Julie Broad (Book Launchers) summarizes and warns independent authors about three common Amazon-targeted scams observed and reported by Dave Chessen: (1) OCR-copied print knockoffs sold via FBA that undercut originals and generate poor-quality reviews; (2) presale listings appearing used (scammers testing demand); and (3) "book gap" replacements where scammers add missing formats (often with slight author-name misspellings) to appear tied to an author's title. The video explains red flags (steady bestseller rank without royalties, bad print-quality reviews, unexpected formats), recommends filing copyright infringement claims and monitoring listings, and demos Reader Scout, a Chrome extension to watch price/format changes.
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In the last year, scammers have been working really hard to take authors money in rather creative ways using the Amazon platform. If you want to know what to watch out for and get a little tool to help monitor your books, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie, the book broad of Book Launchers, a professional full service self publishing team. At Book Launchers we set our authors up so they are fully independent of us when the process is over. We don't keep any royalties, nor do we have any control book, but we do provide support for some of the crazy things that happen when you publish books on Amazon. In the last year or so, scams have gotten really big and I didn't even realize the extent until Dave Chessen gave a presentation at 20 books to 50k here in Las Vegas in November 2022. He gave me his permission to share what he shared because in his words, we need to get the word out so authors know what to do. While we haven't had to deal with everything I'm about to reveal, we're we have seen some really weird things happen. And as frustrating as it can be, Amazon is rarely quick to resolve the issues. So you need to be on top of your issues in your books and know the way to resolve things, not just going to Amazon saying hey, there's a problem, fix it. Because sometimes they won't. So scam number one. Scammers identify a book is selling well. More than likely it's an independent author, not one with a major publisher behind them. And the scammer buys the book and runs it through OCR scanning technology. Oh, hang on, let's have a quick definition. In case you're not familiar. Optical character recognition. OCR is the process that converts an image of text into machine readable text format. It's kind of like photocopying the book, but it converts it into an editable text that can be read on Word or other software like that. We've used it to get a digital version of a book that was handwritten. What we did was we sent that handwritten book to an OCR scanner and they sent back a Word document of text. Anyway, the scammers use OCR to copy the book and then they run it back through a printing press and make the cheapest copy of your book possible. Then they open an Amazon FBA account to sell cheap replicas. Oh, another definition for you. FBA is fulfilled by Amazon, which is the kind of account you need if you offset print thousands of your books that you then want to Sell direct on Amazon, not through Ingram or KDP Print. Then they sell it a little cheaper than yours, so they get the buy box and it's their book being sold, not yours. Now at first you might think the big issue with this is that you're not getting paid royalties when your book sells. And yeah, that absolutely sucks. But the bigger issue is that these crappy copies now get into the hands of a reader who doesn't know that they bought a knockoff. And now they're angry that your book is so badly made, they start posting reviews about the terrible quality of. So suddenly your 5 star reviews are dropping to a 4 star average or even a 3 stars on average. That sucks. So how do you know this is even happening? And what can you do? Well first, this is really only going to be an issue if you have steady print sales every month. If you're selling 100 print books every month, then it's possible you could be a target for something like this. More likely though, they're going to go after the books that are selling even more than that. Now there are a few flags that this could be happening to you. Your absr. Okay, one more definition. Amazon Bestseller rank. You know that sales rank, that's relative to other books selling on Amazon. If that's high or steady, yet you're not getting royalties. That could be a sign. Bad reviews. Flagging print book quality issues is a huge sign. If you see either of these things, immediately buy your book and make sure it's okay. Acting swiftly is important because get this, Amazon won't stop the scammers because their view is that anyone can resell books on their platform. Of course these aren't being sold as used, they're being sold as new. But Amazon doesn't seem to care. Or at least to date, people who've had this issue have run into Amazon's eh, we're not going to do anything. Okay? Even worse is that they won't remove the negative reviews that occur even when it's obvious the review is solely because of this crappy knockoff. So, so what is the solution? Well first, notify Amazon as soon as you identify the issue and immediately make a copyright infringement claim against the seller. In Dave Chessen's talk at 20 books to 50k, he said this has repeatedly happened to the author of this book. Now you can see why Ryan Kleckner is a target. His book is from seven years ago and he's still got a great bestseller rank. It sells really, really well and he's clearly getting a ton of great reviews. But if you look at his reviews, you still see evidence of the scammer's work. Like on this one. That sucks. All right, scam number two. When your book is in presale and a version is for sale used huh? This is the case of a scammer testing your book out to see what the sales volume will be. I assume if they get a lot of volume, they will quickly copy your book and sell it. Now if you see this happening, a book for sale in pre launch used immediately flag it to Amazon. And if you're loving learning about this, I do hope you've subscribed to the channel and turn those notifications on so I can make sure you're always on top of your book issues. Now it's also worth commenting, not only because I always comment back, but also because we have a lot of no boring book swag that we give to folks who comment the day a video is released. And then you can also become one of my YouTube besties, which is a rather elite and marvelous group of people like Monique Joyner, Michael W. Cook, Bill Miller, Scully's House of Thrillers, Brian Atnosyn, Allen west, and Sandra Rodriguez, just to name a couple. So thank you to all of you for your comments, likes and shares. Now, the one scam that I had no clue was happening until Dave's presentation is this one. Scam number three the Book Gap replacement. Essentially, if you don't have a softcover, a hardcover Kindle, and an audiobook, you could be a target for this. Scammers look for books that don't have all the formats. In particular, if you don't have an ebook, this is an easy gap for a scammer to fill. So somehow the scammer is able to tie the fake book to your account. It has the same title, but the author name will have a slight misspelling like an extra R or an initial. The COVID is likely to be the same, but the contents are not. It won't be on your author page, so you will only spot this if you're clicking around the formats on your Amazon page. I don't actually understand how the scammer gets it connected to your book in the first place, but somehow they're able to do that and fill this missing gap. And in my view, this can be prevented by publishing all the formats. But if you don't do that for some reason, you have to be vigilant about monitoring your book and clicking around to all the formats to see if anything looks weird. Look for a format coming up that you don't have, or any other oddities with your author name. So regularly search your title in Amazon and on Google to see if anything strange is coming up. And to help you monitor your Amazon account, all authors should download Reader Scout. This is a Google Chrome extension that Dave Chessen from Kindlepreneur, publisher Rocket and Atticus created to help authors monitor their accounts. So here's a quick overview of what Reader Scout is and how you can download it. So when you follow the Instructions over@readerscout.com, you see that you just need to download the extension, pin it, and head over to Amazon to find your books. When you find your book, you'll see the extension turns orange in your toolbar, which means you can now click on it and add to Watchlist. Wait for it, wait for it. Okay, wait a couple more seconds. Voila. Okay, now when I added Self Publish and Succeed, I started with the Kindle version and nothing seemed to happen. There was a lot of waiting and not much else, so I clicked to the print version. Waited, waited, waited, and voila again. Now, when there is a price change or some other change with my book, this is going to notify me, which means I don't have to obsessively check every day. Cool beans, right? I hope after the video, you're heading over to get your Reader Scout extension. Now let's chat about what scams you've seen in the comments below. And after you comment, well, you just might want to watch the latest and greatest video from the channel, which is right here. Or may I suggest this beauty on how to sell more books on Amazon? Because maybe you're not selling hundreds of books on Amazon and you want to be. Both are pretty fabulous, and watching them means we get to spend more time together. So click on over and I'll see you there.
