I was searching through Google today, when I came across this web page - http://acnapo.ru/hebaxeq.pdf
It was advertising my book A Witch in Time, but although the download wasn’t available, it actually directed me to your Playster, while the comments seemed to point to another story entirely available through free-ebooks.net.
I would hope this is nothing to do with Playster and being a bit of a geek, I looked up the owner of the site my book was being adverstised on, on Whois.
Sadly, their contact information wasn’t available. So I put the hebaxeq.pdf into google and came across yet another Russian site - http://diacogra.ru/hebaxeq.pdf.
So while the pdf was apparently the same, the book’s name was different, as was the site. However, the layout and everything else was exactly the same, with the so-called links pointing to your site and the comments referring to the same book.
Now I haven’t spoken to anyone in Playster about making a pdf of my e-book available and am therefore somewhat bemused by how it can suddenly pop up with over 2,000 alleged downloads there – let alone for free.
With my book being advertised on Playster for free, my Amazon standing could be ruined. Whilst I am not an author who’s on the bestseller list, if Amazon find out that you are making my story available for free, they will expect me to make it free on Amazon too.
Now according to this site, my book having been downloaded 2048 times, means that Amazon have potentially lost over $4,000 or nearly £4,000 in sales and I have missed out on the royalties for this too. You can see where I’m going with this.
Since users are being directed to Playster to download my story, I felt compelled to follow up with an email, asking that Playster demand advertising on the offending site be removed, as it’s not only misleading, but could potentially be damaging to my business relationship with Amazon, and therefore adversely affect my income from sales of this book.
Then I realised that the comments and other parts of the page were pointing to both Disqus and free-ebooks.net, therefore making me wonder exactly who was responsible.
Clearly the responsible party is the person or people who owns the Russian site, but they appear to be affiliated with Disqus, free-ebooks and Playster, so I'm now at an impasse. I'm not too sure whether any of these sites are aware that their names are being used to fraudulently advertise and whether contacting them to request that this page be removed is actually wise or would get me anywhere at all.
Anyone got any thoughts?
Comments
Theft
Yup, found loads of these sites, "selling" my books, even ones using disused blogs as base camp sites. I believe what a lot of them are doing is harvesting e-mail addresses or downloading spybots etc.
Theft
You could well be right. It seems that the sites that the ads were on were what I would term as "blind" - that's to say that the front page is pretty much as WP or Joomla give you as the template with all the menu links blank and in the background are loads of urls that Google and other search engines pick up and direct traffic to.
There are a lot of arseholes out there aren't there?
Right guess
That is what they do. Visiting them is a bit dangerous.
Right Guess
The fact is, they're there. If Amazon finds the page I found, are they going to investigate and discover that no, my book is not actually available through any of the websites purporting to be supplying it, or are they just going to say that they feel that since it's free through this page, that it should be free on Amazon too?
There are no rules for this ... at all.
And this is why I do not do e-books.
E-book commerce have no rules. And if you read contracts by e-publishers, the conditions one-sided and are likely worse than the dead tree publishers for writers.
I will wait a few years until rights are given on such matters.
I HAVE done e-books
For me it would be a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. I already have e-books published and yes, the charges from the retailers versus the royalties can be very one-sided, but I'd rather have a little of something than a whole lot of nothing!
Stolen / Scam !?
That it should be free on amazon also should likely apply if you were distributing it, but if it is stolen that is another thing entirely. It would make no sense enforcing a price matching policy against stolen items(whatever they are). However you are likely to have to explain it to them. If it is not even actually available then it is just another pieces of internet disinformation.
I may be wrong(I got this info second hand), or it may have changed, but I don't think the Amazon price matching policy is completely strict, I think it just disqualifies the book from certain promotion ,and/or effects the cut.
>i<
PS. I do not recommend informing them(why ask for trouble). However, if they do find out about this, you might actually be able to also ask them for advice on what to do about it. They probably have encounter this before.
Stolen / Scam !?
That's brilliant advice and I shall totally take it on board and won't be asking for trouble!
Thanks Hypatia :)