{"id":44352,"date":"2019-02-25T07:27:11","date_gmt":"2019-02-25T12:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shilohwalker.com\/website\/?p=44352"},"modified":"2019-04-02T11:44:21","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T15:44:21","slug":"hot-takes-part-who-knows-so-you-want-to-know-how-to-spot-the-scammers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shilohwalker.com\/website\/2019\/02\/hot-takes-part-who-knows-so-you-want-to-know-how-to-spot-the-scammers\/","title":{"rendered":"Hot Takes: Part…who knows? So you want to know how to spot the scammers."},"content":{"rendered":"

UPDATE: I’ve had a few people come into start shit. Before you try, let me direct you to my disclaimer<\/a>. I don’t put up with shit stirrers on my blog. You want to do that, find your own platform. You’re not entitled to mine. Also, this is directed at a few people who’ve decided to come in with what appears to be an attempt to derail this discussion and the information posted due to issues with a specific person mentioned in the blog, despite the fact that I posted my own ‘experiment’.<\/em> These people know who they are. It’s not directed at anybody else, so please don’t take it as such.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The past week has been a hot mess in a falling apart handbasket. I do have other words for it, but if I get too free with them, I’ll run off track and I’m doing a hell of a lot of that lately. People paying attention to the #CopyPasteCris<\/a> mess have probably noticed there’s been a lot of talk about things not necessarily related to plagiarism. Cris Serruya did, after all, plagiarize some major authors, including Nora Roberts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One question that seems to be prevalent in a lot of minds is how <\/em>this all happened and how it got so big all of a sudden.<\/p>\n

A Reckoning A Long Time In the Making<\/h4>\n

Well, it didn’t happen all<\/em> of a sudden. This crap has been going on in the indie world for a while.<\/p>\n

If you hang out on social media sites much, you probably heard about #Cockygate<\/a>. The long story short there, a woman wanders into the writing field, writes some books, decides to do a series with Cocky<\/em> in it, then suddenly notices other<\/em> people use the word Cocky–and some of those uses predated<\/a><\/em> hers–but wah, they’re damaging her brand, so she tries to trademark a word. It didn’t go well.<\/p>\n

But during the mess, something a relatively small group of authors & readers knew about became something of a focal point.  Not just about Faleena Hopkins, but other authors.<\/p>\n

Bookstuffing<\/h4>\n

Author puts up a book up for 0.99 or whatever, and only part of the book is new content. The rest is backlist books, excerpts and other assorted bullshit. This sums up bookstuffing, but I have an infograph, thanks to twitter user, Anteria Hawbaker<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"scammers<\/p>\n

Now, you might thinking… what’s the problem here? More to read, right? Well, it depends on your point of view.  Those stuffing the books were (and still are) pushing the authors who don’t<\/em> stuff books farther and farther out of the way on Amazon. If writers don’t make money, they can’t really afford to write. Not to mention if a handful of authors are dominating an area, that’s not leaving much room for you to find a lot of variety. Of course, you’ll always have your big name favorites, but this does<\/em> make it harder for you to find newer people to love, because it’s harder for newer people to make it in a field that’s getting increasingly narrower.<\/p>\n

Additionally, a lot of bookstuffers don’t care as much about craft and use scammy tactics like clickfarms and the kindle flip<\/em>… please… they even name this shit now.<\/p>\n

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The comment during the chat.
\nChance: “ohhh ehhm what do- uh, I don’t know what that means” pic.twitter.com\/lzBP0Ooy8Z<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Nikki (@ease_dropper) June 3, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n