book stuffing

book stuffing (uncountable)

1. (uncommon) The practice employed by some self-published authors of artificially inflating the length of their e-books by adding irrelevant content, and thus exploiting e-book platforms' algorithms to increase visibility, rankings, and royalties.
   • 2018 June 23, Jacob Aron, “The weird case of book stuffing on Amazon”, in New Scientist, volume 238, number 3183, →DOI, page 10:

     This practice, known as book stuffing, is paired with a link at the start of the book encouraging readers to click for a bonus story or special message placed at the end of the book. If they do, Amazon counts the whole book as read, even if they have skipped thousands of unread pages, and makes the maximum payout.

   • 2018 June 25, Adam Rowe, “Amazon's New Rules Against Book Stuffing Scams Aren't Satisfying Authors”, in Forbes‎^[1], archived from the original on 2024-05-01:

     Amazon clearly wants to address Kindle Unlimited cheating: Their new guideline update follows an April arbitration case in which book stuffing was mentioned, setting a legal precedent against the practice. In order to truly quash book stuffing in the self-publishing community, however, Amazon will need to enforce its own rules.

   • 2019 March 28, Alison Flood, “Plagiarism, ‘book-stuffing’, clickfarms ... the rotten side of self-publishing”, in The Guardian‎^[2], archived from the original on 2019-03-29:

     Writers had been aware of book-stuffing for months, but this was something else. When #tiffanygate took off on Twitter, Amazon quietly removed Carter’s books from sale.

   • 2023, Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round, Bronwen Thomas, editors, The Routledge Companion to Literary Media, :Taylor & Francis, page RA2-PT487:

     There are deceptive tactics a ‘scam artist’ can employ, such as ‘book stuffing’, where duplicated or gibberish passages are deliberately inserted to inflate page counts. But for authors who don't intend to mislead, what counts as a page depends not only on their writing but on how Amazon customers read it - or how quickly they swipe to the next.