Amazon used to let people get away with gaming the system. I applauded them for trying to crack down on the cheaters
, but now that I have been wrongly accused of manipulating sales I'm not as enthusiastic.
In case you're interested in what happened to me, here I go . . .
I didn't know there was a problem until I noticed one of my books had lost its sales rank. I thought it was a technical glitch, so I contacted customer service. They thought it was a technical glitch as well and promised to look into it.
A week after my first inquiry I finally got a message back from someone in compliance:
We detected that purchases or borrows of your book(s) are originating from accounts attempting to manipulate sales rank. As a result, your sales rank will not be visible until we determine this activity has ceased.
While we fully support the efforts of our publishers to promote their books, we take activities that jeopardize the experience of our readers and other authors seriously. Please be aware that you are responsible for ensuring the strategies used to promote your books comply with our Terms and Conditions. We encourage you to thoroughly review any marketing services employed for promotional purposes.
Compliance also wrote:
We cannot offer advice on marketing services or details of our investigations.
Please be aware we will not be providing additional details.
I take it that they think I'm a scammer, but they won't share the evidence as to why they've reached such a conclusion. The email account used by their compliance team doesn't allow the recipient to reply, which is meant to discourage back-and-forth conversations. Geez, I know Amazon is busy, but that's kinda crappy.
It's enrolled in KDP Select, so I used the free giveaway option sanctioned by Amazon. It ran from Sept 18th to 22nd. I advertised the giveaway at the usual places like FKBT, Fussy Librarian, Genre Pulse, Kindle Nation Daily, ENT and a few more.
After thinking long and hard on why Amazon believes it has evidence that I'm manipulating sales, I wonder if it has anything to do with the one-day Kindle Fire giveaway I sponsored at Kindle Nation Daily during the giveaway. However, eligibility to win didn't require a purchase or a download. The only requirement was to sign up to follow my blog or author page. So there's no sales manipulation going on there--only platform building so followers will know when I release future books and hopefully consider purchasing them. Could this be the culprit? I dunno because Amazon won't tell me how they arrived at their conclusion.
And, since I didn't do anything to game the system, I'm at a loss about how to correct it
.
If what they are saying is true, that sales or borrows or whatever are coming from bogus accounts, I am not working in collusion with them. I didn't ask or pay anyone to do any such thing. The fraudsters are doing so independently of my wishes. So how can I make them stop?
Doesn't it make sense that these fraudsters, in order to make their fake accounts look more legitimate and fly under the radar longer, would possibly download legitimately offered free books alongside the ones they're being paid to artificially boost rank?
I pretty much told Amazon all of this, but they cannot be swayed.
I asked them how long they plan to punish me, but they won't even answer that much. Their reply is always the same parroted response, "We cannot offer advice on marketing services or details of our investigations."
To Amazon's credit, they have allowed the book to stay up for sale. It doesn't have a rank though. This means it doesn't get the benefit of showing up on any of the top genre lists, which hurts sales.
I've also noticed the book hasn't gotten any reviews since it lost its rank. That's surprising after 7000+ free downloads a few weeks ago. I figured it would get at least a few. Is it possible Amazon is suppressing them? Then again, only a small percentage of readers leave reviews. I'd like to ask compliance if this is part of my punishment, but they're a secretive bunch over there
.
I've heard of author's getting kicked off the site for scamming the system, so I'm happy they haven't gone that far.
For now the book continues to sell despite its rank being suppressed, but time will tell if Amazon will let me keep what I earned or pocket all of the proceeds for themselves. Stay tuned.
A frustrating situation that I cannot fix, but a reminder for all writers out there to think twice before putting all of your eggs in one basket.