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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Sept 26, 2018 1:45:38 GMT
How would you feel if you wrote and published a nonfiction book, and then someone came along and wrote up a summary/cliff's notes version of your book, using your author name as part of their title to steal your traffic and sales?
Would you not care because once people bought it mistakenly and realized it wasn't your book they would go and buy your book? Or would you be pissed off/super annoyed that someone was trying to make money off you and believe they could be costing you sales?
I haven't had this happen to me, I was just reading a "how to" that tells people how to do this, and when I looked at the example books and read the reviews, the majority of them were people who didn't notice "summary" in the title and who thought they were buying the actual book. I can't see how this could be a good long term sales goal. Not only is it lazy and uncreative, but you're just going to make a ton of buyers and possibly authors mad.
Cliffs notes of like old classic books that kids have to read for school assignments is one thing. I can see a value in that for lazy kids who don't want to have to read so much. But for newer books that are just for personal learning why would anyone want to purchase a summary of it?
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Post by possiblyderanged on Sept 26, 2018 21:43:00 GMT
It steps into all kinds of copyright issues, in my opinion. And Amazon has strict rules about doing it. You should have seen the moaning on the KDP forums when Amazon decided to enforce those rules. Could have filled a river with the tears. It's almost as bad as when all the PLR stuff was banned.
I wouldn't let such a thing get published, personally. I feel it's using someone else's hard work to make a quick buck. If someone truly thought something I wrote needed a study guide or whatever, then they can agree to a contract with me and pay me the money.
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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Sept 26, 2018 23:26:54 GMT
Yeah, I think study guides are fine for subjects, like a quick study guide on how the US government works or something. Or you can do it for public domain stuff, summarize a bunch of very old books with updated info that no one actually wants to slug through. But don't do it for popular copyrighted books that people actually want to read. You're just getting dishonest sales from people who don't read the titles and descriptions too carefully. I suppose one ethical way you could use this is to write up a study guide, send it to the author and say, "hey, I wrote this guide that I think your readers could really benefit from using. How would you feel about including the link to this in your next email? It would go to my opt-in page, so we would be sharing audiences. Here are the books I write. I think your audience would really like them." I don't know if any authors would go for it or not, but at least it would be ethical. The course I got this from came with an excellent canva tutorial though, so it wasn't a total loss.  I'm kind of addicted to all the scammy WSO courses. I just like to see what they're doing. And sometimes I'll get ideas for ethical things I can do. For the newbies reading this: The easiest way to tell if a course is selling you a scam plan is to ask yourself - does anyone actually want this? Don't rely on what the seller is telling you. Would you ever want something like that? Can you think of any circumstance when this product would actually help someone? If the answer is yes, then write your book for that specific circumstance. That will be your hook and you'll do very well. If you answer, no, then stay, far, far away from that business plan. |
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