Amazon has been besieged over the recent year or two by authors trying to ‘game’ the system. A number of marketers have been promoting hacks and methods that are reminiscent of the techniques used to game Google, such as keyword stuffing. Why? The methods succeeded in pushing your books up the rankings, gaining more visibility and more sales. When something works, people jump on the bandwagon and the methods get overused.
Like Google, Amazon is awake to these tricks and is cleaning out its bookshelves of books it believes may be using such tricks.
The unintended consequence is that ‘good’ authors and publishers get caught in the crossfire.
See what’s at play in this article, and the updated one, then review descriptions for any books you have on Amazon.
Seems like a tricky issue…on the one hand, it is incredibly unfair for people to just exploit the system. There should be some way of stopping that.
I think removing the books entirely is a little too much though.
I’m sure there are better ways, like just forcing them to remove the guilty parts of their descriptions.
Sounds like Amazon are trying to notify to enable publishers to edit, but in some cases they are being pulled. Overall I think this process will clean up Amazon and maintain their reputation as a quality bookstore. Thanks for stopping by!