Low Content is No Contest by Debbie Bennett

There’s a Facebook group called Amazon KDP Books - Kindle Direct Publishing with a screenshot of the KDP logo as the group picture. It is in no way affiliated with Amazon and I can only assume that Amazon either no longer cares or has simply given up chasing people who appropriate their words and pictures. In the early days of this blog, we had the word kindle in the title and received a polite message from Amazon asking us to cease and desist as it was trademarked to them. 

Anyway, this group has over 77 thousand members. I’m not entirely sure why I go there as it is of no benefit to me whatsoever. The majority of posts come from people who have apparently watched YouTube where there are entrepreneurs making a lot of money out of telling other people how to make a lot of money. Of course, it doesn’t work – it never works. There is no get-rich-quick scheme and if there was, few people would be altruistic enough to share it. 

It’s all about low content. You can allegedly make a comfortable income from selling books without actually needing to write. Who knew? We’ve clearly been doing it wrong. Low content books are notebooks and journals and all you need to do is grab a few pictures from the internet (anywhere will do), bung them on the cover any old how. Then you add a motivational quote to each page inside and leave the rest of it blank, for people to write in themselves. Easy, innit? It appears that this facebook group is actually run by one of these entrepreneurs, which is presumably why he/she has no issue with using KDP’s logo. 

Obviously low content books don’t work as ebooks – although some of the group members haven’t quite grasped that concept, judging by the questions asked. But by far the most frequent question are variations of Why has my account been terminated? Reasons are usually one of: 

• Using images without permission. Most of the covers are ‘designed’ (and I used the word loosely) on Canva where people seem to think that because there are available images, they can be used anywhere for commercial gain. They can’t.
• Using content without permission. One guy deleted his posts after it was pointed out that he’d scraped the entire content of a children’s story from somebody else’s book. In this case, I did actually email the lady’s publicist (the only contact I could find) so she could take appropriate action. Another gentleman posted pictures he’d ‘drawn himself’ for his colouring book – but neglected to take out the © at the bottom of the page he’d copied it from! He didn’t last long either. 
• Stuffing a gazillion keywords into the notebook’s title. There are probably more words in the title than in the entire book! 
• Making a new KDP account after the first one was terminated for reasons above. 

What these ‘writers’ don’t seem to get is the nature of print-on-demand. The unit cost is significantly higher than for traditional offset printing. Nobody is ever going to pay $7.99 for a wellness or healing journal, when I can buy a pack of notebooks for a few quid with my weekly shop. Nobody is going to pay $12.99 for a colouring book (with ripped-off images) when I can get a Disney one for £1.99. And Disney has very deep pockets and a large legal team. 

Other questions frequently asked are along the lines of What's the best thing to write to make the most money? At least they are honest! Or simply How do I publish a book? Funniest one (but 10/10 for audacity) and I paraphrase: I've written a journal but I can't be bothered to publish it myself so I'll sell it to you for $1000 and you can publish it and keep all the money.

The moral of this tale? Amazon’s bots are ever more vigilant so do be careful sourcing your content. Be able to prove you have a licence to use everything. And while these people are uploading thousands of low content bits of tat a day, it’s inevitable that us genuine writers are occasionally going to get caught in every-widening nets. It takes longer for content to be approved and we will face ever-higher hurdles to get in the game. I don’t see Amazon banning self-published low content – the percentage they cream off every sale makes them money after all – but there will come a tipping point when it costs them more to police than they make in profit. And rules will change again. 

Meanwhile the scammers get richer and indie publishing’s reputation gets rustier.