Black Hat ,White Hat or Grey Hat?

I think this question is trickier than it seems at first. Because amazon polices their store so poorly it gets confusing what's ethical and what isn't. If everyone is speeding, is it wrong to speed?

To me:

Blackhat - artificial manipulation of the system (ie. bots and author circles). These "things" aren't reading the books, they are merely borrowing them to bump rank or leaving reviews in exchange for reviews (or some form of compensation). The tactics are 100% geared toward using "non readers" to manipulate zon's system.

Grey hat - incentivized purchases and reviews fall into this category. It's scummy, but it's a fairly regular practice in the product world. These tactics involve generating readers who actually read the book and choose book A over B because there was something "more" in it for them to choose A. Check out home depot's site and you'll see TONS of dishwashers and other appliances where it states the review was given as part of a promotion. The issue with zon is they don't have any mechanisms that allow people to identify a review as having "strings attached". Or they allow strings attached (ie. vine system) but only if they do it (which makes no sense).

White hat - Just straight up marketing and sales. But I'll add here that I'll never understand zon's "family and friends" restrictions. Ironically, family and friends seem to be the HARDEST people to get to leave reviews (don't ask me why). I get that zon feels there's a bias there and hence the review isn't "legit". But let's be real, how many "friends and family" do people have? I got no problem with a book being padded with 5 good reviews (good luck getting family to do that anyway)... especially if they have read the book. My issue is when you have 100 fake reviews. But honestly, even then, the fake reviews would easily be offset by real negative reviews. I think the fake reviews become a bigger issue for high priced products like tv's and stuff... it just so happens that zon has a single review policy for all products.

The longer I'm in this game the more it becomes clear to me that the black/grey/white hats are irrelevant. It's amazon itself that create a store that almost demands that you cheat. Borrow bumps for rank incentivized 90% of all this silliness we've seen going on. Everyone is out to "beat" the amazon algo. On the product side you see something similar, where people sell a product cheap, generate reviews, then jack up the price... and people who got something for $10 will review it very differently than the ones who paid $40. But because amazon doesn't care about any of this, it goes on because it helps sell product A over B.

So the issue isn't other authors or the unscrupulous tactics some of them use, it's that amazon rewards them for using said tactics when they VERY easily could prevent the benefits from occurring. Drop "borrow bumps" and give the rank bump based on say 300 KENP pages = 1 sale and you'd eradicate 90% of the issue right there.

When you strip amazon down to its core it is PROMOTING poor quality books and SUPPRESSING high-quality books. Amazon wants the content mills and the AMS big spenders... both of which tend to supplement their efforts with grey/black hat tactics (since they tend to start off with deep pockets... these are business people more than they are authors). There are LOTS of really great books that are simmering under the various charts that zon could easily give some visibility to, but which they intentionally do not. Because let's face facts, writing a really great book takes time. And zon isn't particularly interested in authors who are selling/releasing 1 or 2 books a year, they want authors (content mills) that are releasing a book every two weeks. More books, more revenue. Or in KU's case, more books equals constantly fresh content.

I strongly disagree with their attitude towards books, but what can you do, it is what it is.

I think a lot of people fail to allow for the possibility that zon is attracting exactly the type of authors it wants. The fact that those same authors then have to cheat to compete with each other (as there are too many of them, creating a saturated market) is an unexpected consequence (although it shouldn't have been).

Zon isn't about quality publishing, it's about fast and dirty pulp fiction... and it's that way intentionally, not by accident. The cheaters didn't create this, zon did.

Yep. just for context you can't get any cleaner than me I've literally done nothing that could ever be seen as even grey hat. But that's tied to my philosophy that I don't want "fake success". If I write something my goal is that its readable for life, not just 3 months. So my view of publishing is very different than the content mills. Also, i want to know if I suck so that I don't waste my time chasing failure.

I think with amazon we've gone past the point of being able to talk about ethics anymore simply because they, themselves, are unethical. Maybe they have reasons for page cuts and bans and KENP calculations and pushing their own imprints and various other things... or maybe they don't. What I do know is that there are very simple and easy steps they could take to stomp out a ton of the games that go on, but they don't.

I don't agree with grey and black hat tactics, but I can also understand how authors end up there because of how amazon set up and runs their store. My emotional brain is of the view that the hatters are scheming dicks, but my logical brain is of the view that if you set up a store to attract scheming dicks then it's no surprise when you get them. I put almost all of this mess on amazon.

Same. If I do things the honest way, at least I know my success is mine. I've earned it. That sure feels good.