If you are a self published author you would probably be happy that your book is selling.I am a very big fan of self publishing through Amazon.If not for KDP I woudnt know how to sell books.I never submitted books to big in small publishers, for the simple reason that I didn’t have the bandwidth to face rejections and earn peanuts. Life has it’s challenges without writing books becoming one of them.

But what happens when unauthorized people sell the paperback(or other) version of the book on Amazon?

You lose sale ,royalty.

What happens if they are bad quality versions?

You lose a reader and a potential bad review.

So What can you do?

Two of my nonfiction books and 1 fiction book seem to attract such spurious publishers and sellers.

Every day there is some new published doing this.

Whenever I find such a thing I add the book to my cart.

Message the Amazon chatbot about the issue.

The chatbot says he has no idea ,how to respond and would I like to contact the seller.

I answer yes.

Usually the seller responds saying he had no idea about this and he has imported these books from USA .My books being published in USA and imported to India sounds like a dream.One was priced at 14000 INR and discounted to 1000 something.Seriously what are these people doing with the everything store is anyone’s guess.

Usually the seller says he will stop selling that .

The same thing happens after a few days or months.I repeat the sequence of events.

I wonder why Amazon doesn’t do due diligence for their sellers who are selling counterfeit,unauthorized Copyrighted content .Amazon KDP is a wonderful opportunity for self publishing. Things like these will make it unprofitable and not worth the trouble in the long run.

Also did you read about what Jane Friedman the famous author(The Business of Being a Writer)found books with her name on them which was not hers and Amazon asked her whether she had a copyright to her name!She didn’t and that started an avalanche of questions which you can definitely read about if you google the topic.

As of today, there are about half a dozen books being sold on Amazon, with my name on them, that I did not write or publish. Some huckster generated them using AI. This promises to be a serious problem for the book publishing world. https://t.co/YXcMlJeTMV

— Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman) August 7, 2023

Have you ever faced something like this?

Let me know in the comments below.

I am writing this with  BlogchatterHalfMarathon.