Amazon's Plagiarism Problem
Amazon's Plagiarism Problem
After publishing 20 non-fiction books with mainstream publishers, Sharazade (her pen name) decided to try her hand at erotica, and over the past year has published two sex- and fantasy-themed ebooks, both of which are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords (Warning: Linked pages may contain explicit content.) Her stories often
involve travel–a passion of hers–and are set in exotic locales. Recently she
began publishing other authors through 1001 Nights Press, a small house she founded, and last month she learned that Amazon was
letting indie publishers and self-published authors into its Kindle Select
program.Sharazade, who requested anonymity because she also works as a
freelance writer, editor, and teacher and doesn’t want clients or students
to know about her erotica exploits, recognized several benefits to working with
Amazon. She could offer a title free for up to five days, and that’s great
publicity since her book would inevitably shoot up in the rankings. If
any Kindle Select members borrowed her book–they are entitled to one
title per month–she would receive a proportional sliver of the $500,000
Amazon set aside in December to pay publishers and authors. Then, once her book wasn’t free anymore, it would be tied to things like “Customers
who bought X also bought Y,” plus readers might post glowing reviews
and buy backlist books.
She decided to test drive the service with
Erotic Stories of Domination and Submission: Taking Jennifer, a book by one
of her authors, then watched it climb the rankings in “gratifying
leaps.” But Sharazade was dismayed that a number of books, a few with
nonsensical titles, were beating hers, even though they were hamstrung by
twisted grammar and perverse punctuation. Some sported covers comprised of low-resolution images with no lettering. One author managed
to misspell her own name. “Even in
porn, customers come down on books that are totally incompetent,”
Sharazade says, “but this wasn’t happening with these.”After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon’s U.K. Kindle
store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little
Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating
[sic] Her, plus one called Dracula’s Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click
inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it
was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz
had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Curious,
Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.Here’s Maria Cruz on Amazon…