That’s what seems to be happening with a distasteful practice called “book stuffing” by some Kindle Unlimited authors. Kindle Unlimited is an Amazon program that works like Netflix for books: You can read as much as you want for a flat monthly fee. Amazon requires that books on Kindle Unlimited are published nowhere else, which means that traditional publishers and big-name authors don’t use it. Instead, Kindle Unlimited is filled with books written and self-published by independent authors, many of them in the romance genre.
It works like this. An Amazon author publishes a new book that’s, say, 300 pages long. At 1/2 cent per page, the author would earn about $1.50 every time that book was read to the end (or every time someone turned to the last page).
To beef up their earnings, book stuffers add several other already-published books, or a long series of newsletters, to the end of the book as “bonus material.” Then the author finds ways to get the reader to turn to the last page, for example by promising a gift or the chance to win prizes. Most stuffed books run near 3,000 pages, the maximum that Amazon will pay for. In the current system, an author could earn about $13.50 per book this way, which is more than most authors earn from traditional publishers when their books are sold as hardcovers.
Serious book stuffers acquire email lists that they sometimes share with each other. They boost their sales by sending out promotional email to hundreds of thousands of email addresses. They also spend a lot of money on Amazon Marketing Services, promoting their books as “sponsored” to Kindle Unlimited subscribers and other Kindle shoppers. These tactics, in combination with artificially producing positive reviews, help them rank high in Amazon’s romance category, crowding out authors who take a more traditional approach.
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