hollyand-writes replied to your post
“When I’m here and on twitter long enough and even managed to sort of...”
I have never heard of either of those hashtags, and a look into both #tiffanygate and #bookstuffers isn't enlightening me as to what they're both about. What happened?
#bookstuffing #tiffanygate #getloud
I’m gonna post some links that articulate this better but the short and ugly is this: Scammers put books into Kindle Unlimited that contain about 15% new material, stuff it with recycled stories and encourage readers to click through all pages towards the end for some reward. That way, they get paid by page reads for the full hundreds to thousands pages of a novel, without producing any real content. Since the KU pot is a shared resource among all pages read (which I find shady as fuck anyway), they scam other authors out of revenue by taking out a large part of it.
These books have all been at the top of the charts, pushing down “real” books with their recycled/stuffed content and get promoted as Kindle Stars by Amazon. This isn’t new, it has been going on for years but the community of romance writers on twitter is now making noise about it under the hashtag #getloud.
Some links:
https://yourcheekywench.com/2018/06/12/an-open-letter-to-jeff-bezos/
http://davidgaughran.com/2018/06/10/cassandra-dee-mosaic-book-stuffing/
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/amazon-book-stuffing-authors-scam-chance-carter-romance-kindle-unlimited.html?cid=sf01001
http://www.pajiba.com/think_pieces/book-stuffing-bribery-and-bullying-the-selfpublishing-problem-plaguing-amazon.php
Here are some highlights because you just can’t make this shit up:
Most of these novels are probably ghostwritten https://twitter.com/serittel/status/1004716888859992064 so it’s not even their own work their selling. https://twitter.com/DavidGaughran/status/1006602504434585600
The hashtag #tiffanygate refers to Chance Carter, often called CC, who offered his cult of followers (called Diamonds) “a gift from Tiffany” for reading through all pages. That’s definitly against Amazon’s TOS and probably what has gotten him now banned from Amazon and made the Diamonds all very sad.
The Diamonds are a group of about 1000 women, who are a fangroup of the aforementioned Chance Carter. They apparently live such neglected, loveless lives, that the attention from one man through weekly chats is enough for them to go in full on protection mode. It’s actually quite sad.
The Diamonds have guides how to help CC so that he makes the most money: https://twitter.com/ease_dropper/status/1002001437876944897/photo/1. That shit is not easy, you have to take your time with the page flip or it doesn’t count.
This is a whole clique of authors like Faleena Hopkins, Cassandra Dee, Russ Raj, all vaguely connected by those “get rich with ebooks” groups like “20 books to 50k”, or “ebookmoneynow, why writing a book yourself is a waste of time”, and the like. They all learn and feed on each other and I wouldn’t be surprised if they all pay for their shared pool of reviewers.
Amazon is now banning a few authors for violation of their TOS, which is of course just a fig leave in this fight. I’m sure Chance Carter has done some search and replace on his old novels and is already re-releasing them under another pen-name and nobody can quite say how many pen-names Cassandra Dee has. None of this will affect the scammers.
Because Amazon is profiting from this. It’s not in their interest to put a stop to this. Capitalism at work.
The #GETLOUD movement has of course brought up a whole lot of sockpuppets on twitter that harass the mostly female romance writers with threats of doxxing and we all know that’s not a coincidence.
Yeah, this is all I can think of for now.
I’m so tired.
