With a lot of people talking about book stuffing at the moment - for anyone who hasn’t heard about it, Twitter is largely where it’s at, under the #tiffanygate and #bookstuffing tags - I feel like this is an appropriate time to remind folks Cassandra Dee is a bookstuffer.
Lately she’s taken to adding enormous spaces between her paragraphs to increase page count too…
(from The Dirty Hotel King, her latest)
And however she’s getting page reads, I can’t imagine it’s from too many people ENJOYING her deathless prose.
Need a reminder?
You asked for it.
I don’t mean to be a jerk to anyone about this, but I sincerely don’t understand how readers can tolerate this. If I happen to get an ebook that I open and the writing is terrible, or the formatting is wretched, or there’s some obvious promotional shenanigans involved, I’m completely turned off by that book. There are so many other books where the authors aren’t trying to pull one over on me and that include great stories that don’t need to be read through ugly formatting.
Why do readers waste their precious time on crap like this? That’s my question.
For my followers who don‘t know, Kindle Unlimited now pays authors by the page read. Last time I worked it out we were paid $0.004 per page read (yes, four tenths of one cent) so a 100 page book/novella would earn us 40 cents.
Padding is done by adding extra gaps between paragraphs, as above, or including additional material, usually other novels/novellas, and getting readers to click to the end, either by asking them to click a link to the end, or by putting the additional material at the front to be skipped past before readers get to the book they bought. This works because Kindle only records the furthest page read, not if all pages have been read.
If you padded your 100 page book into a 400 page book, so you earn $1.60 per book rather than 40 cents, 4 times as much but for the exact same story.
The kindle fund is a set price each month and it’s divided by the total number of page reads, so if it’s a million dollars and there’s a million page reads, each author would get a dollar per page read (yeah, I wish! It’s usually about $19m and working backwards, divided by about 4.75 billion page reads to give 0.4 cents per page).
What it boils down to is that these writers are defrauding other authors out of their fair share of that fund by pretending they have more pages than they really do. Sometimes padding adds up to 2000 pages or more to a book! (the max page limit is 3,000 pages).
My books average 80K words and are about 300ish pages each.
Casandra’s most recent page count is 1749 pages, equivalent to half a million words!
The longest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, has just 257,045 words!
Casandra Dee has also published 64 books since may 2016.
My first book dates to March 2010 and I’ve only managed to write 25 books in 8 years, one of which is a short story (up to 10K words) and a second is a novella (50K).
If we discount the half million word count and assume she does like me, have 300 pages of genuine new story in each book. That would mean she’s written five trillion words written in 2 years! Or to put it another way seven thousand words every single day! I don’t think it’s physically possible to do that! When does she find time for rewrites and editing? When does she find time to eat?
If I could write 7K words a day, I’d finish a new book every 11 days!
She’s not only a book mill, she’s a fraudulent book mill.
There have been many attempts to game the system over the years, examples like
- Buying or swapping fake reviews,
- Paying for or swapping keyword suggestions (so your books appears higher in the results if anyone searches for a book about your keyword, like “firefighter romance”),
- selling chapters individually (back when we were paid per download, not page read),
- And Amazon farms (where you pay people to download your KU books and skip to the end, (which counts as a sale even though they didn’t buy the book) and you rise up the charts to a more prominent position.
- Competition entry, draws, or prizes in exchange for reviews.
The worst thing is that when Amazon does have a crackdown on unfair practices, it’s only the small authors who get banned for life.
The big name authors, those who’s tricks they were emulating, they get off scot free. As such, they just find a way a new way to game the system because the rules clearly don’t apply to them.
If Amazon had some balls and actually banned the popular authors who employ these tricks, they wouldn’t have nearly so many headaches thanks to disgruntled writers demanding fair treatment.
Amazon are really super, super good at stamping on minnows and ignoring the sharks. After I got outed last night as someone helping research stuffed books, I woke up this morning to find my @amazon Associates account had mysteriously been reported and shut down. WHAT A STRANGE COINCIDENCE.
I’m still waiting for the email they claim they’ve sent me to explain why. I’ll give it till tomorrow morning and then I’m emailing executive support and raising hell.
What burns me is that Chance Carter’s Mister Diamond, a massively stuffed book for which he was offering an illegal giveaway in exchange for reviews (check out #tiffanygate for info) is STILL FOR SALE.
Well, the lot of them can fuck right off. They were discussing suing me for slander… good luck with that.
1. I’m in Australia.
2. To prove slander, you have to prove I made a false statement.
Hey fam! Caitlyn is awesome and in light of her income and possibly her amazon reviews being under threat by these deplorable people who claim to be authors, I’d like to bring your attention to her books which can be found on Amazon here:
I’m currently reading Finding Cory from her Island Escapes series, and enjoying it immensely. It’s “free” on Kindle Unlimited and 99cents to buy. And remember, us small time authors careers live and die by reviews, so if you do read her work, please leave reviews! It makes more of a difference than you realize!
P.S. Every page is loaded with text! ;)