WSJ Endorsers $3000 for ebook Formatting?

I was blown away by anarticle which in appeared in the Wall Street Journal in which a self-published author paid a company $3000 to ‘act as her digital publisher.” When all you need to do is send an email to a Smashwords.com address for you to get back a list of inexpensive formatters (which is what a digital publisher essentially does. As for uploading the ebook to Amazon, you have to be trying real hard to mess it up). Refer to Smashword’s formatting guide for details on how to get that list.

Fact of the matter is that this whole digital publishing is so new that even publications like the WSJ don’t think anything is wrong for someone to be paying $3000 to format a book, when you can get someone to do this for as little as $25. Even I can do it in a few hours.

Click here for the entire article.

 

Spam Arrives on Kindle

It was too good an opportunity for scammers to ignore. Taking advantage of Kindle’s upload by anyone policy, scammers have been ripping off lesser known authors. All it takes a name change and a cover change. Price it at $.99 and you’re set to go.

Then there are the spammers. They upload junk content. To a casual buyer, it is only $.99 right? They’ve made their money.

Kindle pays authors monthly, so it is quick turn around for the scammers as well as spammers.

Check out the article ‘Spammers, Content Farming, and Kindle: One Reason Why Your Book Can’t Be Found In The Abyss’ for another angle on this. Click here for this post.