Authors who self-publish through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select programme have their books automatically enrolled in KU. KU means they can read to their hearts’ content, while the writers can make a lot of money. These readers can race through at least a book a day, gulping down stories about unexpected pregnancies, arrogant millionaires and bad boys in need of taming. A regular author could never keep up.įor romance readers, Kindle Unlimited (KU) has been a godsend. She pointed to what the industry calls “black hat teams”: anonymous authors who hire ghostwriters for a pittance, to churn out cheap novels en masse which are published under a pseudonym to “smother out competition” – and, in some cases, copying lines or entire scenes to get the job done.

And everything I learn enrages me,” Roberts wrote on her blog last month. “I’m getting one hell of an education on the sick, greedy, opportunistic culture that games Amazon’s absurdly weak system. More, more, more, fast, fast, fast Nora Roberts This culture, this ugly underbelly of legitimate self-publishing is all about content. But Serruya is just one example of the dark side of the stack-em-high, sell-em-cheap, flood-the-market culture which has come to dominate self-publishing – particularly in the lucrative romance genre and on Kindle Unlimited, an Amazon service which gives readers access to more than 1m books for £7.99 a month, many of which are self-published and unvetted for plagiarism. After Milan went public – and after dozens of other examples of plagiarism were highlighted by authors and readers – Serruya pulled her books from sale, blaming the overlaps on a ghostwriter she said she’d hired from freelance marketplace Fiverr.Ī former law professor, Milan was a dreadful choice to lift from – as was Roberts, who has never been sanguine about plagiarism, taking her fellow novelist and former friend Janet Dailey to court in 1997. Serruya’s alleged plagiarism was first exposed by US author Courtney Milan, who found passages from her book The Duchess War in Serruya’s novel Royal Love.

Amazon kindle direct publishing review