On a recommendation, I picked up a that turned out to be 21 (est.) pages for 99c. It was a single erotic scene, lacking much lead-in, a very long scene of affection, and then a cutesy throw-away line at the end.

Character development, plot? We don’ need none of that stuff…

That’s not a criticism…

This is.

When I opened it on the Kindle Fire, there was the title and then several, many, didn’t bother to count but a *lot* of blank pages. I had to move the slider to see if I’d had a bad download or … whatever. And at 323kb total, when I finally found the beginning of the scene I was at 9%.

This is the new scam: put fillers in the front, so many of them that when you finally reach the story bit, you are at the 10% cut-off for Amazon’s KU algorithm to kick in with a payment. I pay (get bilked out of) 99c, Amazon kicks in $1.33 or whatever the “share from the pot is currently” to the author. As a business model? Hmmm.

I call BS here. And I’m getting *really* sick of the market being flooded with chapters being dubbed “books”. Not even chapters… They are “scenes” most times, mostly erotic but not exclusively.

Here’s a thought: how about putting actual word count in the Product Description, instead of the mystifying kilobyte or estimated pages.

I’m to the point where, if I see a “book” (in quotes because how the hell does 21 pages, at least 8 of which are blank, count as a book?) for 99c and it’s in Kindle Unlimited, I don’t even bother to read the blurb. I know what it is—a rip-off (not all, never all, but enough I’ve been warned off).

How about you, fellow readers, what’s your take on this?