One of the biggest challenges facing the e-published or self-published author is getting your book into the consciousness of the international reading public. Unfortunately, aside from the huge boom in self-publishing over the past few years as well as trade publishers turning to electronic versions of their new releases and backlists, there's another threat to the average author: spammers and content farmers are creating e-books and releasing them in the thousands.
For example, some spammers (I refuse to call them writers) are using PLR (Private Label Rights) to buy information inexpensively, format them into ebooks and then releasing them in Kindle versions. Laura Hazard Owen in her March, 2011 article The Kindle Swindle at Publishing Trends.com stated:
"Many ebook vendors don’t check copyright on works that are submitted, and Essex noticed that people are stealing content from the web, quickly creating ebooks about the same topics from multiple angles in order to target different keyword variants, and publishing them—some Kindle authors have “written” thousands of books in a single year."
In that article, Ms. Owen showed a screen shot of "books" by Manuel Ortiz Brachi. At that time, he had "published" 3,000 books on Kindle — including (to my horror) Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. Following Owen's lead, I searched Kindle's store today. I discovered 72 titles (apparently recycled e-content selling for 99 cents each) and the following comment on a sales page:
"We are dedicated to providing our customers with cutting edge information with the latest and most popular ebooks and hot topics at very affordable prices. Our mission is to create positive change in your life. We carry hundreds of unique titles including 'Literary Classics' under many categories for your convenience. Please click on the name 'Manuel Ortiz Braschi' at the top of the page, next to the title, or write 'Manuel Ortiz Braschi' at the search box and you will be taken to our main page in Amazon, where you will be able to check all the interesting, unique and informative titles that we carry at Amazon Kindle."
I am thrilled to announce that I found no "literary classics" listed under "Manuel Ortiz Braschi." However, that made me interested. Had anyone else "published" Alice in Wonderland?
So, I did a search for Alice in Wonderland, and discovered not only a free version for Kindle, along with various other Kindle versions selling for anywhere from 1.99 to 4.99, but one (Alice in Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass; A Lewis Carroll Collection) that listed Lewis Carroll as the author and The WrightAngles.com as author and editor on a .99 cent version.
Article comments
1 - indie
I read this article thinking how awful and then realized why my site, which is only a few months old is so popular. I do what Amazon doesn't, I vet the books that I promote.
2 - Celina Summers
Without plagiarism recognition software, it would be impossible for Amazon to confirm every book released unless they went through each book individually--and even then, that's only as secure as the reading knowledge of the person who's checking. Some of the recycled e-content is one thing, but Alice in Woncerland? With a co-author? That means no one is even checking the new titles.
Thanks for your comment.
3 - Ellen Stevenson
Personal attacks are not allowed in this forum but you are attacking the publisher "Manuel Ortiz Braschi" and other publishers & calling them spammers and scammers. I am familiar with this author because I have bought several ebooks from him and I have no complaints. The ebooks I bought from him were very informative and full of great content in the topics I read. They contained as much good information as other mainstream books in their field and at a very attractive price. You should look into this matter further before writing negative things about these publishers.
4 - Celina Summers
I cited material from external sources and did my own follow up on Manuel Ortiz Braschi and the material available from him on Amazon. Question: who co-wrote Alice in Wonderland? How about Through The Looking Glass? Answer: no one. I'll be more than happy to retract my commentary just as soon as the original source material does as well.
This Kindle self-publisher has been under scrutiny for months. I recommend that you read this article from The Bookseller.com (http://www.thebookseller.com/feature/digital-focus-content-farms.html) released on February 11, 2011 which states, in part: "...Oh, you don't know Braschi? He is the prolific author of Vegetable Gardening 101; Fairies and Angel Tattoos; The 30 Day Low-Carb Diet: How to Lose 20 Pounds or More in the First 30 Days; Anyone! Anywhere! Paintball ROCKS!: The Secrets to Winning at Paintball!; Hen Night: Get Geared Up for a Wild Girl's [sic] Night Out! and Anger Management: How to Control Your Anger to Get the Most Out of Your Life! (he loves an exclamation mark, does Braschi) among many, many, many others. Unlike Christie, Blyton and Cartland, Braschi's high number of Amazon search results are not because of multiple editions of titles (there are, for example, 144 hits for Christie's And Then There Were None, which includes various in and out-of-print physical editions, plays, audio books, e-books and foreign-language versions).
No, almost all of Braschi's books are single editions of Kindle e-books, encompassing 24 different book genres, ranging from Business, Finance & Law to Music, Stage and Screen to Children's Books. In the past month, Braschi has published 48 Kindle booksâ€"in the past three months the figure is 338. How does he do it? Is he some kind of superhuman writer, a polymath able to churn out more than a book a day? No. It is because Braschi is actually a content farm..."
Manuel Ortiz Braschi isn't an "author" in the general sense. This is an advertising ploy designed to garner the greatest number of search engine hits and produce the maximum amount of revenue. And content farmers are extremely unabashed about what they do. And calling him a content farmer isn't a personal attack. It's a fact--one that generates a great deal of money and very little notice.
5 - Heloise
I thought this was for short articles only. No?
6 - Chap O'Keefe
I've self-published three of my backlist novels via the Kindle: Misfit Lil Cheats the Hangrope, Liberty and a Law Badge, and The Sheriff and the Widow. In each case, Amazon delayed release for several days while they sought from me evidence that I was in fact the author and that I held the ebook rights. Fortunately, in all three cases I was well-prepared and able to send them documentary evidence in the form of scans of the original publishing contracts and, where applicable, the reversion of rights to myself.
It's very annoying to hear that others are not being obliged to jump through the same hoops. Even worse is the certain knowledge that books worth publishing in the new format are being drowned by what one author has described as a "tsunami of swill." I do what I can via websites etc., but I don't think any new reader is likely to come across my ebooks just by visiting Amazon and browsing. Even excellent reviews don't seem to help since they end up on title-specific product pages that don't get visited.
7 - Celina Summers
That's what makes PLR rights so annoying. Granted--it's great to have classic literature available in the public domain. However, for someone to claim to have 'co-written' a classic and then to make profit off that work is shameless exploitation--not only of the original writer's work, but also the reading public and the writers like you or I, Chap, whose works are hidden beneath a pigsty of content farmed or poorly formatted revamps of other authors' work.
8 - Claire
These sort of books are usually little more than a composite of Wikipedia articles, cheaply bought info and public domain works. The 'authors' seem to be of the impression that if they only sell one copy of each title then that's fine because they have loads of titles.
I would be interested to know if the 'author' has listed those books as 'public domain' or not when setting them up on KDP - I suspect they will be listed as 'not in the public domain' in order to take advantage of the 70% royalty which is NOT available on public domain works.
9 - Tammi L Coles
I read this article at http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Spammers-Content-Farming-and-Kindle-One-Reason-1428484.php
Does BlogCritics have a column there or was I reading a live example of the very same issue (i.e., some other company profiting from someone else's content)?
Inquiring minds want to know!
10 - Celina Summers
It appears that blogcritics has a column there.
11 - El Bicho
Tammi, it's called syndication
12 - W. Dean
I’m afraid you’ve barely scratched the surface on content farming at Amazon and B & N. Virtually every public domain book available at Project Gutenberg (in Kindle’s mobi format, for free) is snapped up and “published” on Amazon by some unscrupulous “e-publisher” for anywhere between $0.99 and $5.99.
It gets worse. When I pointed out that a particular book was public domain in a customer review, I was verbally accosted by a shill for the publisher. So not only do they publish public domain books to fleece unsuspecting buyers, they also hire reviewers to publish glowing reviews and attack critics of the practice. Delightful.
I plan to continue my little crusade, time permitting, because I find this practice revolting. I encourage others to do the same, since it’s about the only thing people can do to fight it.
13 - Celina Summers
Most of the reviews attributed to these publishers are actually reviews of the literature, and not the book itself. So sure--someone claiming to be Lewis Carroll's co-author is going to get great reviews--from newspapers at the turn of the century.
14 - W. Dean
Celina,
I was talking about the customer reviews, which influence a book's sales, not the editorial reviews. It is these reviewers who zealously guard their products. I've not been attacked by, say, H. L. Mencken, come back from the dead to slog me for criticizing content farming.
15 - Nora Blake
Anyone who doesn't know Lewis Carroll didn't have a co-author can't be protected.
I read the article hoping I'd learn more about the abuse of --copyrighted-- works. For me, the piece got derailed.