Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Nov 17, 2019 1:34:01 GMT
1. If you notice a sudden and unexpected uptick in sales. A blogger/vlogger may have decided to review your book, or you could have been added to a free promo by a smaller service in need of content, or maybe someone popular happened to have read your book and decided to give it a shout out. There could be many happy and exciting reasons for your awesome sales.
Or a scammer could be using your book/audio book as a smokescreen to cover their scammy actions.
A few years ago, hundreds, maybe thousands of authors suddenly started getting threatening letters from amazon and watching in horror as half of the unpaid money KDP said they'd earned was taken away due to what amazon said was their scammy behavior.
Most of these authors were innocent of any scammy behavior, and after months of fighting back and forth it was discovered that KU click scammers were reading random authors books (authors who had not paid click scammers to scam for them). Amazon had discovered how to tell where reader traffic was coming from, and so they were taking back all the money lost in this scam. Losing money sucks, but if it came from fraudulent reads, okay. But having your account threatened over something you didn't do is not okay.
The only good thing to come out of that particular scandal is that we now know this is a thing, and it's something to watch out for. If you see unusual activity on your account, and after googling your book to see if you can trace a logical reason for the flurry of sales, you may want to contact amazon proactively to tell them about it. They might not do anything, at the time, but as long as you save the screenshots and save the email you sent, you will have a trail to share if amazon later starts sending you nastygrams.
It might also help to post about the situation on Kboards or on some other forum you know amazon monitors, so that you have another piece of evidence that you're a honest author. I don't know for a fact that any of this is necessary, or that it will actually help or not, if you end up being falsely accused. But it's worth a thought if ever happen to notice anything unusual with your account.
Does anyone else have any signs or stories they'd like to share to help other authors spot quicker when they could be in trouble? Share your wisdom and experience with us below!
