There's no escaping Amazon, is there? They sell everything from beds to ink cartridges to falafel mix. And eBooks. There are undoubtedly a lot of good things about the mighty ‘Zon, but with the good comes bad. They sell at great prices, yes, but their profit margins are low and rather than using people to run things, they seem to be turning more and more to automated bots.

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In the past few months, the rise of the bots has been causing more and more problems for the author community. First came their ineffective fight against Kindle Unlimited scammers. Do you know how the main KU scam works? It starts when the person behind the operation (and it is an operation) uploads a book. At best, this is a badly ghostwritten bad-boy romance, at worst, three thousand pages of gobbledegook. Then their click farmers go to work.

What's a click farm? Exactly what it sounds like. Some poor sod on minimum wage sitting in front of a bank of Kindles, flipping through pages to earn the half cent or so for each page of the “author's” book they turn. As KU payments come out of one big pool of money, basically the total amount in the pot divided by all the pages read that month, pages “read” in this way take money away from genuine authors who write real books.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Amazon made a half-hearted attempt to crack down on the click farms by closing accounts of authors where they identified, presumably by tracking IP addresses, books being read in this way. So, in an effort to cover their tracks, the people running the click farms began picking legitimate books at random and “reading” them too. And yes, you've guessed it, Amazon shut the innocent authors' accounts down as well. No discussion, no recourse.

How does this affect readers?

Authors wary of losing their Amazon accounts no longer put their books in KU.
Click farms push “their” books up the Amazon charts, meaning the hotlists are populated by sub-standard books and it's hard to find good stuff to read.

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After the click farm issues came the pre-order problems. When an author puts a book on pre-order with Amazon, on release day, everyone who pre-ordered gets the book for the lowest price it was offered at during the pre-order period. This means if an author initially prices the book at $4.99, then reduces it to $0.99 for even a day, everyone gets the book for $0.99. So no author ever does that. It's common sense, right?

The problem arises because of Amazon's price promise. If they find the book for sale on another eBook retailer at a lower price, they lower the price on Amazon to match it. Irritating, especially when Google Play's pricing is a law unto itself, but we work with it. But this price checking is done by – you've guessed it – bots. And what happens when the bot matches another book with a similar title, by another author, with yours? Yup, they reduce the price on the pre-order without even informing the author, and the author loses thousands of dollars. At best, the author notices in time and cancels the pre-order, and as a final kick in the teeth, Amazon revokes their pre-order privileges for a year for doing so.

How does this affect readers?

Worried authors no longer offer pre-orders on Amazon.
Authors who have lost thousands of dollars (and yes, this has happened), can no longer afford to write as they have to take a different job instead.

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That brings us to the third problem, the pièce de résistance, which appears to be Amazon's response to the bipartisan SESTA-FOSTA bill currently going through the US Senate. Originally written to help prevent online sex-trafficking, it has good intentions but is written in such vague language that it's implications are far wider reaching. Just to be on the safe side, eh?

Basically, it means that website owners are responsible for the content of their users, and could be prosecuted if they host any content that promotes or enables sex-trafficking. How are companies responding? Well, Craigslist has already removed its personals section. Reddit has removed several sub-Reddits. And Amazon has turned its bots on erotica titles in a seemingly scattergun approach. Erotica titles have now been removed from the main sales ranking list and hidden from search results. Aw, you like reading sexy books? Good luck with finding them in the future.

Even that might not be quite so bad if the bots actually knew how to identify an erotica book. So far, we've seen SciFi, Christian fiction, sweet romance, and thrillers confined to the “Adult dungeon,” never to be seen again. No amount of pleading with the limited number of human Amazon reps who actually exist will get these books out of prison.

Of course, because Amazon doesn't like to keep authors informed, they won't confirm the cause of the recent problems. We just see the effects, which are concerning for a large number of authors.

How does this affect readers?

Fans of steamy romance won't easily be able to find new books to read by using Amazon's search facility anymore. Even if you type in the author's name and book title, it still doesn't appear.
Some romance/erotica books will be placed in the wrong categories in an effort to get around the ban. As I type this, E.L. James's Grey has been classified as a “Holiday Romance.”
Authors are removing 18+ and trigger warnings from their blurbs in an attempt to stay under the radar.
Romance books are likely to have more conservative covers in the future.
Expect a lot of “love truncheons” and “velvet gloves” if we're not allowed to say cock or pussy anymore.
Some authors may quit Amazon or even stop writing altogether.

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If Amazon persists with this heavy-handed, misplaced censorship, authors will have to get more creative. I write romantic thrillers, and several of them touch on sex-trafficking – not to promote it, but to show how trafficking networks can be brought down. So, what options do I have?

I'll be selling books direct from my website. Because the processing fees are less than Amazon's fees, I'll even be able to do this at a small discount, as well as giving early access to new titles. The books will be delivered by BookFunnel, and you can find my new eBook store HERE.
This is still all shaking out. If, in the future, it seems the bots are triggered by keywords and we can work out what these are, I'll consider misspelling certain words deliberately. So far, it seems that any mention of kidnapping, trafficking, menage, reverse harem, or particular body parts appear to send a book to the dungeon. I'd rather have “traficcing” and get dinged in a review for a “spelling error” than have my books vanish into obscurity.
Other web stores, such as iBooks and Kobo, use people rather than bots to review their titles, and as such, they don't appear to be taking such a draconian approach. The next two books in my Blackwood Security series will touch on the darker side of the sex trade, and so current events in the Amazon world are making me a little nervous. I may have to offer a censored version of these books on Amazon if their bots/reviewers can't tell the difference between a thriller novel and some sick freak promoting trafficking.

As a reader, I'll be voting with my feet and my wallet. Today, I cancelled my Kindle Unlimited membership and installed the Kobo app on my iPad. I'm sure there'll still be a few Amazon exclusive books I want to buy, but from now on, when a book's available elsewhere, I'll buy it from iBooks or Kobo.