tl;dr Books, most likely generated by an LLM, were being sold on Amazon under Jane Friedman’s name. The same books were added to her Goodreads profile. Amazon initially refused to remove the books. If it’s happening to her, it’s definitely happening to other authors.
This is crazy. It’s one thing for Amazon to be filled with AI nonsense books but it’s quite another for them to have a real author’s name attached to them without their knowledge.
Amazon has turned to absolute shit. Fake books and cheap Chinese crap. Why even bother with them anymore?
Because they have been around long enough that small niche businesses closed, and you can’t get what you need locally, so you go through Amazon or another website that wants to charge 20 bucks shipping on a 6 dollar item.
Sort of. Mostly this is just what happens when you build a platform that allows basically anyone to sell something on it. Local businesses have limited space, so necessarily they needed to limit product to trusted brands/partners/publishers.
Amazon has actually made it possible for self publishing to exist. There are a lot of successful authors now that never would have made it in the old ‘local bookstore buys books from publishing house’ paradigm.
But this of course has also opened the floodgates for scammers which utilize those same indie-friendly options to try to exploit people.
I think the issues are a little more nuanced than just ‘local business good, Amazon bad’. Not that I think Amazon is good, I just think there are real, valid reasons why small bookstores (and their large book publishers) had problems.
I was thinking more general of Amazon as in products it sells, rather than only books. Book stores here have been damaged by Chapters/Indigo chains opening up.
I find it appalling that Amazon demanded evidence of a trademark registration for her name. I hope they get sued. Trademark or not, you can’t put an author’s name on something that they did not write. That’s called plagiarism, and it is not legal, especially if you try to make money off of it. I wonder how many authors they did this to? How clogged will the civil courts get from this? What a mess!
Serious question for the authors reading this - if there was a non-exclusive Fediverse e-commerce alternative to self-publishing on Amazon (including print on demand), would you use it?
Second question - what features would you like to see to make it fly? Dream big here - I’d love to hear all your ideas.
Third question - besides the topic of the article above, what does Amazon do wrong for authors? I’ve got a fair idea, but I really want to hear your thoughts and personal experiences.
Their contract terms for new authors are set in stone, atrocious even for the publishing industry, and unavoidable for most because they have a stranglehold on the ebookmarket.
Honestly one could go on and on and on about the shit they’ve pulled/tried to pull at various times.
Anyway… Why would the hypothetical e-publisher need to be on the fediverse?
To be honest right now that just seems like a recipe for getting no publicity and no sales, which no author who wants to actually have an income would do just to promote fediverse. There’d have to be an advantage beyond already existing platforms.
Draft2Digital already exists as a way to publish everywhere except Amazon (and actually you can do Amazon through them too but then both take a cut). I’m not sure what the benefit would be for a publishing service to be connected to the fediverse.
Wow, I had no idea this was a thing!
With the flood of AI content now published at Amazon, sometimes attributed to authors in a misleading or fraudulent manner, how can anyone reasonably expect working authors to spend every week for the rest of their lives policing this? And if authors don’t police it, they will certainly hear about it, from readers concerned about these garbage books, and from readers who credulously bought this crap and have complaints. Or authors might not hear any thing at all, and lose a potential reader forever.
I find this upsetting as a reader, I imagine these writers are absolutely horrified.
This is a very troubling trend.
I follow Mercury Stardust (aka the Trans Handy Ma’am) on TikTok. She has a book coming out at the end of the month, but she had someone steal her name and the book title and start selling a book filled with utter nonsense. It apparently took forever for them to take the copycat down.
Becoming?
