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Hijinks Ensue posted:I'm thinking of making book 1 in my two-book suspense series permafree. Should I just wait for Amazon to price-match? If they're being slow about it and I send them an email, should I tell them that it's going to be permanent or should I just say it's for a promo and never change it back to the original price? You can contact them through Author Central under Help -> Contact Us -> My Books -> Update Information About a Book -> Pricing In the text box, include the ASIN of the book (not just title), and the link to where it's free (must be B&N or Apple, maybe Kobo). They'll send back the same message just about every time that says "Price matching is at our discretion blah blah blah" but within a day or so it'll be price matched.
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Mar 1, 2016 18:47
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Oh, I know how (I've done free promos before). I'm just wondering if they'd be reluctant to match it permanently, and if so, how do I get around that.
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Mar 1, 2016 19:10
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Hijinks Ensue posted:Oh, I know how (I've done free promos before). I'm just wondering if they'd be reluctant to match it permanently, and if so, how do I get around that. There is no way to make a book permanently free on Amazon other than by Amazon price matching another retailer.
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Mar 1, 2016 22:15
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Mass frenzy from writers on my Facebook feed! Apparently Amazon is now adding "buy used" links for ebooks, though I haven't yet seen actual used ebooks for sale. Amazon got the patent for selling used ebooks in 2013 but so far nothing has come of it. Maybe that's about to change?
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Mar 6, 2016 01:36
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Amazon d8es something new to anger self publishers, film at 11. Seriously I can't wait for there to be any other retailer worth a drat.
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Mar 6, 2016 01:42
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Google doesn't have anything worthwhile on that topic since some doomsday ebook prophecies from 2013, is there any new concrete basis for rumor?
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Mar 6, 2016 11:58
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Roar posted:Google doesn't have anything worthwhile on that topic since some doomsday ebook prophecies from 2013, is there any new concrete basis for rumor? just some clickbait articles and the fact that some Amazon pages have "Buy this new and used from $2.99" on it It's not that I believe this particular rumor but the fact that it is spreading and has been repeated since late January with no word from Amazon is troubling. Amazon doesn't feel the need to comment, ever, because they're the biggest game in town and believe that they always will be. Nobody is even bothering to compete against them so it's really not ridiculous. The fact that they make major changes to our business model with little-to-no notice means that you might as well begin to prepare for it, and this could affect your bottom line waaaaay more then KU ever did. Or it could be great, and Amazon could let us know that today! KDP's customer service continues to decline, and now they've stopped sending their reps to the various writing conferences that they used to. I was just at a major one that they decided to come in via lovely video feed lol. They said they're "cutting back" and might not even go to RWA this year. They've stopped doing anything that they used to do for anyone via their reps (mine hasn't spoken to me since April of last year). The only way to get them to do anything is to contact jeff@amazon himself, which seems like a pretty horrible way to do business.
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Mar 6, 2016 14:17
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EngineerSean posted:Amazon doesn't feel the need to comment, ever, because they're the biggest game in town and believe that they always will be. Nobody is even bothering to compete against them so it's really not ridiculous. It smacks a little of monopoly, the way they sell the most e-readers and control the easiest way of getting the books onto them. I don't know about you, but if a book is the same price on Amazon and Smashwords, i'll buy it on Amazon so it downloads straight to my kindle. I can't be arsed transferring files, and i'm a moderately tech-savvy ex helpdesk worker. I think the reason that their control of the market is so huge lies somewhere between the two. Selina Kitt started her own smut distribution site, but it's barely doing 1% of Amazon's business from what I understand. I suspect that even if all of Amazon's romance authors banded together and launched their own site, they'd still hit the wall of the books being hard* to get onto kindles. * harder than most readers are willing to go through vs just instantly downloading on Amazon. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Mar 6, 2016 |
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Mar 6, 2016 14:54
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Roar posted:Google doesn't have anything worthwhile on that topic since some doomsday ebook prophecies from 2013, is there any new concrete basis for rumor? Yeah, I wasn't trying to start a panic or anything--this was exactly what I said on Facebook, actually. Then it kind of went like this: Author 1: It's a real thing! Here's a link to an article I haven't read yet [a/n: yes, really]. Me: That's from February 2015, is there anything more recent? Author 2: I didn't read Author 1's reply to you, but here's a link to an article! It's fairly recent. February 2015! Me: gently caress it, I'll ask on Something Awful. So I'm glad there haven't been any recent bombshells, though I agree it is possible it could happen, because obviously anything can. I wish there was a viable alternative to Amazon 
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Mar 6, 2016 17:36
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I know I couldn't take the 60% pay cut that withdrawing from Amazon would mean, but I wouldn't worry. The sky is not falling. Authors just tend to freak out about every little thing. As long as your sales don't rely on some weird algo quirk or some ONE WEIRD TRICK you will be okay.
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Mar 6, 2016 18:28
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Lol just lol if you aren't packing your crack with crisco as July 1st looms.
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Mar 7, 2016 15:10
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So I think I want to try writing to see if I'm any good. I haven't written anything fiction in years, but I've read this entire thread, bookmarking helpful posts along the way, and I figure the worst that happens is I waste 40 hours I could dump into a video game seeing to find out I can't hack it. I'm going to set myself 1000 word a day minimum, and try my hand at the romance/ erotica paint by numbers that's been discussed here. I'm not afraid of hard work, or failure. I am hesitant to write a 50k word romance monster (or monster romance) that both don't enjoy and sucks out loud. I was looking at a bunch of the best sellers list, and they're all 4-600 word volumes. I downloaded something sub 1000 in the shifters category, and it had 3 pages of the story, a link to buy it somewhere else, and then 600+ pages of poorly formatted short stories which looked like high fantasy romance as I picked some random pages. Is this a usual thing? I think I could manage to string together 6k words 2-3 times a week, make a ab and wolf cover pic, and publish a bundle every couple weeks (after a little bit to warm up). But I can hardly find any of those to make sure I'm hitting the points, and am I going to be competing against people just putting their full catalog in the back of every book?
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Mar 8, 2016 04:21
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Beast Pussy posted:I downloaded something sub 1000 in the shifters category, and it had 3 pages of the story, a link to buy it somewhere else, and then 600+ pages of poorly formatted short stories which looked like high fantasy romance as I picked some random pages. Is this a usual thing? No, it's a scam that's due to amazon paying based on word count rather than list price. Pretty much any book you download that has "Romance:" or "ROMANCE:" as the first word of its title will be the same scam.
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Mar 8, 2016 15:22
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Beast Pussy posted:I'm going to set myself 1000 word a day minimum, and try my hand at the romance/ erotica paint by numbers that's been discussed here. I'm not afraid of hard work, or failure. I am hesitant to write a 50k word romance monster (or monster romance) that both don't enjoy and sucks out loud. From what I can tell, short 3-6k Erotica is now dead in the water as a revenue source, unless you put in the kind of time and resources you could throw into any other home business and make a lot more. Writing 50k is not a daunting task if you want to throw 1,000 words a day at the project. Look at it this way: 2 months of that, and you'll have had time to complete a first draft and redraft it a little to send it off to an editor. Grab some books on structure and set yourself word count targets. If you really want to do it, the current state of play is that it's going to have to be either a 50k novel or a couple of 10-15k serials.
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Mar 8, 2016 15:49
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Do not write erotica or romance if you don't enjoy reading it. I don't really agree with this. If you like writing/reading in general, you can pretty much force yourself to like it. I don't like it as a visceral thing even after having finished six novels now, but I like it as a "crafted product" if that makes any sense. I enjoy seeing a well-crafted story that hits all the beats, and even though I don't actually like reading romance in the same way my readers do, I get really high reviews and great emotional response from my readers.
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Mar 8, 2016 15:53
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I really enjoy writing sci-fi but after four months and 100k words I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't even imagine writing on a topic I didn't enjoy.
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Mar 8, 2016 15:57
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angel opportunity posted:I don't like it as a visceral thing even after having finished six novels now, but I like it as a "crafted product" if that makes any sense.
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Mar 8, 2016 16:03
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angel opportunity has it right but 99%+ of people don't have the work ethic to take a love of science fiction and turn it into a career in romance
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Mar 8, 2016 17:57
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Hey does anyone know how long it takes Amazon to update KENPC page count when you upload a new manuscript? I put a few extra chapters in a book, originally was going to be in the sequel but it worked better in the first one, uploaded the new manuscript and published. It said it was live with updates publishing, then got the email saying it was published, but the KENPC on the promotions page and length (where it shows estimated pages for buyers) is the same. Been like that since Sunday night, is there a delay for that?
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Mar 8, 2016 18:26
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Beast Pussy posted:So I think I want to try writing to see if I'm any good. I haven't written anything fiction in years, but I've read this entire thread, bookmarking helpful posts along the way, and I figure the worst that happens is I waste 40 hours I could dump into a video game seeing to find out I can't hack it. First of all, welcome to the fold! I wish you boatloads of smutbux. The scam you're seeing there is that Kindle Unlimited no longer pays out a flat rate for borrows anymore; instead they give you a per-page-read payment of about a half-cent. The person sticking their entire catalog in the back of all of their books is hoping you'll leaf through a few hundred pages of it looking for something good and make them some money. It's a lovely way to do business. Most people here will tell you KU is the only game in the town, but its up to you whether you want to trade visibility for money - some people in here have had it take their catalog into the stratosphere, but I'm not one of them - other than a couple of "sampler packs" I have nothing in KU. The good news is you're already doing the required first step: research! Definitely get a KU subscription and use the hell out of it; look at the Top 100 erotica authors (ignore anyone who has less than five titles as they're probably someone taking advantage of a gimmick, like that guy who wrote the Donald Trump erotica that blew up) and see what they're doing: what kind of stories, what length, what presentation. Presentation is probably the most important thing of all - there's lots of terribly written smut that makes lots of money because it has a nice cover and blurb, but there's no erotica that makes money with a terrible cover/blurb because its well-written. Unfortunately, the days where you could churn out a 3k story every other day and make five figures a month have ended, but there's still ways to make bank. The big thing is bundles, because everything in erotica is about length (pun intended). Don't write one-offs, everything should be part of a 3/5/7 story series. A lot of the erotica people on top have basically been writing serials - they write a three-to-five story series where every part is around 10k, then package it all together like a novel once the sales of the initial story taper off. It's like you get paid to write the novel while you're writing it, and its what I've been doing to great success. Look up Nadia Nightside for a good example of what I'm talking about (disclaimer: I show up in her also-boughts constantly but I am NOT NN, much as I'd like to be). You're not going to make a lot of money off the bat, but chances are good you'll at least make some. Have fun with it, don't get too frustrated, and for god's sake do your research. I spent my entire first year doing this making all of three-hundred a month because I wrote what I wanted and used cutesy, oh-so-clever titles instead of making everything a focused product. You can do it. And if not, you still have one hell of a good conversation starter. edit: lol, I kill this thread every time I post Popular Human fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Mar 9, 2016 |
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Mar 8, 2016 20:38
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Popular Human posted:edit: lol, I kill this thread every time I post Although i'm starting to get sick of everyone bad-mouthing self pub automatically. I'm always interested when people talk about it being 'less of an option,' how much of that is based on statistics, and what percentage of those figures are based on eBook self publishing vs. physical self publishing (i.e. going to the printer yourself, distributing and advertising locally etc - the old school vanity publishing market).
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Mar 11, 2016 09:05
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Bobby Deluxe posted:To be fair, the industry is hardly making it look like a glowing career choice. before I even clicked it, I knew which irrelevant two-year-old article from the UK you were linking
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Mar 11, 2016 14:22
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EngineerSean posted:before I even clicked it, I knew which irrelevant two-year-old article from the UK you were linking
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Mar 11, 2016 21:17
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Finally hit Publish on my first book. It's now been "in review" for about 5 hours or so. I can't remember if any of you guys said this is normal, but I can't stop refreshing the page every ten seconds 
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Mar 12, 2016 04:13
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Blue Scream posted:Finally hit Publish on my first book. It's now been "in review" for about 5 hours or so. I can't remember if any of you guys said this is normal, but I can't stop refreshing the page every ten seconds 5 hours is nothing. It's not impossible for it to get through in that sort of timeframe, but 90% of the time you're looking at between 12 and 36 hours.
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Mar 12, 2016 05:34
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Aaronicon posted:5 hours is nothing. It's not impossible for it to get through in that sort of timeframe, but 90% of the time you're looking at between 12 and 36 hours. Oh, great. In that case, I have a question about preorders. I assume the best way to handle them is by putting a link to the next book in the back of the one you're publishing, but that means the next book already has to have a page on Amazon, correct? So I uploaded the draft for book 2, and the preorder book went live in less than 2 hours, and I put the link to the page at the end of book 1. Then I published book 1 and it's under review for 12-36 hours. So now I have a preorder page for the second book in my series when the first isn't even visible on the site. I guess it's not a problem right now because I don't have an audience yet, but that seems like it will be a real pain in the rear end in the future. Is there a way around it that I'm missing?
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Mar 12, 2016 06:31
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Blue Scream posted:Oh, great. In that case, I have a question about preorders. I assume the best way to handle them is by putting a link to the next book in the back of the one you're publishing, but that means the next book already has to have a page on Amazon, correct? So I uploaded the draft for book 2, and the preorder book went live in less than 2 hours, and I put the link to the page at the end of book 1. Then I published book 1 and it's under review for 12-36 hours. Wait until book 1 is live. Then, upload the preorder for book 2. Update book 1 with the link to book 2. While book 1 is updating, it stays live on the site and available for purchase.
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Mar 12, 2016 07:53
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Alternatively, use a URL redirection system. What I had is a link to each (future) book in the back that was mywebsite.com/booktitle. While it was still being written, I would set up the redirect from that link to a signup page for my mailing list so they'd get an email when I launched it. When it was live, I just changed the redirect to the store page. That way I didn't have to change something so minor in every book and reupload it whenever something happened, I could fish for more mailing list sign-ups, I'd have the option to redirect to a special sale page, change the Amazon store link to a generic page with everything when I went wide, etcetera. It worked pretty well imo.
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Mar 12, 2016 09:01
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Both of those sound like much better options than what I was doing. Thanks guys! At least book 1 is live now, whew.
Blue Scream fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Mar 12, 2016 |
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Mar 12, 2016 17:07
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Do you still have the first 3 days after publication to get out of Select? I'm starting to wonder if I've boned myself by not having the option to keep the first book in a long serial perma-free, and I published on the 12th so this would be my last chance to change my mind, if that rule is still in place. I'm having a hard time finding it in the Agreement but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?
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Mar 15, 2016 17:22
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Blue Scream posted:Do you still have the first 3 days after publication to get out of Select? I'm starting to wonder if I've boned myself by not having the option to keep the first book in a long serial perma-free, and I published on the 12th so this would be my last chance to change my mind, if that rule is still in place. I'm having a hard time finding it in the Agreement but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place? You should be able to check this yourself by clicking on Promote and Advertise on your KDP bookshelf. In there you should see a checkbox for KDP Select enrollment. February KENPC rate is $0.00478. A nice jump from last month: I guess the scammers were earning a lot more than I thought.
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Mar 15, 2016 17:50
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Yes, I just tried that and it let me uncheck the box, so I guess I'm out. Duh, sorry. I'll see how it goes from here; guess I better start publishing on the other platforms to get the price match going.
Blue Scream fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Mar 15, 2016 |
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Mar 15, 2016 17:55
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Only have one book in Select currently, but its reads flatlined a few days ago. Dead in the water.
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Mar 15, 2016 18:33
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psychopomp posted:Only have one book in Select currently, but its reads flatlined a few days ago. Dead in the water. you have to keep publishing and old books in select will continue earning
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Mar 15, 2016 19:01
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Published this book less than a month ago, have a bunch of non-select books. Gonna publish the next in its series in about a month. Probably just a random slump.
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Mar 15, 2016 19:11
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:February KENPC rate is $0.00478. A nice jump from last month: I guess the scammers were earning a lot more than I thought. Scammers as in people who used D2D to format their books? Have you seriously already forgotten that we all lost 10-15% of our page count in February? Am I in the Twilight Zone?
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Mar 15, 2016 19:16
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EngineerSean posted:Scammers as in people who used D2D to format their books? Have you seriously already forgotten that we all lost 10-15% of our page count in February? Am I in the Twilight Zone? He was talking about the link scammers.
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Mar 15, 2016 19:19
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EngineerSean posted:Scammers as in people who used D2D to format their books? Have you seriously already forgotten that we all lost 10-15% of our page count in February? Am I in the Twilight Zone? I HAVE A VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR YOU. CLICK HERE I PROMISE ITS NOT SPAM. CLICK HERE TO WIN A KINDLE FIRE HDX! CLICK HERE FOR A CHANCE TO WIN A $100 AMAZON GIFT CARD!
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Mar 15, 2016 19:19
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Edit: One of the prominent smutlords on Reddit is reporting that many authors are seeing KENPC reductions of 10-60% on their titles. Jalumibnkrayal posted:February KENPC rate is $0.00478. A nice jump from last month: I guess the scammers were earning a lot more than I thought. This "jump" is entirely attributable to them changing the way they count pages. brotherly posted:He was talking about the link scammers. Jalumibnkrayal posted:I HAVE A VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR YOU. CLICK HERE I PROMISE ITS NOT SPAM. CLICK HERE TO WIN A KINDLE FIRE HDX! CLICK HERE FOR A CHANCE TO WIN A $100 AMAZON GIFT CARD! Are you two entirely loving kidding me? EngineerSean posted:No, it's a scam that's due to amazon paying based on word count rather than list price. Pretty much any book you download that has "Romance:" or "ROMANCE:" as the first word of its title will be the same scam. Believe it or not I have been aware of this scam and emailing Amazon about it for Quite Some Time.
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Mar 15, 2016 19:41
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EngineerSean posted:Believe it or not I have been aware of this scam and emailing Amazon about it for Quite Some Time. Right, so Amazon capped the kenpc at 3k and pulled that kenpc2.0 poo poo which helped stem the tide of scammers a bit, which is why we think the rate has gone up. People have been up in arms about it on the forums for a few weeks now.
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Mar 15, 2016 19:52
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