The Fake Biography Scam
How does it work?
It has been a hectic few days, moderating a panel on health innovation at the Boardwave conference, talking to a wonderful group of BBC Alumni about my book Ruskin Park, then braving the chaos of the West Coast rail network to travel to the Wigtown Book Festival, a fabulous event. In between, I spoke to the Observer journalist Jake Tapper, who wrote this excellent thought-provoking piece about the threat to authors from AI ripoffs. I thought I would flesh out what happened to me.
My publisher had warned me that when you have a new book out there may be attempts to game searches on Amazon for your name to turn a profit for someone else. And, when I looked, there in the search results was what looked like an AI-generated fake biography of me.
Anyone who has read Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC, which has had a fantastic reception from readers and reviewers, will know that the “biography” is utter tosh. I read out the section below to a group of authors in the Wigtown festival green room and they found it both hilarious and infuriating.
To rub salt in the wound Amazon’s algorithm decided to troll me with an email recommending this travesty rather than Ruskin Park. To the online giant’s credit it swiftly removed the biography from the site - I hadn’t complained because I couldn’t work out what rules had been broken but others, alerted by my social media posts, had demanded it be banned.
But I am left mystified by one thing - what is the business model behind this scam? It’s difficult enough to persuade people to part with hard cash for a real memoir (Ruskin Park - only £16.99 on Amazon!) so I can’t imagine why anyone would hand over £10.89 to Alexander J Youngs, the no doubt fake name behind the fake biography. Can anyone enlighten me?
My hypothesis is that they are not expecting anyone to actually buy it, but rather for Kindle Unlimited subscribers to download it for free. Even if they only read a few pages before they realise it's drivel, Amazon will still pay the publisher a few pence for the pages read. Repeat the exercise with enough zero-quality and zero-effort books and there's serious money to be made.
Fascinating. I have read quite a few 'authorised' biographies that don't seemed fully 'aligned' with their subjects before. I put this down to the authors' desire to flatter and airbrush any unpalatable elements. But after this, I'm reconsidering.... ;oD