Original Enchantment launched on September 2nd. A little over a week later, I wrote about how it had already paid for itself, with two-thirds of that commission coming from Kindle Select. For those who don’t remember, that’s the program where you let readers with Kindle Unlimited subscriptions read your book for free and get paid a share of their subscription fees based on how much people read your books compared to others.

The good news is that there’s a lot of money in this. For instance, last month’s fund was $39.7 million. Even a very small piece of that pie is lucrative. Amazon has the subscriber base and reach to make self-publishing a legitimate way to earn a living. For most authors, it’s not just indispensable; it’s the only platform worth the time or effort.

What’s the bad news? It’s really just the other side of the good news; because there’s a lot of money to make on Kindle Select, there are bad actors who try to cheat the system. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder how easy it might be to write a bot to automatically read your book hundreds or thousands of times and rake in an easy payday.

Email from Amazon KDP

Let’s leave that for a moment and go on a journey. It’s October 10th. It’s been more than a week since my estimated royalties for September clocked in at ~$3,300. Now I’m just waiting until the 15th for the amounts to be finalized. I’m not just happy with it; I’m on cloud nine. I had been hoping to recoup the ~$700 it cost to produce the book in its first month, so this is an order of magnitude better than I had expected.

Then I get an email.

Hello,

We are reaching out to you because we detected accounts attempting to manipulate Kindle services by simulating reading or borrowing activity on your titles.

You do not need to take any action, however, we will block the activities of these malicious accounts and their effects on payments. This means that you will still receive royalties associated with legitimate reading activities, but you will not receive royalties associated with activities related to these accounts.

Please note that this notice does not represent a change to your account status but is sent to make you aware of how our security countermeasures will affect your previously reporting page count and your royalty payments.

We understand you might have questions regarding the nature of how we detect these activities; however, please be aware that we cannot provide details that might compromise the integrity of our security systems. 

If you have any other questions, please reply to this email. 

Regards,

Amazon KDP

So, to paraphrase, Amazon informs me that the wild success I’m so pleased with is a fluke. Bots have inflated my number of pages read on Kindle Unlimited, so they’ve corrected it. Oh, and I can take any questions I have and file them in the circular receptacle on the floor beside their desk.

To say this strikes me as odd is an understatement. Why on earth would someone use bots to inflate my book? Is it some well-meaning but misguided friend? Some sort of mistake on their part? “Okay,” I tell myself. “Calm down. Breathe. You know you’re not cheating the system. How much of a difference is this likely to make?”

I log into my reporting to see that my royalties for September have dropped to ~$1,900, a full $1,400 less than originally shown. With one email, Amazon has canceled ~42% of my commission.

Figuring Out What Happened

What follows is several days of research. I will never actually know who was doing this no matter how hard I try. However, after some Googling and chatting with the nice folks over on the LitRPG Forum Discord server (the same nice folks who selected me for their book club), I learned that this sort of thing happens all the time.

You remember those bad actors I was talking about? It turns out they do all sorts of unscrupulous things. They’ll publish books with fake or plagiarized content, appropriate the names of real (sometimes deceased) authors to sell them, and inflate the commission from their books using bots on trial accounts, among other things. Inflating the counts of legitimate authors is just a smokescreen, a way of covering their tracks so Amazon has a harder time telling which accounts to ban. It’s like a bank robber shoving a stack of money in your hand so the police don’t know who to arrest.

Coming to Terms

My reaction in the first day or two was what you’d expect: Confusion, frustration, indignation, and shattered expectations. The way you might feel if I told you you’re getting a check for $3,300 and then and say no, whoops, you’re getting $1,900 because someone else made it look like you cheated. It’s not pleasant to feel jerked around like that.

Once I got my head on straight, I went back to my original definition of success. I had been hoping to recoup $700. Even if I’m getting less than I expected on October 1st, I’m still getting a lot more than I hoped for on September 1st. It’s all about how you frame the situation. Sure, I’m a little disappointed it isn’t the bigger number, but it’s still a good number.

I feel the same about Amazon. Sure, it sucks that they do this regularly. Put another way, it sucks that they have to. In a way, it’s the price we pay to have a successful system like this. Bad actors are the inevitable consequence of Kindle Select working so well. If it’s a choice between a self-publishing platform where authors can’t earn a living versus one where they can with some *ahem* hiccups, I know what I’d choose.

If anything, I think it’s an important dose of reality to consider before taking the leap to writing full time. It doesn’t change much in my case, but I can imagine how much harder it is for writers who are depending on that income to pay the bills. I do know one thing, though:

I sure as hell won’t be fawning over my estimated commission metrics from now on.