Amazon's erotica section isn't just rife with tales of lust, incest, violence, and straight-up kink. It's also a hotbed of masked merchants profiting from copyright infringement. And even with anti-piracy legislation looming, Amazon doesn't appear too eager to stop the forbidden author-on-author action.
From a piece in Fast Company...
She decided to test drive the service with Erotic Stories of Domination and Submission: Taking Jennifer, a book by one of her authors, then watched it climb the rankings in "gratifying leaps." But Sharazade was dismayed that a number of books, a few with nonsensical titles, were beating hers, even though they were hamstrung by twisted grammar and perverse punctuation. Some sported covers comprised of low-resolution images with no lettering. One author managed to misspell her own name. "Even in porn, customers come down on books that are totally incompetent," Sharazade says, "but this wasn't happening with these."
After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon's U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula's Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.
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