Stuffing: It's Not Just for Thanksgiving Dinner, Toys, or Bras Anymore

Last year I wrote an entry on all these omnibuses that ranged from 800-2500 pages and were being sold for a piddly 99 cents.  At times they've really clogged up Amazon charts, especially in erotica categories.

It turns out there's something even worse:  stuffing.  A few "authors" have been very successful manipulating Amazon's Kindle Unlimited system by selling a book that also includes several other books, though it's not necessarily indicated in the book's description.  And sometimes in "mosaic stuffing" those books stuffed into the book are themselves stuffed with another book!  It's like one of those Russian dolls where you open it and there's a smaller doll and you open that and it's a smaller doll and so on. 

This David Gaughran guy seems to be really on top of it, so you can read a couple of articles about it, like this article from Nigel Mitchell's Twitter feed and this article from Facebook "friend" Kathy Steineman.  The first one also has some stuff on "#Cockygate" and also describes a sleazy way that these stuffing "authors" would use to get people to flip through their books and post reviews.  It's called #Tiffanygate because everything needs a fucking "gate" attached I guess.

This is another of Amazon's self-inflicted problems and in Amazon fashion they're kinda, sorta handling it--erratically as always.  They won an arbitration suit against some authors recently.  Some authors have had books taken down and some authors might have accounts blocked but others are still alive and well.  The second article talks about some of the minimal ways authors are changing their stuffed books.  Mostly it's just calling it a "compilation."

Now some legit authors like me do things like omnibuses or boxed sets.  Those are not "stuffing," though I worry Amazon in their jackbooted way will start to just shut down anything that even looks vaguely like stuffing--so long as it's not a Big Five compilation.  I do omnibuses because I figured that they might attract the value-conscious consumer.  I mean someone might not want to pay $2.99 a book but maybe they'll pay $4.99 for a trilogy or $9.99 for a bunch of books.  Or get them from Kindle Unlimited.

Other authors like Sandra Ulbrich Almazan and Jay Noel have been in compilations and box sets.  Those are done so that authors can band together for the greater good.  Again it's about creating a value for customers and then hoping that some of those readers will like your story or book and go to find more.  It's like if an indie band puts a song on a soundtrack or sampler; the point is to draw listeners in so they buy more.

Those are all legit uses, or at least they should be.  "Stuffing" is just a lot of bullshit.  It's just throwing a bunch of stuff together to get page views and thus more money from the Kindle pot.  At least those omnibuses I complained about said they were compilations so they aren't technically "stuffing" though still skeevy.  Any time someone puts out a 2000-3000 page book for 99 cents, you should know it's not on the up-and-up.  In my original entry I think I compared it to if someone offers 200 cans of pop for a dollar then it's probably not very good.  Even authors looking for "exposure" probably aren't that desperate, right?  Or not.

But I don't know how you can really solve it.  This sort of stuff is always like a game of whack-a-mole:  you knock out one stuffer and there'll be another and another.  Or if you change from page views to something else then scammers will find a new way to manipulate the system.  That's just what people do.  It's like viruses and hacking; they make software to stop this worm or virus and then another one pops up.  It never ends when there's so much money at stake.  And for Amazon there's no need to work too judiciously on this problem as they're making money on this stuff.  It's really other authors these "stuffers" screw over, not Amazon.  So you can't really expect Amazon to move too quickly on the problem.

If you've seen a stuffed book, report it to Amazon and maybe the Evil Empire will stop it.  Or not.