This is my first ever blog. I've never really had the urge to share what goes on in my head with the world before but today that changed.

I'm a writer. Possibly not a very good one, but it is something I love and something I hope to make a living at one day. How likely is that? Honestly, not very. But hey, we all have dreams!

I publish all my books digitally and, up until recently, was a member of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.

For those of you not aware of what this is, it's Amazon's subscription model 'book club'. For a fee, members can borrow as many books as they like during the month. The writer gets paid per page read. Sounds tricky to figure out, but Amazon has the software that tells them if you've read a book in it's entirety or if you didn't like it and didn't read to the end.

What this means for us writers is that if you don't like it, we don't get paid. Now I'm not going to go into a rant about how that may or may not be unfair. (You still have to pay for a book from a bookstore even if you don't like it, right?)

Every month Amazon puts a pool of money in a pot and all the Kindle Unlimited writers get a share of that pot. However, the share is getting smaller and smaller and we are getting paid less and less for our books.

Why is this?

Well it seems that the pool is being flooded by scammers. Yes, big surprise. Not. They have always been around in various shapes and sizes. Those who choose to find a loophole rather than earn their money by good old fashioned hard work.

You may well have come across these books yourselves when you have been looking for your next read. The scammers get a ghostwriter to write a book. A short, not very good book, from someone they pay a small fee to. They then slap a cover on it. Quite often a copy of another book's cover.

Here's the rub. They then throw the book through Google translate and translate it into several languages, adding that in there too. (Can you see where I'm going with this?) By the time they've finished, they have a 'box set' - ha! - of several books giving them a huge number of pages. Usually up to Amazon's maximum pay out of 3000 pages.

They then, at the very front of the book, put a big link. Something like this - >>>>>CLICK HERE FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN A FREE KINDLE<<<<<<

By clicking the link you are immediately taken to the end of the book and Amazon pays them for 3000 pages read. Boom.

Most of them have hundreds, yes hundreds, of these sets up on Amazon. Go have a look, you'll see them. They are nearly all in the romance categories.

There are You Tube channels dedicated to teaching this scam. Facebook groups full of willing devotees just desperate to learn how to do this. One of the main teachers of this scam is a man called Dave Koziel. Yes, I'm calling him out by name.

What he is doing is teaching people how to rip of Amazon, rip off readers, and take money from authors who are working hard to do it the right way. By offering great stories.

The books are reported to Amazon on a daily basis but as soon as one is taken down, another dozen pop up.

I'm writing this as a shout out, asking anyone and everyone who sees these books to please report them. This con artist and his ilk are making tens of thousands of dollars every month and being richly rewarded for their sleaze.

So my first ever blog post is a doozy!

Thank you for reading!