On the scandal rocking Indie publishing

Blog post

My name is Kelly Young, I am an indie author, and I write my own books.

You may wonder why I would bother stating the obvious. Of course an author writes her own books, you might think. And in some cases, sadly, you'd be wrong about that.

In case you haven't heard, there is a controversy in the world of independent publishing. The issue was, for me, brought to light by a blog post by Nora Roberts which was shared by one of my favourite authors, Jana DeLeon. I have shared these posts on my author Facebook page, but wanted to address it further.

The scandal came to light when a so-called author, Cristiane Serruya, was called out for plagiarism. At last count, she plagiarized 51 books from 34 authors, most famously Diana Galbaldon, Gena Showalter, Kerrelyn Sparks, and yes, Nora Roberts.

The criminal Serruya, because that is what she is, gathered passages from other writers' hard work, packaged them into sequences that she wanted in a book, and sent them to ghostwriters to put together in book form. She paid them, reportedly around $1,000, to do this work, which was then published with her name as author.

Why would someone do this? It turns out that the same platform at Amazon that allows indie publishers such as me to publish their work, which might never get out there otherwise, has a few holes that reward prolific writers. Basically, as I understand it, Amazon rewards authors who put out frequent releases with a high ranking on their site. The more books a person puts out, the more the books are seen, and the more they sell. As well, if they are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, the author is paid PER PAGE READ, and the top authors in that program can be awarded up to $25,000 for having those pages read.

That's a lot of money. Especially for an indie author.

Scammers have made it nearly impossible for indie authors to break into that ranking system. They pay ghostwriters to help them crank out what would be an impossible amount of books for one writer to pen. They flood Amazon with these manuscripts, often plagiarized or simply the same book with a different pen name, and 'earn' top billing. They offer these books for 99 cents or free, to get the numbers up, a price point that indie authors can't compete with. They pay reviewers to leave five star reviews, and with a lot of reviews come an even better standing in the rankings.

And they make a fortune while indie writers, like me, struggle to get one or two quality books out a year.

This is an immense hole in the Amazon system. But it isn't just Amazon that made this situation. It's also readers, who snap up the cheap, knock off, or plagiarized books, not paying attention to whether or not they are actually written by that person. Want a rule of thumb? If an author cranks out material at an unbelievable rate, it is suspect. While the odd writer is capable of writing a number of books a year, odds are that they can't do one a week. Look at the frequency of publication, and then ask yourself if you really want to support a scammer.

I write my own books. The most I've done in a year is two. And that's with the incentive supplied by the National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, which encourages participants to write 50,000 words in the month of November. There's no way on earth I could push to do one a month right now, let alone one a week.

Please support writers who care - about their work, about their readers and about quality. If you can't afford to buy all the books you would like, check some out of your local library. I personally donate a copy of each book to my local library, and I'm sure many authors do the same.

As a reader, you deserve to read books that are by who they say they are. Writers aren't the only ones being scammed here. You are too.

I am Kelly Young, I am an author, and I write my own books.