “just in case”. I’m sure many authors that are Amazon exclusive discount this argument, figuring Amazon is too big to fail – or at the very least, if the winds begin to shift in support of moving elsewhere, there will be plenty of warning signs giving them enough time to move elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the events of these past couple of weeks have proven otherwise. If Amazon decides you’ve broken a rule, whether you did or not, they can and will shut you down immediately. There may be little to no warning, and certainly not enough time to shift your catalog elsewhere in time to adjust. Amazon doesn’t have to fail in the face of some new competitor before you’re catastrophically affected. They just have to decide to take it all away, and the onus will be on you to fight to get it all back.

And that really shouldn’t be something authors have to live in fear of.

What happened?

Starting a couple of weeks ago, a number of authors were sent notices that their Amazon accounts were terminated, their entire catalogue pulled, and all of their outstanding royalties were forfeit. In some cases this notification was the first they’d heard of any issues, and in other cases they were given some prior warning shortly before the termination. Not that it mattered, because the lack of info or any response for more info meant they could never have resolved it in time anyway.

I’ll provide a few more details below, but for those interested in reading the full story from an affected author, USA Today bestseller Lexi Ostrow wrote a 3 part blog on the whole ordeal as it was happening. To be clear, she was just one of the authors affected around the same time.  I’ve seen accounts by at least 2 other authors on private author groups that I can’t directly link to, and have heard talk of others both specifically and generally.

From what I’ve read, most of the author’s had very similar experiences with only a few minor variations, so I’m going to use Lexi’s post as my main source here as it is the most detailed. But where there are differences that I know of, I’ll call them out. With that said, here are the key points about how and what went down.

1. Some authors (but not all) were sent a notice about an issue with one of their books – in Lexi’s case she was sent an email that her new release contained some misleading info that may lead to a poor buying decision for customers. In Amazon’s typical vague fashion, it essentially just claimed that something about her book was similar to some other (undefined) book by someone else, but no further details were offered either in the original message or in response to her requests.
2. Soon after a new email arrived (for some authors there was no initial warning email, so this was their first email) stating that the author’s account had been terminated due to “…misleading content that have the potential to mislead or defraud our customers.” I’m not sure if all affected authors got the same message, but that’s what was in two separate email screenshots that I saw. They listed a single offending book and noted that the author’s account would be closed and they would no longer have any access to them, all books would be removed from sale, and they would receive none of their outstanding royalties.
3. Attempts to contact anyone at Amazon was as difficult and infuriating as usual. Throughout the more than weeklong process of getting this resolved, Lexi received about 20 different email responses telling her she was out of luck and nothing could be done. None of those responses ever offered any further info about what the actual issue was or which rules were broken. It was next to impossible to get anyone on the phone and certainly no one beyond low level reps. Apparently she was told that the KDP content team (the ones responsible for the ban) had no phone access.
4. For authors that continued to push and fight, the issue eventually got resolved although how that was done varies. For Lexi, it took 8 days and even then it was only because she took the issue to social media. Funny how that always seems to get more attention from a big company intent on ignoring you!

So first off, let’s be clear that in these cases where everything was resolved, there was no actual wrongdoing on the part of the accused. Amazon is well known for (eventually) reversing their decisions when they finally investigate something and determine an error was made, but I don’t know of any cases where they decide to let someone off that they actually believe was trying to get away with something.

No, they go after those people hard.

And in Lexi’s case at least, she was even told by the executive that eventually contacted her that while he didn’t know what caused her account termination in the first place, he does know that there was “no suspicious content” in her book.

Again though, the above is really just a quick summary of the issue and I encourage you to read Lexi’s blog and peruse some of those other links, and if you search around in other author forums you’re bound to find even more info about this. 

But that info is enough for most authors to see how bad this issue is, and how vulnerable they are – especially if writing is their full-time job, and even more so if they are exclusive to Amazon. For no valid reason whatsoever, any author, even a USA Today bestseller that has been writing for years, might wake up to find everything gone. And while this time it seems to have eventually gotten resolved, there is no clear reason why it happened in the first place or that any of it would have EVER been resolved if the authors hadn’t fought so hard to have someone actually look into the issue, despite being repeatedly told it was a closed issue and nothing could be done.

To expect change we have to ask for the right changes…

Now, ideally no author (or anyone else) should ever be falsely accused, but realistically, especially with what we know about how Amazon works, this type of thing is inevitable. It’s not just authors that get accused of things they didn’t do, I’m sure it happens across the product lines and I KNOW it happens to actual customers. I often hear from readers that had their legitimate Amazon reviews blocked or removed, but then eventually released when the customer pursues the issue.

So yes, mistakes or errors will happen and while it sucks when it happens, it’s unrealistic to simply argue that Amazon should (or could) simply make the whole process for everyone and everything infallible.

As a community of authors, we need to accept that because it’s not going to change.

What can and should change, however, is how these mistakes and errors are handled and resolved. That’s the part of the process that is completely broken and requires a complete overhaul, and is really where all the anger and outrage should be focused.

But even then, if we really want a chance at being heard and taken seriously, we have to be realistic in what we ask for and the changes we demand.

Let’s be frank, the chances that Amazon will change anything are probably pretty slim unless some real momentum around this issue begins to build. But even if that happened, even if Amazon was willing to listen and make changes, they will only do so if what we’re asking for is reasonable and realistic.

Let me clarify.  Reasonable and realistic to them.

For example, most of the anger around this issue is centered around how vague Amazon’s rules are that authors are expected to follow, and many can’t understand why Amazon doesn’t just clarify them. Or, at the very least, tell an accused author exactly what they did wrong so that they could defend themselves.

From an author’s point of view, that sounds completely reasonable and realistic. From Amazon’s perspective, however, I would bet that’s one of the asks that would make this whole thing completely dead in the water.

Since we’re authors, let’s put this in terms of a novel we’re reading where there is a clear hero and villain. We root for the hero because his way is right and just, and we see everything that the villain is doing as evil and unreasonable. Until suddenly the author flips the perspective and writes a chapter from the villain’s point of view. All of sudden we understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and even if we still don’t agree with their actions, we at least have a better understanding of how the world is not always as black and white as it seems.

That’s what we have to keep in mind here. Even though as authors it might seem obvious what needs to be fixed to make this problem go away, from Amazon’s point of view those same things might be ones they are unwilling to even consider changing. So to make sure we ask for the right things, we have to first understand what we shouldn’t bother asking for, and why.

Amazon’s Perspective

There are many things that infuriate authors about working with Amazon, but I’m going to keep this discussion focused on the two that are most relevant to this whole situation, and why these issues exist as they do in the first place.

Vague and General rules

The first and arguably one of the most vexing issues is how completely vague and generalized many of Amazon’s rules are. This not only makes it next to impossible to know if you’re even violating them, but also can (and does) make their enforcement seem completely subjective and arbitrary.

In fact, we probably shouldn’t even refer to them as “rules” at all, since they don’t actually meet the dictionary definition of the word.

Rule: one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere

Amazon’s rules are rarely “explicit” or “understood” by anyone – often including their own staff. What Amazon enforces is more a set of vague guidelines, often grouped together in a way that may at first seem to allow them to be more specific, but in practice actually allows them to be even more ambiguous.

Take the example from Lexi’s blog, where their original email claimed that something about her book “causes a misleading customer experience because it impairs consumer’s ability to make good buying decisions.”

On its own, that could be almost anything, and is also completely subjective. What one person might find misleading, another person might find completely clear.

But the email does provide more detail, let’s see if that helps?

Items that can cause a misleading customer experience include

• Similarity of the contributor name to another author

• Similarity of the title to a previously published book

• Similarity of the cover to a previously published book

• Similarity of the publisher listed in the book details to another publisher

This is an example of how breaking down an issue into more specifics isn’t always more helpful, particularly when you miss the point of doing it by providing all of them together and essentially just saying “here, it might be one of these.”

More importantly, though, is how subjective they all are. You could literally take almost any self-published book that uses stock art and argue that the cover is similar to another previously published book because it used the same stock photo.

And author names are not unique because actual names are not unique. Another quick search on Amazon can find a whole host of authors with the same or similar names. And if Amazon wants the author names to be unique, why don’t they make that field in KDP unique – so as soon as an author fills in the pen name with a name that already exists, they’ll have to change it?  So instead of a bunch of books written by different authors named “Bob Smith”, for example, you might have “Bob Smith2” or “The Real Bob Smith”. Not EVERYONE uses pen names.

But wait, that wouldn’t work because “Bob Smith2” is probably too similar to “Bob Smith1”…

The same goes for titles. I just put a random word (“Broken” in case you’re interested) into Amazon’s search and saw a number of books with that title or some variation of it. Who decides how similar is similar enough to trigger an account termination?

So why can’t Amazon just be clearer with their rules and tell us exactly what is and isn’t allowed?

That does seem like the obvious solution here, and it’s one authors have always asked for in the past, and more so now in response to this current situation.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things that I don’t see Amazon ever bending on, so it’s pointless for us to continue to demand it. The problem boils down to all the bad actors out there, the people or companies that try to make their living by running some scam or another and using the world’s biggest online marketplace to do it. 

Yes, scammers are why we all can’t have nice things.

Amazon has had an ongoing battle against scammers for almost as long as they’ve been around – people looking for ways to beat the system, or at the very least get an unfair edge on the competition. From selling fake or counterfeit products, to selling fake reviews, to the parade of Kindle Unlimited changes driven by authors trying to get more from the KU pool than they deserved.

As an example, let’s look at KU.  When Amazon launched it, they began by paying authors an equal amount per book borrowed.  Well, it didn’t take long for authors to realize that if they were getting paid the same amount for 5000 words as they were for 100,000 words, it was far more lucrative to pump out a bunch of 5000 word short stories. And that’s exactly what happened.

This then led to KU version 2, which paid based on the number of pages read.  This stemmed the tide of short stories, but because of how they were calculating pages read (by furthest page opened), some authors began adding links to their books that would take readers from the front of the book right to the end, triggering a payout of the total number of pages in the book. When combined with book stuffing, the practice of adding extra “bonus” material (sometimes entire other books) to the end of their books, this led to massive payouts to those authors and eventually KU 3.

Now, I use the history of KU as an example for two reasons.

First, because it’s a great, familiar and relevant example of how Amazon has to continually work to keep things “fair” for everyone. (I put fair in quotes because I know that many authors hardly consider KU a fair system, but hopefully can still recognize that within the context of the system as it is, Amazon has made changes to stamp out a lot of the biggest ways people were trying to game it.)

Secondly, I think there are some people out there that don’t necessarily think that some of those KU “scams” were scams at all – but rather entrepreneurial thinkers that simply saw a way to exploit a system for maximum gain without breaking any actual “rules”. That’s a debate for another time, but it speaks to the point I want to make here.

Regardless of whether you think that switching to short stories in order to make more money than authors writing full length novels was a good, right or moral decision, the fact is that it wasn’t “against the rules.”  There was no rule that said a book in KU had to be a certain number of words (and there still isn’t.)  Just like, when KU 2 launched, there were no rules against book padding and links taking you to the back of the book (there are now.) 

There are always going to be people looking to exploit loopholes and get away with things that may not break the letter of the law, but the spirit of it.  The problem is that in cases like that, Amazon really can’t do a lot about it other than continue to change the rules (and/or the system, in the case of KU). But if they did change the rules to block every possible sort of violation that has or could happen, the rules would eventually be so complex that only a lawyer could understand them.

Instead, they’ve taken the opposite approach. They’ve made rules that are generalized and vague, which essentially gives them free reign to claim a wide variety of actions are in violation and then police them as necessary.

Clear and well-defined rules inevitably lead to loopholes that bad actors could not only exploit, but also get away with by saying that they didn’t actually do anything wrong. General rules don’t stop the scammers, but they do allow Amazon to come down hard on them when they’re discovered.

In theory, that sort of system could work, provided that the entity enforcing the rules could be trusted to do so fairly and consistently, and by ensuring that if an innocent person is falsely accused they had a clear and speedy process for getting exonerated. Unfortunately, neither of those things is happening now.

Lack of Violation Examples

The second issue that infuriates authors, and this is the one most authors are angriest about when it comes to this account termination situation, is that when Amazon does determine there was a violation, they refuse to give examples or specifics about what the violation was. Or even be specific about which exact rule was broken, as we saw in Lexi’s example above.

This problem is actually very much related to the first one so I’m not going to spend as much time on it. I really only break it out separately because I’ve seen so many incensed by this.

Surely if someone breaks a rule and is being punished for it, they should be given the specifics of the violation in order for them to have a chance at defending themselves?

I personally agree with that sentiment in principle, but again, I think there is a clear reason why Amazon doesn’t provide those specifics, and you already know what it is because I just wrote all about it in the section above.

By telling a bad actor what it was that got them caught, they would then know exactly what to do differently the next time they try. If they provided this information then there would really be no point in them having general and vague rules in the first place.

Essentially, this whole thing is Amazon employing their version of security through obscurity.

And I think we can all agree that telling authors to keep the information to themselves is unrealistic. In this day and age, where people tweet or post about everything, that information would be out there the moment it was revealed to the very first author. Even if it just appeared somewhere “anonymously”.

In fact, the very absence of a leaked set of rules on the internet tells us something else, something that makes this whole thing much more frustrating but has always been suspected.

That is, that most Amazon employees don’t know what the real and clear rules are, either.  One would love to believe that while the publicly available rules are vague and general, in order to fairly and uniformly apply those rules to authors, Amazon employees themselves should have access to a much clearer and specific set that they can refer to.

Unfortunately, given that these rules haven’t ever “leaked” despite the low wages, poor conditions, and large employee turnaround that Amazon is notorious for, is proof enough that no such list exists.  Or if it does exist, it is only available at the very highest level – a level that most accused authors asking for their cases to be appealed never get access to.  Perhaps that’s why Lexi’s executive contact eventually admitted that there was no actual violation, despite Lexi having been told differently from about 20 previous Amazon employees.

Where do we go from here?

The American legal system might employ an “innocent until proven guilty” policy, but Amazon works completely opposite of that. To them, if you’re accused then you’re guilty until (and if) you can prove otherwise.

Although, I imagine Amazon sees it differently. I think if pressed, they would likely claim that they assume everyone is innocent until they find them doing something wrong, at which point they’re guilty. But since they skip the whole trial by judge and jury of their peers bit, I wouldn’t put much stock in that point of view.

But that’s the whole problem.

There is no clear, obvious, easy or reliable way to appeal a decision that Amazon has made. And while I don’t doubt that they shut down FAR more actual scammers than innocents, we’ve seen time and again that their system is flawed. Authors are falsely accused, and even if that’s just a rare or occasional occurrence, that doesn’t make it acceptable. Not when more can be done.

Amazon has long had a shoot first and ask questions never approach, and that needs to change.

This industry may have started out small, with a few self-published authors trying their hand at writing in the hopes of making enough money to buy a case of beer or have a fancy dinner. But over the years, the industry has grown and there are a great many authors that earn their entire living, support their whole family, on the money they earn self-publishing on Amazon. So when Amazon decides to shut someone down, they aren’t just taking away a few bucks and sending them off to go try something else. They’re essentially firing them for their job. Yanking away a career they may have spent years building up.

For our part, as authors, I think we need to accept that due to the nature of how Amazon works and what they’re up against, mistakes will happen sometimes.

But what we should not accept is that those mistakes can be catastrophic to our livelihoods.

We should not accept that decisions made in secret, or by some algorithm, are final and cannot be appealed.

Yes, we have to be realistic in terms of what we can expect or ask for, but we should not accept that the system as it is now cannot be changed or improved. Because it can.

A clear and proper channel for appeals can make the system fairer to authors, take away the fear that everything could be stripped away at any point (even if it is just temporarily), yet still be viable for Amazon.

Today I’ve talked a lot about what I think is unrealistic to ask Amazon for, but next week the focus shifts. Not just for what we can ask for, but for what we should be demanding.

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The post An Amazon Appeals Process is Long Overdue – Part 1 appeared first on HiddenGemsBooks.

Amazon has been experimenting with their ‘sponsored’ adverts for books – placing them in ever-more prevalent positions throughout a customer’s shopping experience. The question is – have they taken it too far, and have these Amazon advertising spots begun to negatively impact both the success of authors and the reader experience?  Ginger gives his opinion on the issue. What do you think?

Recently, I was on Amazon organizing my catalog of books – and like I’ve done a thousand times, I typed my pen name into the search bar expecting to see all the books that come up related to it, independent of my Author Profile page.

What did I get instead? Two ‘Sponsored’ books, neither of which were mine.

My books were there – but ‘beneath the fold’. This means I actually had to scroll down before I’d even get to see any books relevant to the terms I’d put into the search bar.

At first, I wondered if that was just me – as a small-time author on Amazon, maybe my books were subject to a slightly more aggressive advertising presence.

 But, no – I typed in ‘Stephen King’ and this is what I got back:

Astonishing, Stephen King – one of America’s most beloved and respected authors – has it even worse than I do! Not only are the top two results for the search term ‘Stephen King’ not books that he’d written, but a whole new line of advertising was thrown in for the ‘sponsored by Galaxy’s Edge’ content. Once again, you have to scroll down ‘below the fold’ to actually see any of his books.

Now, listen – I’m a free market capitalist as much as anybody, and I support Amazon strongly for everything they’ve given to independent authors…

…but this is ridiculous.

It’s ridiculous that you go to Amazon and search for an author’s name and they don’t give you books by that author – not without making you work for it by scrolling through their advertising. Not only is it a horrible user experience, it’s also impacting the success of authors.

I mean, I speak from personal experience with this – but I noticed a massive drop in my page reads and book sales in the middle of February this year – coincidentally, around the same time I’d really noticed the ‘Sponsored’ content ramping up. I’d had a pretty good and consistent run with my books, so I should have known how they would perform in terms of sales and Kindle Unlimited activity – and almost overnight they just stopped performing. Ever since then, my books have been getting better, my promotions tighter and my analytics even more granular; and it’s the same thing.

My only hypothesis? Amazon advertising has favored ‘Sponsored’ content to such a degree that now it’s negatively impacting an author’s ability to be seen on Amazon unless they are paying for that advertising themselves. In short, Amazon has become ‘pay to play.’

We really need somebody to dig down deep into the broader analytics of this, but to further back up my theory – when I stopped running AMS ads on two of my books… their sales disappeared.

Not slowed, but disappeared; like somebody turning off a faucet. I wasn’t spending very much – about $5 a day, per book – but I could see very clearly that without that spend, my books became invisible.

Now, I can understand why Amazon introduced their Amazon Marketing Services and I love the ability to purchase ads right on the Amazon shopping dashboard; but I feel there has to be a balance. Here are the reasons why I think this has gone too far:

• Readers aren’t being served relevant content. If somebody types ‘Stephen King’ into the search bar, you want Amazon to serve up links to Stephen King’s books – not books ‘like’ Stephen King’s novels. If that was the case, you could type in ‘horror’ or ‘thriller’ or even ‘books like Stephen King’s.’ If you type specific content into a search bar, you want that specific content delivered back to you – and the over-abundance of ‘Sponsored’ content now means that readers are having a much more difficult time finding the stuff they want to buy. Remember, you can pay to advertise your book with any author’s name as a keyword, even if your book isn’t remotely relevant to that author. So, somebody might type ‘Stephen King’ into the search bar and get served up three adverts for other ‘Sponsored’ books that could include Romance, YA, or any other genre. It doesn’t matter to Amazon. As long as that book’s advert uses Stephen King’s name as a keyword, and as long as the advertiser has the winning bid, that’s what people searching for ‘Stephen King’ will see.
• The content they are served isn’t guaranteed to be good. Likewise, one of the issues of Sponsored content is that practically any published book can be sponsored (with a few exceptions, like erotica) and there is no meaningful quality control in place. This is a problem because the world of independent and self-publishing is still the wild west, to a certain extent, and one of the ongoing issues is reader experience. Many self-published books are published unedited, and for a cash strapped author – knowing that his books aren’t going to be viewed without paying for the privilege – they might end up having to choose between paying for a good editor, or paying for advertising. As a result, not only will readers get served up less-than-relevant books, but there’s no guarantee those books will be good even if they click on them. In fact, the very setup discourages focusing on quality, which had been Amazon’s mission for years. Now it’s about spending the money to get your book seen.
• They’re turning Amazon into a ‘pay to play’ platform. One of the beautiful things about self-publishing on Amazon used to be that your books were featured alongside titles from the big ‘traditional publishers’, democratizing the whole process of publishing. As Amazon later focused more on shopper experience, this organically shifted to give preference to books with solid reviews and strong performance in the algorithm; which again was focused more on quality than advertising, and so provided a level playing field between self-published authors and traditional publishing, as long as those self-published authors were committed to quality. Now, however, that’s reversed – and the only way for your book to make a big splash is to pay Amazon money. This gives an unfair advantage to established authors and traditional publishers with a big marketing budget, and makes it even more difficult for new writers to ‘break into’ the industry. The sheer volume of ‘Sponsored’ content is basically eliminating everything that was once ideologically beautiful about the Kindle and self-publishing, and making Amazon just another curated platform to shift stuff people don’t really want.

There’s also a massive ripple to this shift, making other methods of marketing less effective. I’ve always been a huge proponent of leveraging the free promotional days that membership of KDP Select offers, and I pair each promotion with at least one newsletter service, so I can get my books downloaded as many times as possible. In the past, I’d buy a promotion and see my money returned within a day or so of it ending; as the thousands of downloads led to hundreds of sales and millions of pages read.

Recently, though, those same promotions deliver just as many free downloads… but not the sales and page reads afterward. Amazon has used ‘Sponsored’ content to obscure things like the ‘Also bought’ section to such a massive degree that the promotions that used to guarantee months of sales now barely make an impact; and newsletter sites that used to have a solid business model and deliver an excellent Return on Investment are really feeling the pinch.

As an author, I now feel that paying for Facebook and/or Amazon advertising – where you pay ‘per click’ – offers a better Return on Investment during a free promotion than a newsletter; and we’re seeing more and more newsletters go out of business as a result.

I mean, Amazon probably doesn’t care about third-party subscribers losing out on business – especially if those dollars end up going to them – but I personally feel for the businesses that developed to share free books with subscribers, and all those subscribers who used to get the opportunity to download free books through them.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it’s not that I’m opposed to Amazon advertising or ‘Sponsored’ content – in fact, I love it when it works for me! But it’s become too much. It’s starting to harm the publishing and shopping experience on Amazon, and I really think it needs to be dialed back.

I’m all for running a profitable business, but Amazon is a financial behemoth. They, more than anybody else, have the ability to focus on customer experience rather than revenue, and for years that’s just what they’ve promised. Well, I argue that ‘Sponsored’ content is hurting that commitment, and it’s really going to change the game if Amazon doesn’t step it back and focus once again on giving readers easy ways to discover the books they want to read, and authors a more consistent way in which to do that if they focus on quality rather than marketing.

What do YOU think?  Sound off in the comments below!

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Services like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing have provided a new generation of authors an amazing opportunity to be successful outside of the confines of ‘traditional publishing’ – yet there’s still a stigma about self-publishing. As more and more authors choose to spurn traditional publishers, many feel that this stigma is increasingly undeserved.

As my writing career has become more successful, I’ve been more and more open to telling people about it. I’m now a writer full-time, and it’s pretty exciting to be able to support my family from book sales. And yet, when I talk to strangers about this, I still often get a strange reaction from them.

“Oh, I’d like to write a book someday. But, y’know – like a real book.”

I always like to ask: “What do you mean a real book?”

“Oh, you know – from a publisher.”

It’s funny, but almost a decade after Amazon changed the publishing game completely with the introduction of Kindle Direct Publishing – allowing anybody to publish an electronic version of their book (and now, through a print-on-demand service, physical copies of their books) there’s still this presumption that a book published by a ‘proper’ publisher is somehow the only way to be a ‘real’ author; and that self-published authors lack legitimacy.

To a certain extent, this is to do with the perception of publishing electronic books instead of print books (a topic we’ve addressed before) but it actually extends further since it’s now easy and affordable to print physical copies of self-published books. The stigma isn’t so much about electronic versus print, but more ‘traditionally published’ versus self-published. And while I think this assumption has some legitimate origins, as the world of publishing grows and evolves, it’s become less and less accurate.

That’s why I think it’s time to break down why more and more authors are spurning ‘real’ publishing altogether – and why self-published books are just as ‘real’ as those produced by traditional publishing houses.

A History of Self-Publishing

To understand where the assumption that self-published books aren’t ‘real’ books comes from, you have to look back in time a little. The scary thing is – not very far.

It’s been less than two decades since advances in technology changed the publishing industry forever, and before that the game was played very, very different.

Before products like the Amazon Kindle, books were printed on paper. This is an expensive and time-consuming process. The cost of the paper and materials itself is quite significant, but the real expense was in laying out the books in a print-ready format and setting up the equipment to churn out hundreds of copies. In fact, compared to all that, the cost of what was actually in the book – the words themselves – was relatively inconsequential.

Publishers wanted to make a profit, of course, so they needed to balance printing out as many books as they thought they could sell, at a volume that made the print run cost effective. Paper and ink was actually a lesser part of that equation, so the more books you printed the lower the actual cost-per-copy tended to be. Most major publishers wanted to print around 2,000 copies of a book because that gave them a good chance on earning more from the sales of those books than they’d spent actually printing them.

But as anybody who’s published a book knows, shifting 2,000 copies of a book is easier said than done. Even in an era in which people had to physically go to a bookstore, and the variety of choice was much more limited, not all published books managed to sell enough copies to pay their way. This is why publishers tended to rely on new books by established authors – an annual release by James Patterson or Stephen King, for example – rather than take a gamble on the unknown entity that was a new writer.

It’s this which made breaking into the writing industry so difficult. You needed to get your manuscript in front of decision makers – which, given the hundreds of books publishers received every day, was easier said than done – and then you needed to convince them that it would sell enough copies to be profitable.

Authors like J.K. Rowling – who became the first billionaire writer – received dozens of rejection slips before their books were published; and the vast majority of aspiring authors simply gave up after a while. Writing was a very closed community; and there was enormous cachet in getting the ‘approval’ of a publishing house, and having them back your book all the way from manuscript to seeing it in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

If a publisher was willing to take a gamble on your book, then you were a ‘real’ writer.

Of course, even back then that wasn’t the only way to see your book in print. If you couldn’t get your manuscript accepted by a publisher, you could always print the book yourself. The same printing companies that produced publisher-backed paperback and hardbacks would also print your own book…

…for a price.

Generally, they did this for the same price as a publisher paid. So if you were an aspiring author and had literally thousands of dollars on hand, you could pay to do a print run of your own book. This is something that soon earned the title of ‘vanity publishing’ because you were basically publishing a book to flatter your own ego.

The problem was – you were then left with hundreds or thousands of copies of your book, without the same network and distribution channels as mainstream publishers. That made it very difficult to actually sell copies; as the only thing as difficult as getting your manuscript accepted by a mainstream publisher was getting those printed books on the shelves of a brick-and-mortar bookstore. There was the assumption that if you had to pay to publish your own book, it probably wasn’t going to be that marketable; and it would be better to fill those bookshelves with more profitable books instead.

Of course, that’s not always the case. Some small publishers sprang up and operated successfully with niche titles. Other writers were successful with self-publishing too. Henry Rollins, the lead singer of the band Black Flag, printed and sold his own books and continues to be very successful at it. Then again, he has a target audience of fans ready to buy whatever he publishes, and that gives him an advantage most self-published authors didn’t have.

The Wild West of Self-Publishing

In the beginning part of the 21st century, advances in technology changed everything. Digital software and more advanced printers finally made it cost-effective to print small numbers of books, and something called ‘Print on Demand’ or POD popped up. This basically enabled you to upload a digital copy of your manuscript and cover and print copies as and when you wanted them – right down to a single copy, if you wanted. While it wasn’t super cost-effective, the overall price for a single POD book was roughly equivalent to a mainstream paperback; so it empowered authors for the first time to self-publish without making a huge cash investment first.

This service was fantastic for authors who were good at marketing and self-promotion, and many soon began printing books and selling them. However, the convenience also saw the arrival of predatory companies that followed the ‘vanity publishing’ model; and took advantage of many aspiring authors. The most famous, PublishAmerica, was famous for marketing themselves as a ‘real’ publisher, yet accepting any and all manuscripts sent to them. They’d then offer to ‘publish’ the author on agreement that the author would market their own book. In reality, all PublishAmerica did was offer Print on Demand services and charge a massive premium for any and all books the author ordered or managed to sell. Worse than that, they offered no proofing or editing services, and took ownership of the rights to the author’s book; basically ensuring that any book with ‘PublishAmerica’ listed as the publisher was considered trash.

And, in all honesty, that wasn’t an altogether unfair description for a lot of the books that they did offer to publish. One of the problems of opening up self-publishing to everybody was that many of the things that traditional publishers did well – for example, proofing and editing books prior to publication – were simply skipped entirely. That meant a self-published book was liable to be filled with typos and errors, lacking the professional polish of a ‘proper’ published book.

This is a situation that just grew worse when Amazon launched the Kindle – because now that authors could self-publish digital copies of their books, AND enjoy access to the world’s largest online marketplace it truly became the ‘wild west.’ People were publishing short stories, erotica and other books on Kindle without any form of proofing, editing or quality control. What’s more than that -they were selling copies of them. Self-published books were being listed alongside print and electronic books from traditional publishers; and when you compared the two it soon became very clear why traditional publishing still had value. Books – even electronic versions – that came from traditional publishers were generally going to have a professional layout, tight editing and a good cover and blurb. They were, for the most part, superior. 

This is, I believe, where the stigma of self-publishing really started to develop.

Traditional publishers used to be the gatekeepers of getting your book onto the marketplace, but now they existed alongside self-published authors with no easy way to discern the difference before buying the book and being hit by the vastly different quality of reading experiences.

And I know this first hand, because I published my own books for the first time in 2011, and I too failed to proof and edit my books, and the covers and layout were amateurish. When I look back at some of the stuff I used to publish during my first foray as a writer, it makes me cringe.

The Evolution of the Art

Times change, though – and even in the space of the last five years, the publishing industry has become unrecognizable.

Now that self-published authors had the opportunity to sell their books in the same marketplace as traditional publishers, a few authors started to get smart. They invested time and money in professional covers, high-quality editing and did some slick marketing – and something incredible happened: A small but growing group of authors started to produce self-published books that were of equal or greater quality to traditionally published books.

On the digital bookshelves of Amazon, it became increasingly difficult to tell which books were self-published and which were published through a traditional publisher, to the point at which you now can’t really tell unless you dig deep into the book details and look it up yourself.

Amanda Hocking, author of paranormal romance stories, was rejected by countless traditional publishers until she started self-publishing. Her books were an instant hit – and she soon became one of the most successful young authors of her generation. E.L. James, author of the Fifty Shades… trilogy has a similar tale to tell, as does Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, who went the self-publishing route as early as 1997 and has now sold over 26 million copies of his books.

Today, a huge number of the most successful authors on Amazon are self-published – and their books are not just of equal quality to the books of ‘traditional’ publishers, they’re often better. The days of the wild west of self-publishing are over, and having the cachet of a publishing contract is no longer a reliable indicator that your books are ‘better’ than self-published novels. In fact, fiction sales for the top five mainstream publishers are declining – as more and more fictional authors self-publish. 

In fact, that’s the ironic part of strangers telling me they want to publish a “y’know, real book.” It demonstrates how little they know about the publishing industry – because for more and more authors, the idea of going through a traditional publisher is just a bad bet.

Profit of Publishing

Since the contents of a book are the cheapest part of traditional publishing, it’s no surprise that those publishers generally only pay their authors 10-12% of the royalties for the books they sell. 

On Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program, authors can receive as much as 70% royalties – which makes a massive difference.

Essentially, a traditionally-published author has to sell seven times as many books to make what a self-published author does; and that makes self-publishing more and more attractive for writers who know that they can sell books.

I myself have seen my writing career evolve and these days I invest in cover design, editing and marketing services – but even after all those expenses are taken out, I still make significantly more than 10% in royalties per book sale. I would arrogantly claim that my books are the equal or superior of anything published by a ‘traditional’ publisher, and I make a lot more money than I would if I did manage to get any of my manuscripts accepted. So when somebody says to me “oh, I want to publish a real book” I genuinely want to laugh in their face. 

These days, in fact, self-publishing is one of the gateways to a traditional publishing contract. You used to have to send in your manuscript to an editor and hope they’d read it, like it and accept it. These days, those same editors pour over the Top 100 authors on Amazon and reach out to them – offering to give them a publishing contract in return for the rights to their books. Publishers are now trying to play catch-up with traditional authors; and it’s a game they’re losing year after year.

This is why publishers are focusing more on political, non-fiction and children’s books – which remain the profitable niches – and more and more fiction authors are publishing themselves. These authors are essentially becoming their own independent publishing houses – hiring cover designers and editors – and they just happen to be able to do it far better than traditional publishers.

Conclusion

Somebody once said to me “you only ever get offended by things that are true.”

Which is why I will never be offended when somebody tells me: “Oh, I want to write a book – but, y’know, a real book.”

I’m not offended, because I know that their opinion comes more out of ignorance than anything else.

I, and a growing number of fiction authors, publish books that are of equal or greater quality than traditionally-published books. I sell more copies of them, too – and I come home with a larger share of royalties. Self-publishing has allowed me to pay my mortgage, put food on the table and fill my car with gas; and with an average royalty rate of 10% that’s something very few ‘traditionally’ published authors can claim.

So the stigma of self-publishing is a misnomer. Self-publishing is the future. The idea that you are only a ‘real’ writer if some faceless editor from a publishing company deigns your book ‘worthy’ is as outdated as stores like Blockbuster or Borders.

The truth is, the readers are the only people whose opinions matter – and they’re increasingly demonstrating to traditional publishers that the only ‘real’ books are the ones that sell copies.

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There’s a lot of mistaken belief when it comes to free books, from both authors and readers alike.  After all, whether they’re doing it for the love of the art, or just as a job, most authors still want to earn money from their work, so how can free books ever be a good thing?  The truth is, the relationship between authors and free books go back a long time – and like any relationship… it’s complicated.

Every so often I see a reader don their white hat to make the argument that they don’t use an ARC program because they think that authors should get paid for their work.

An admirable sentiment, for sure.  Still, I can’t help but wonder if those same readers have ever used a library, or borrowed a novel from a friend?  After all, readers have been using those as traditionally acceptable sources of free reading material since the dawn of books. Yet you rarely hear criticism about them, despite the fact that while the author was paid for the initial copy sold they didn’t get a penny more for the countless reads that came from sharing those copies.

So what’s the difference between those examples and an ARC program (or any other sort of legitimate source of free online reading material)?

Turns out, quite a bit – but all of them favor the online sources of free material over those more traditional types of borrowing books. 

It’s A Problem of Perception

Online piracy has been in the media for so long that everyone is aware of the issue by now.  It started with games and other applications, then it hit music, and eventually books as well.  If you sell any sort of digital product, piracy is going to affect you.  And while the issue may not be quite as bad as some believe, no one wants their work to be stolen.

The battle against piracy is ongoing but is unlikely to ever really stop. It took dozens of takedown notices from major publishers like Penguin Random House and HarperCollins before one of the worst offending websites – OceanofPDF – was shut down last week, but we know from experience that it won’t last. Like the hydra, the moment one pirate site is closed, two more spring up in its place.

But another unfortunate side-effect of this ongoing issue is that many have come to believe there is some sort of equivalence between the idea of “free books” and piracy. As soon as they learn that a book is free online, they immediately assume it must be stolen, or that somehow authors are getting ripped off.

In most instances, that isn’t the case at all. 

Aside from the blatant pirate sites, there are actually plenty of options to get free eBooks that are completely sanctioned – even desired – by the authors themselves.

It’s A Difference of Choice

When it comes to legitimately free books, there are different degrees of what that really means – from buffet free, to free for some, to totally free – but they all have one thing in common. The choice to offer the book for free was done intentionally by the author instead of being foisted upon them by an online pirate.

And given the variety of ways and places those free books are offered, readers are also given more choice as to how they can find and receive that content.

Buffet Free

While not totally free, this category provides all you can read for one low price – sort of like Netflix or Spotify, but for books.  Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited is the biggest example of this, boasting a library of over 1 million titles to choose from, including some audiobooks.

Ideally this would be the best of both worlds, giving readers a low monthly price and a huge assortment of books to read while still paying authors from the pool of money collected from those fees. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees that the payouts are fair and the program has been plagued by scams and people trying to cheat the system. This, along with the exclusivity requirement, has limited the number of books that actually participate in the program, and have led to it being mostly populated by books from self-published and newer authors (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing!).

Free For Some

This category includes a variety of sources, where free books are available but only to some readers. In most cases, it isn’t difficult for anyone interested to become part of that group, but it usually involves joining an author’s mailing list directly or simply signing up for an ARC program like ours here at Hidden Gems.

Totally Free

The easiest place to find legitimately free books that don’t require joining lists or becoming a member to anything are on the online bookstores.  Although most books listed do have a price attached, some authors choose to list some of their books completely for free. 

So in the cases where authors are willingly, knowingly, and often eagerly providing free books to readers – the question remains – why would they do that?

The answer is actually quite simple.

Marketing.

Free Done Right Leads To Money

No matter how an author chooses to distribute their free books, the reasoning behind it is the same. Free copies are sent out in the hopes that they’ll lead to something tangible in return – increased exposure, reviews, new fans, etc.

In the days of traditional publishing, if an author was lucky enough to get a deal they would often have the weight – and budget – of those big companies behind them to handle the marketing and drive sales. But with the rise of self-publishing, authors are responsible for doing it all themselves – not to mention footing the bill. And to make matters worse, there are far more books out there to compete with. Standing out from the crowd is much harder than it used to be.

Promoting a book in a newsletter or by buying ads on Facebook or elsewhere can be expensive but making free digital copies available can be one of the cheapest forms of marketing – and if done right can be very effective.  Sure, there is the soft cost around loss of sales – but in many cases the people downloading the free books aren’t the author’s regular customers. Instead, they’re potential new customers, which can be far more valuable.

Similarly, if an author can get reviews back from some of the free copies they send out – by using an ARC service, or even by mining their own list for reviewers – they can raise the credibility of their book in the marketplace – another marketing tool that can lead to increased sales.  Reviews give a book the social proof that someone else has read it, allowing potential buyers to see what others thought about it first. And in today’s socially driven world, that sort of marketing has become even more relevant and valuable.

Self-Published Authors Create Their Own Success

The key is the control an author has over their own destiny.

These aren’t unwitting novelists whose books have been stolen and offered up on virus laden piracy sites. Rather, these are intelligent entrepreneurs who have made informed choices aimed at boosting sales – becoming authors not only of their books, but also of their own success.

That means that if an ARC service is offering free copies of a book, turning your nose up at it because you want to support the writer is doing exactly the opposite. Authors want readers to download those books, hopefully choosing to then leave a review and maybe even becoming a new fan of their work.  The authors themselves are the ones that provided the service with the copies to distribute freely to readers in the first place – which is certainly not something that can be said about the physical copy someone borrowed from a friend.

So while libraries and lending books may also provide exposure, they do so far more slowly – one reader at a time. And those avenues aren’t necessarily sanctioned by the author and only pay them a fraction more than when they’re ripped off completely by piracy sites.

Free books distributed online in places where an author has made an informed choice to do so, however, are far more helpful and valuable.

Just because you got it for free, doesn’t mean the author is getting ripped off. It’s just the opposite.

So why not help an author out by joining our ARC service today, or sharing this article or link with someone who might?  Each month we send out over 10,000 copies across 15 different genres, and have worked with thousands of authors – most of whom use our service regularly. You only sign up for the books you’re interested in and read as often as you have time for. No fees, no catches. The author’s only hope is that you choose to leave an honest review on Amazon when you’re done.

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For decades, the romance genre has been the butt of innumerable jokes – but it continues to be the biggest genre in publishing, and generates over $1 billion in sales every year. Is it time we looked at this much-maligned genre with a more discerning eye?

If you’re remotely interested in reading romance books, you might have heard about #Cockygate – the latest big scandal to hit publishing earlier this year. The details have been covered enough that we don’t need to rehash it all again, but a lot of the resulting discussion in the media focused on the broader subject of the romance genre in general, and even romance readers themselves. It’s that focus that is worthy of further discussion.

Because what was written and said about the genre and romance readers in particular wasn’t very flattering.

By and large, most authors who write romance novels, and most readers who devour them, don’t really care about what the New York Daily News or other publications have to say about them. There have been countless articles dedicated to how bad the writing of Fifty Shades of Grey is, for example, and I imagine that this is how E.L. James reacts:

But is the criticism aimed at the romance genre fair? Or even reasonable? 

The more you look at it, the more it seems like a lot of the criticism of the romance genre is rooted in snobbery and jealousy, with many of the arguments being completely hypocritical or unjustified. The truth is, the genre sometimes offers us the best in what modern writing has to offer.

Facing the Criticism

The romance genre is a singular force within publishing. It drives the industry forward. It’s the most-read genre, the biggest revenue-generator, and it was arguably the biggest factor behind the success of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program and the Amazon Kindle product. Just like many people argue that pornography drove the acceleration of the Internet, there’s an argument to be made that the relentless appetites of romance readers is what helped establish self-publishing on digital devices as a ‘thing.’ As my sister-in-law told me – it’s a lot less squirm-inducing to read steamy romance novels on the train when you’re using a Kindle than when you’ve got a big, paperback book with a half-naked man on the cover (although if the book is any good, it should still induce some squirming.)

Nielsen BookScan and PubTrack Digital claimed that the romance genre makes up 34% of all book sales, and that would be impressive all by itself even if it weren’t a fact that those numbers are severely under-reported. The issue is that BookScan and PubTrack follow just a small segment of traditional publishing, and completely miss out on most of Amazon’s self-published and digital books – and romance dominates those sales.  So it’s safe to say the true numbers are far higher than generally reported.

Which leads to the question: If it’s so huge, and so important to the industry, why is the romance genre given such a hard time?

To really answer that, we need to look at the two main factors that are most often attacked – the genre itself, and the readers.

Romance Readers

Romance sells a prodigious number of books – so who are the people buying them? Well, the link posted above suggests that 82% of the romance audience are female, and they read a huge number of books. We know from our ARC program that many read an entire romance novel every single day – which is why programs like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (essentially Netflix for books, if all of the content on Netflix were exclusive to Netflix) make such a lot of sense for them. 

To many people, the idea of devouring a book a day suggests that romance readers aren’t discerning. Just look at the recent court filings attached to #Cockygate, where it was argued that romance readers in general were ‘unsophisticated’ to the point that they’d choose and buy a book based on the bare-chested man on the cover and a single word from the title, rather than even reading the author’s name. Fortunately, the judge in that case dismissed the suggestion as absurd. And as anyone who’s ever tried to write and sell a romance novel knows, romance readers can be extremely discerning.

I think the scorn directed towards romance readers stems largely from snobbery. When I interact with the friends I went to university with (where I studied English Literature as one of my two majors) a lot of them frequently post about how much they hate Kindles, their fondness for libraries, and how they’re re-reading the same book for the third or fifth time (seriously, I have an ex-girlfriend who should have memorized every line from Pride and Prejudice the number of times she posts on Facebook about re-reading it.)

It strikes me that their view of what ‘proper’ reading consists of is extremely narrow. It’s got to come from approved sources (traditional publishing, for example) and mainstream vendors (brick and mortar stores) where familiar titles and authors are embraced more for that familiarity than anything else.

In contrast, most romance readers are deep into the wild west of publishing. With an Amazon Kindle and a Kindle Unlimited account, they have access to a vast range of books and authors that my mainstream friends will never be exposed to. There are tens of thousands of books that are only available digitally, and my “more sophisticated” (heavy sarcasm) friends never get exposed to any of them. Romance readers are also more willing to give new authors and new book series a try, since they’re such prodigious readers. They’re pioneers, experimenters, discoverers and explorers. Their open-mindedness and enthusiasm to embrace the new and original makes the idea that they’re ‘unsophisticated’ seem even more preposterous. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. 

Just like the hunger for romance books drove the success of self-publishing and digital eReaders, it’s romance readers who’ve helped drive the discovery and success of a whole generation of new authors. Romance readers post reviews that showcase previously unheard of authors, and in buying their books they support those writers to publish more. Self-published authors of all genres have more to thank romance readers for than almost anybody else, and for this reason many also find the notion that they’re ‘unsophisticated’ to be wildly insulting, inaccurate and boorish.

The Romance Genre

Okay, so now that we’ve addressed how romance readers are actually a lot braver, more sophisticated and discerning than many give them credit for, let’s look at the genre itself.

By far the biggest criticism of romance books in general are that they’re formulaic – that all the stories follow the same blueprint, with the same beats, right down to the usual ‘HEA’ (happily ever after) at the end of them. And I think it’s fair to admit that successful romance books do follow a formula. It’s why they’re successful. Romance readers might be willing to experiment with new authors and new book series, but at the end of the day they want to know what they’re getting when they do choose to read a new book; and it’s not only ridiculous, but hypocritical to criticize them for that.

Any genre fiction book is formulaic, and the successful ones even more so.

You don’t see anyone criticizing a murder mystery for having a dead body in it, or a science fiction novel for having space-ships and robots, do you? The most successful books in any genre are just as formulaic as romance – with covers for horrors and science fiction books often appearing just as generic as the bare-chested men on the cover of many bestselling romance novels. 

Once again, I think that criticism stems from snobbery; and nowhere else.

And if you look at the most successful writers outside of the romance industry, they’re as guilty of being formulaic as anybody. James Patterson publishes 15 novels a year, and he does that by hiring an army of ghostwriters who are familiar with the ‘beats’ of his books. After they’ve constructed the framework, he’ll go in to give it a little Patterson polish before sending it to the publisher.

Lee Child, the talent behind Jack Reacher, churns out a number of books every year that also follow a strict formula. Readers want them to. 

I’m a big fan of Michael Connelly, author of The Lincoln Lawyer, and the other day I spotted somebody reading that book at the pool and we had a discussion about how sometimes you needed to take a break from Connelly to ‘reset your palette’ – just like occasionally you have to switch from Budweiser to Miller Lite.

Hell – I’m a crazy fan of Robert Harris, author of Fatherland, and yet I’ll be the first to admit that he takes the same plot and just reuses it in a different historical setting with each book.

So using the argument that romance is bad because it’s too formulaic ignores the fact that almost every successful author in any genre is guilty of the exact same thing.

What’s so wrong with formula anyway? 

While we’re on the subject of formulaic books – what’s so wrong with them, anyway?

I think we’ve already established that most genre books fall into formula, and many commercially successful authors adopt a ‘formula’ after a while. It’s not unreasonable. You find out what works for you and you repeat it. As you progress you can add a new spin, but an audience expects certain things from a writer; and after a while a writer becomes duty-bound to deliver on those expectations.

Formula, in fact, is the secret sauce which separates genre fiction from literary fiction.

I’ve had a number of writer friends who went the traditional route into publishing, and they’ve all repeated the same story – that at the very beginning, their agent prompted them to choose between becoming a literary fiction author, or a genre author. There was almost no transition between the two; and only superstar success allowed you to make that shift. The only two examples I can think of are JK Rowling, with her crime books like Casual Vacancy (which, let’s be honest, would be classified as ‘genre’ if they’d been written by anybody other than Rowling) and Stephen King, who endured decades of being called “America’s schlockmeister” before finally being given a National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2015.

Literary fiction is viewed as ‘art’ and doesn’t have any of the expectations of genre – so authors can write what they want. Some truly remarkable books have been written in the literary fiction field, and it’s the most visible and reported-on slice of publishing. From the world-famous Booker award to dozens of other literary awards, it’s literary fiction where the prestige is to be found… Which is a good thing, because it sure as hell isn’t where the money lives.

The amount of column inches and the number of awards dedicated to literary fiction are almost directly commensurate to the lack of money to be made from writing it. If you ever see newspaper articles about how tough authors have it, it’s almost always writers of literary fiction they’re talking about. In fact, that article inadvertently points out the issue when the journalist accidentally confesses: “…the poor dears should knuckle down and resign themselves to writing what people actually want to read.”

The problem with literary fiction is that is doesn’t have a formula. There will always be a few dedicated readers of it, but I would argue more because they think it demonstrates something about themselves (and perhaps their intellectual pretensions) than because they actually enjoy it. I read literary fiction every once in a while, but it’s the reading equivalent of eating broccoli. There’s the perception that it’s good for you, but it’s not what you enjoy. That’s why I intersperse it with all the thrillers and romance books I actually like to read.

Genre fiction, on the other hand, isn’t art. It’s craft.

What’s the difference? Well, art exists in and of itself, for itself, whereas craft has a purpose. A painting is art. A table is craft. You don’t expect anything from a painting except to look interesting (or perhaps cover up that crack on the wall) whereas a table has to meet the functional criteria of being able to eat your breakfast off it. Craft can certainly have artistic flair – just go to your next craft fair and see the elegantly crafted and carved wooden tables, or some of the functional metal pieces for sale at high-end stores in New York – but no matter how artistic a table gets, or how much it costs, you can still eat your breakfast off it.

A table has to have a flat surface, and be elevated appropriately, and have supporting legs. That’s the ‘formula’ of a table – and it’s no different to the ‘formula’ of a good romance book, or thriller. Being formulaic shouldn’t be viewed as a negative – it’s structural, important, and defines the object for what it is.

And I’d go one step further. Take poetry.

While the most ‘respected’ writing is literary fiction – which exists without the expectations of a genre formula – the most respected poetry tends to be the opposite. Whether you’re looking at a haiku (which is always three lines, with five syllables in the first and last line, and seven in the middle) or a sonnet (fourteen lines, rhyming, with ten syllables per line) or just a poem-that-rhymes-at-the-end, good poetry is always expected to fit into a structure. 

The ‘art’ of poetry is that you express yourself within a structure – ironically the complete opposite of literary fiction. Structured poetry is respected because you have to take your thoughts and use your rich vocabulary to squeeze it into that formula. That takes talent.

So I’d argue this – doesn’t genre fiction present the same opportunity? To take a vivid, rich and colorful idea and then use your talents as a writer to squeeze it into the formula of that genre? Doesn’t that take more talent as a writer than to just scribble it all down in the free form of literary fiction?

Maybe, maybe not. Done correctly, there are great (and terrible) examples of each. But the point is, I honestly believe it takes true talent to write a creative, vivid and compelling genre book – and in some ways you could consider a well-written romance novel to be the ultimate expression of long-form poetry.

Romance Novels are ‘Problematic’

There’s one more criticism thrown towards the romance genre, and it’s potentially the most serious one.

People argue that romance books are often ‘problematic.’

What does problematic mean? Well, it’s a term that’s found increasing popularity these days as people look at popular culture and then take issue with it. For example, people have been looking at old episodes of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and are complaining that it’s homophobic, transphobic, racist and sexist. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but there are certainly issues that can be raised with romance books.

In fact, some people complain that the biggest issue causing problems in relationships is that women are raised on a diet of Disney films and romance novels, and men are raised on a diet of pornography, and it causes massive disparity in interpersonal expectations.

In the old days, the biggest issue was the notion of the ‘bodice ripper.’

This was the sort of romance novel in which the dashing hero (a Duke, or a pirate, or Prince) would stumble across our innocent heroine and brutally rape her. And she’d like it. And they’d fall in love and live happily ever after. This trope used to be ubiquitous in the romance genre… and there is actually a logical reason why.

In the seminal 1973 book My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, the respected journalist quizzed hundreds of women on their favorite sexual fantasies and rape was second only to incest in popularity. She explained that the idea of rape as a sexual fantasy was popular because it allowed women to keep their virtue (“I didn’t want to have sex”) while at the same time indulging in passionate carnality. It was a fantasy as far removed from real rape as it’s possible to get, and the romance books that thrived on the trope were similarly rooted in pleasurable fantasy.

In 1991 Nancy Friday wrote a follow-up, Women on Top, which revealed that as the sexual revolution progressed, women thought less about rape as a sexual fantasy (although it’s remained one of the most popular). She argued that as women learned to embrace their sexuality, and feel less shame in exploring it, the need to be able to ‘excuse’ their sex (the “but I didn’t want it” line) became less important to them. Perhaps consequently, the rape-but-she-liked-it trope also became less and less popular within romance novels. After the rise of the Internet and third-wave feminism, preceding things like the #METOO movement, publishers shied away from that trope completely, and non-consensual sex is now one of the types of writing that Amazon themselves will refuse to allow to be published.

But while that trope has died its death, the romance genre still has many troubling aspects to it. The Twilight Series and 50 Shades of Grey both feature behavior from their heroes that could be viewed as abusive. As one joker put it – “the fact that Christian Grey is a billionaire is the only reason 50 Shades of Grey isn’t an episode of Law & Order: SVU.”

In more mainstream romance fiction, the trope of the ‘alphahole’ is a powerful one – the male character who is arrogant, dislikable and borderline abusive… Until the female character melts his icy heart and discovers the good guy beneath. On the RomanceMFA website, Bonnie Loshbaugh argues that drawing the line between “alpha” and “asshole” is subjective – but whichever way you look at it, it’s a pretty thin line.

There have been many articles decrying the ‘alphahole’ trope and the romance genre in general… but the evidence suggests that the actual buyers aren’t listening. Despite problematic tropes being so ubiquitous, the genre continues to earn more than a billion dollars a year. 

And just as Nancy Friday had an explanation rooted in psychology for the popularity of the rape fantasy, I think a similar reason exists for the popularity of the ‘alphahole’ and the borderline abusive behavior of heroes like Twilight‘s Edward and 50 Shades‘ Christian: Those are types of behavior that women inherently find attractive.

I get worried about making statements like “it’s evolutionary” because I think an awful lot of terrible behavior is excused with pseudo-scientific explanations – but I think you could argue that women are attracted to powerful, protective, dynamic men; and the worst behavior of romance heroes often demonstrates what they view as those attractive traits. Once again, the people-who-don’t-actually-buy-romance-books might argue that we should decry ‘toxic masculinity’ and showcase heroes who are nurturing, vulnerable and caring… But the honest truth is that these are not the sort of characters who get a lot of romance readers purring; and you can’t force yourself to be attracted to something or someone no matter how much you ‘should’ be.

But the slow elimination of the ‘rape-until-she-likes-it’ trope demonstrates that romance fiction is evolving just as society does – and it reflects changing and developing attitudes. It’s very likely that in ten or fifteen years, we’ll look back at contemporary romance fiction and the trope of the ‘alphahole’ will be as anachronistic and cringe-worthy as the “bodice ripper” has become today.

I think before we lambaste the romance genre as ‘problematic’ we need to remember that it exists as a reflection of our cultural tastes; not a force that drives them (nor should it be used to excuse them). And in that respect, from a literary perspective, the romance genre itself is and will continue to be a valuable mirror to hold up and examine ourselves through.

Conclusion

Just as the line between a romance hero ‘alphahole’ and just a plain, old ‘asshole’ is subjective, I think your view of the romance genre will be too. However, I think much of the criticism aimed at both romance authors and romance readers is unjustified.

The romance genre is one of the post powerful forces in publishing today, and everything that the popularity of romance books has driven forward ends up benefiting the rest of the publishing industry. It generates over a billion dollars in revenue every year, and with the rise of self-publishing more and more of that revenue is being filtered into the hands of self-published authors, most of whom are women. It’s one of the few industries in which women dominate – both as consumers and creators – and even in this post-feminist age, I don’t think we should view that as a bad thing.

Romance writing might be formulaic – but so what? To criticize books for being formulaic smacks of hypocrisy and snobbery. In that respect, I think a lot of the criticism aimed at romance novels says more about those making the criticism than the authors or readers they’re criticizing.

And finally – the romance genre might have problematic aspects to it – but those are reflections of our culture, not the cause of the problem. I think anybody who criticizes romance heroes as ‘abusive’ or the love scenes as ‘sexist’ needs to examine those aspects in the context of our modern society; and not in the isolation of a digital manuscript.

I think there is great beauty, enormous talent and a lot of cultural significance to be found within the romance genre; and I think we’re all doing romance authors and romance readers a huge disservice by not giving them or their craft the recognition they deserve.

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Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program revolutionized the publishing industry – allowing anybody with a laptop to follow their dreams of becoming a writer. In the same vein, Amazon also revolutionized book reviews; taking the power of showcasing (or bashing) a book out of the hands of an editorial elite and letting anybody have their say. It’s one of the best things to ever happen to publishing – and here’s why.

Before I became a whatever-the-hell-I-am-now, I tried my hand at many different careers. My first job was scrubbing foxhounds at the local county hunt, and since then I’ve also tried garden shed installation, radio sales, copy-writing and bar tending – all with various degrees of success (my Sapphire Martini is world-class, by the way.)

When I first moved to America, I got a very curious job reviewing erotic books for a now-defunct online newspaper The Sex Herald, and this was way back in the day before self-publishing took over. Every week I’d trudge back from their offices on the Upper West Side with a plastic bag full of paperbacks and try to spin some opinion about erotic anthologies and story collections edited and published by independent publishers like Cleis Press.

I learned very quickly the power and privilege a book reviewer has.

Back in those days, book reviews were written by people with connections at newspapers and magazines, and the whole business of Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) was handled very differently. Off the back of The Sex Herald I got the opportunity to review more mainstream books for The Hampshire Chronicle and other publications, and also started to receive ARCs directly from publishers and stores like Barnes & Noble.

It was interesting because many of my friends who were into books and reading thought that this little gig of mine was kind of cool – and, I’m not going to lie, I started to get a bit full of myself with it.

I mean, c’mon. Publishers were sending me books. Real, printed books! And people were publishing my reviews! I was important! My opinion mattered! Not just anybody could write book reviews! 

And that’s really the issue. I got my gig reviewing books not necessarily because I was some wise and enlightened literary expert. It’s because I could hammer out 300 words with 24-hours notice on a consistent basis, and sometimes (more often than not, actually) I’d do so for less than the price of a Starbucks coffee. At the risk of offending a lot of people who did what I did back in the day, most other book reviewers were just as convenient and disposable as I was. The sad thing is that I just didn’t realize it at the time.

In fact, I was insufferable. I genuinely believed that because people sent me books, and because people published my reviews, and because a lot of other people didn’t have this privilege, the stuff that I wrote was somehow as valuable as the stuff that I reviewed. Except… it wasn’t.

I got a wake-up call way back in 2009 when I reviewed a book called Frenzy: 60 Stories of Sudden Sex edited by Alison Tyler.  It was a compilation of quickies, all assembled by renowned editor Alison Tyler, who had been titled “Erotica’s Own Superwoman” by the East Bay Literary Examiner even back in those heady days in which books were printed on paper and had pages.

I approached that review with the same devil-may-care, balls-out attitude that I’d taken to reviewing pretty much everything at the time – after all, people sent me free books! People published my articles! I was important! 

I look back at what I wrote, nearly ten years later, and it makes me cringe.

“Frenzy contains a plethora of prose,” I opened the review with, “with stories ranging from 8-10 pages to ‘flash-fiction’ that’s barely a paragraph long.”

“You don’t read Frenzy like a normal book.” I waxed lyrical. “It’s not to be plodded through from cover to cover, but dipped into whenever you want a sinful snippet to savor. As such, the variety in length and style makes these stories particularly rewarding to sift through.”

I really loved alliteration, didn’t I?

Some of the stories I was very complimentary to – but not all of them. In fact, you can almost see the smug little smile on my face as I typed: “Erotica attracts the worst from our writing brethren and a few examples slipped under the radar of Alison Tyler’s normally excellent editing. The worst was ‘Madrid’, by Nikki Magennis – an interminable erotic contrivance that was both pretentious and amateurish to boot.”

Let’s forget the arrogance of the fact that I’d mentioned my ‘writing brethren’ – back in 2009 I hadn’t published anything except these featherweight reviews and a few short stories for Hustler – and focus on the dripping vitriol I so carelessly typed about Nikki Magennis‘ writing. For those of you who don’t know, Nikki is an excellent writer and editor of the FeatherLit ezine, and while I am sure her writing has evolved and improved over the years, she still didn’t deserve me writing that about her story. I mean, let’s cut to the chase – I’m pretty sure nothing I could have written at the time would have met Alison Tyler’s standards for inclusion in her anthology, and it’s just a supreme act of classlessness for me to have written what I did about the writing of another author – writing that was inherently and objectively superior to my own writing.

And to be honest, I would have thought nothing of it. I clicked ‘save’, sent it off to my editor, and then went off and had a glass of wine. I never would have given Nikki Magennis another thought…

…if it wasn’t for what happened next.

Alison Tyler somehow stumbled upon my review of her book, and had a few choice words to say about it. She was very chill – which is pretty much Alison in a nutshell – and dryly wrote this:

“The reviewer liked the book. Mostly. But eviscerated a few of the contributors in passing. Sort of casually. Like you might swat a mosquito.”

I don’t have a link to the original article, or the one that prompted it, but I remember her very coolly, calmly and classily dissecting my review and it was like somebody dunked a bucket of cold water on my head. I read what she wrote and it immediately made me think of that old Disney movie Ratatouille, in which the famed culinary critic Anton Ego is served a helping of humble pie and writes the following:

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

And that was me. Totally. I enjoyed the incredible privilege of getting free books containing the passion and hard work of aspiring authors, and I swatted their aspirations down with undeserved arrogance. I’d totally lost sight of what it was a reviewer was meant to do – and I’d started to believe that my criticism was as creative as their writing; and nothing could be further from the truth.

And you know what? Back in 2009 – and long before – this was the issue with book reviews in general. They were the domain of a small circle of connected elite. It was pretentious egotists like me who got free books, and had our reviews published, and thought that our opinions were somehow more important than anybody else’s. And the honest fact is, by keeping book reviews within such a small circle, the very thing they were intended to be ended up corrupted.

And I speak from experience. I’ll admit that when I got sent a ‘swag bag’ with an ARC, I’d be more likely to leave that book a positive review. When I got invited to cocktails and nibbles in New York for the launch of a new book, I’d be more likely to give that book some glowing coverage. When an author agreed to an interview for my personal blog, you’d better believe I waxed lyrical about them in my published review.

The fact is, I enjoyed a position of privilege, and I abused it. And many other reviewers did, too. Book reviews were less about the books themselves and more about how the publisher approached you, what relationship you had with the author, or how spinning the review would impact your little circle of influence.

It was a reflection of publishing as a whole. Traditional publishing was a very tough business to break into, and a lot of the time influence and networking was more important to seeing your books in print than actual talent. In fact, all you need to do is look at the prodigious success of many self-published authors – like Amanda Hocking – to see that publishers routinely rejected very talented writers. The irony was that traditional publishers styled themselves as the gatekeepers of quality and talent, but often had a very bumpy track-record with their books. Publishers thrive thanks to their occasional best-sellers, whereas the majority of books barely sell upwards of 2,000 copies over the course of the first few years. And those best-sellers aren’t easy to predict. That’s why more and more rejection letters have been sent out in recent years, and why publishers continue to drive established (i.e. safe) authors to write more and more, and give contracts to celebrities or other people who have ‘pull’ instead of talent.

And then Amazon came along, and everything changed.

In terms of publishing, suddenly everybody could get their books into an open marketplace – and they did. Today, self-published authors sell more books than the top five publishing houses combined, and successful self-published books are as tightly-edited, well-marketed and professional-looking (sometimes much more so) as anything traditional publishers produce.

And that “democratization” of publishing extended to book reviews, as well.

Now instead of pretentious egotists like me having the only say about which books got reviewed and what got said about them, anybody with a (qualified*) Amazon account and an opinion could post their review of a book on the product page. Not only that, but these reviews tended to be the ones that potential customers saw first. Instantly it swept the legs out from under traditional book reviews; and even as a former reviewer myself, it was not before its time.

Amazon reviews are different than the book reviews you’ll see in the New York Times or even flash-in-the-pan online papers like the one I wrote for. They’re generally from people with regular jobs, and regular lives, and the only motivation they have for writing a book review is that they want to share their opinion of it. They didn’t get invited to cocktails and nibbles with the author, they don’t get preferential treatment from the publishers, and they’re not being pressured to churn out a weekly column by an eager editor.

It intrinsically makes those reviews more valuable – and that’s precisely why Amazon put so much stock in them. It put book reviewers like me out of business, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Everything about Amazon’s reader reviews are more authentic; even down to how inconsistent they can be. It’s funny to look at a book and see competing 5 and 1 star reviews; but if those reviews have any context to them, even the ‘bad’ reviews can help convince a potential customer to buy a book.

As a natural reaction to Amazon’s review system, the concept of Advanced Reader Copies evolved. Free copies were no longer limited to newspaper or magazine reviewers like me. Digital-only copies were shared with closed groups of “ARC reviewers” and that’s where programs like our own Hidden Gems originated. These book reviewers aren’t hoity-toity journalists or pretentious people like me – they’re just passionate readers, fans of genre books, and folks with an opinion on what makes for good reading.

I think it’s one of the best things to ever happen to publishing – even though, as an author, those same reviewers can often drive me bananas with the things that they get upset about (for example, one of my romance titles once got a 1-star review because the heroine wasn’t pregnant in the final chapter). However, these book reviews don’t just help Amazon sell books – they also help authors evolve and become better. The feedback real readers give in their reviews is inherently more valuable than ‘official’ editorial reviews because there isn’t any agenda attached to it. Nobody is trying to flatter an author when they leave a 5-star review, or generate clickbait when they post a scathing 1-star review. These are just people’s genuine thoughts; whether they paid for the book themselves, or received it as an ARC.

With book reviews carrying so much weight on Amazon, it’s such a valuable and meaningful contribution to write your own. I encourage anybody and everybody who lives to read to make sure they share their thoughts with Amazon’s customers. But, more than that – it also makes sure that (former) idiots like me don’t get away writing pretentious twaddle or accuse books of being an ‘erotic contrivance’ like I did to poor Nikki Magennis.

It’s ironic that when Alison Tyler called me out for my review, I considered that line from Ratatouille; “the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

Now that Amazon has democratized the review process, and given everybody an opportunity to review books just like they’ve given everybody an opportunity publish them…

…well, our criticism now has more value than it ever did before.

Go out and write some book reviews, people – or, if you haven’t already, sign up to Hidden Gems and receive free ARCs of some of the hottest and most exciting new books in whatever genres you like to read.

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Way back in 2017, Amazon introduced a requirement that anyone leaving a review on the site had to have spent at least $50 at the store with an actual credit or debit card. Over time, that policy has evolved to become even more restrictive. While we understand and even applaud the intent behind the policy, questions remain about whether or not it has really made a difference in improving the situation it was designed to fix.

And even more importantly, is it worth the cost to the real customers affected by it.

The Current $50 Review Rule

While the original rule was that customers have spent $50 in total on their account before being able to leave an Amazon review, it has since become more restrictive.  According to the community guidelines page, a customer can only write a review if they’ve spent $50 over the last 12 months (that is, it’s now a rolling total that you have to maintain over time instead of a one time grand total). Further, those purchases have to have been made with a credit or debit card (no gift cards allowed!) and certain discounts and services (like Prime) don’t count either.

The Point Behind the $50 Rule

The company’s ongoing battle against fake Amazon reviews is well documented and has been going on since about as long as reviews have been allowed on the site. And it’s no wonder. Recent research has shown that close to 95% of online shoppers consider reviews before making a purchase, and having even a few reviews can increase sales conversion by 270% over a product with no reviews.

That means that while vendors benefit from reviews and the increase in sales that they bring, so too, does Amazon – given that they get a cut of each sale made. So if you’ve ever wondered why they don’t just get rid of reviews from the site entirely, that should give you a good idea of the answer.

But with reviews being so important to sales, it wasn’t long before dishonest companies began creating fake Amazon reviews for their products, or hiring companies to do it for them.  Amazon tried suing both the companies that provided those fake reviews, and the product sellers themselves, but the arms race hasn’t slowed. New ways to game the system are devised almost fast as Amazon can shut them down.

Back in 2016 they even tried to up the ante by banning reviews based on free or discounted products entirely (with the exception of books), but that still didn’t fix the issue.

One of the techniques used to create fake Amazon reviews en masse is by creating a bunch of different fake accounts to post them. By doing this, even a single user could post many fake reviews for a product, and some companies would hire a small army of employees to do this, each armed with multiple accounts.

So the $50 rule was put in place to try and stop the issue at the source.

By requiring that each account spend $50 on a unique credit or debit card, Amazon forces each review to be tied to a real person (or at least a real person’s stolen identity) with a real Amazon account. and makes the cost prohibitive for many products. After all, you’re unlikely to want to create a bunch of fake accounts that each have to spend $50 just so they can leave a fake review on your $5 item.

However, the fact that Amazon changed the rules from $50 total to $50 per year seems to indicate that the issue still hasn’t been resolved. After all, a company selling these sort of fake review services can likely easily make enough to cover the cost of spending $50 a year per account, especially if they’re forced to only post verified reviews anyway, since they’d have to buy all of the products. Or they could hire existing Amazon customers that already have accounts that have spent the required amount that are willing to break the rules and write fake reviews for them.

So while this rule (or any of the others) may stop some low budget vendors from abusing the system, which does have some benefit, it obviously doesn’t stop anyone with deep enough pockets to pay for the latest workaround.

Legit Review Services vs Paying For Amazon Reviews

At this point it would be a good idea to distinguish between “paying for reviews”, as described above, and paying a review service like Hidden Gems (or others) to help you get reviews. Because the sad reality is that the scammers have given the whole industry a bad name, and so it’s important to understand that there are still legitimate ways for authors to get help finding honest Amazon reviews.

Companies or reviewers that “sell reviews” are often promising something for that service, and that something is usually that the reviews will be positive (usually 5 star) and guaranteed, regardless of product quality or other factors.  In addition, the people leaving the reviews are being directly compensated for their efforts.

If we talk about this in the context of books only, that means even if the book is terrible, the reviewer will always leave a review, and a positive one at that. That’s what they were paid to do, regardless of whether they’ve even read the book at all (which in most cases they haven’t). Whether they also buy the book first to make the review “verified” is a separate issue that likely depends on how much their service cost (the reviewer has to recoup the cost of buying the product on their account, after all).

Review services like Hidden Gems, however, neither guarantee the number of reviews a book will get, nor give any sort of star rating promise. Those factors are completely dependent on the quality of the book and the reviewer who chooses to read it. Further, the reviewers themselves are not paid anything for leaving their reviews – all they get is a free copy of the book to read after requesting it. The fee that authors pay for the service goes to Hidden Gems to cover the cost of running the service – recruiting new readers of all genres, sending out emails with book details, keeping track of sign ups, sending out copies of the book to the right readers, etc. But the readers themselves are all volunteers that elect to read and review the book on their own, and what sort of review to leave based on their enjoyment of the book.

Books that go through our service get all sorts of responses from readers – and authors that use our service understand those risks. Some books are almost universally panned or loved, and usually deservedly so, while others get a mixture of good and bad reviews – a more typical result. But the informed author knows not to fear some bad reviews. No book is loved by every reader.

Who Is Really Affected by the $50 Rule?

With thousands of readers and authors using our program, we hear from so many people with so many different life situations, and that’s helped us become aware of the real problem that this rule has created.

Not everyone spends their money on Amazon, and not everyone can afford to spend $50 a year.  In fact, not everyone even has a credit/debit card in their name (kids like to read too!).

That doesn’t mean that they’ve done anything wrong.

There are many people that love to read, but they simply cannot afford to spend what little extra money they have on books.  Instead, they rely on free books from a variety of sources, and are happy to leave honest reviews when they have an opinion to share. But now those readers are blocked from leaving reviews on Amazon because of this rule.

Yes, they can still get free books from places like the library, but many of these people are on disability, with limited income or ability to even leave their house.  Getting free books online through ARC services (like ours, or even from authors directly) have been a great benefit to many of these people. And not because they’re looking for handouts. They may not be in the financial position to buy all the books they want to read right now, but that doesn’t mean they’re not happy to contribute in ways that still help the author – like leaving reviews on those books.

And yes, they can still leave reviews on other review sites, but the reality is that authors want them on Amazon because that’s where most customers are at the point of purchase – the point where seeing those reviews really make a difference to sales.

Remember, these are often former (or current) Amazon customers who have never done anything wrong. Their reviews are honest, they aren’t being paid to leave them, and their mere existence often helps sales for both the author and Amazon.  Yet the $50 rule has cut many of them off from leaving their honest opinions, simply because they can’t afford to continue to spend money in the Amazon ecosystem.

Are reviews from customers with a certain level of disposable income the only ones that matter?

No one is arguing that was the intention of the rule, but given the questionable impact it’s had on the problem it was designed to combat, it seems like that’s all it’s really accomplishing.

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