So here’s something that has happened to me twice in the last month (and to other authors as well) that everyone should be aware of:

People are creating accounts at some of the book retailers, and sometimes at aggregators/distributors like Draft2Digital and Smashwords, and uploading books that they don’t have rights to. They aren’t pretending they wrote these books. They’re using our books, our titles, and our names.

The first time this happened to me, it was on Apple. Another author flagged it for me; she’d been alerted by yet another author. In total, there were 17 books uploaded by this seller. We all emailed Apple. ​Worth noting is that I never received a response from iBooks. I think some of the authors have iBooks reps, so maybe they heard something. The seller’s account was taken down within a few days.

The next time it happened was on Monday. I got a Google Alert that my book, Fall Away, was available at Scribd. Except I didn’t send it to Scribd through my distributor, not even my accident–the only place I’ve ever uploaded that book file is Amazon, because it’s in KDP Select (exclusive to Amazon). It being on Scribd put that exclusivity in jeopardy, and of course, I assumed it was uploaded by a file sharer, a problem Scribd is notorious for.

But it wasn’t.

Scribd’s response to my DMCA takedown notice (they have a handy form on their site, and actually, that process was easy) was that the book was uploaded through my authorized distributor, Draft2Digital.

Meanwhile, a friend had noticed it was also at two other sites that D2D distributes to. So I sent all of that information to D2D, and their response came back pretty quickly–yes, really, really sorry, but it looks like someone created an account and uploaded your book. That account has been suspended, that seller contacted and informed they were caught trying to sell copyright material, etc.

So it was resolved, appropriately and quickly. But still. IT’S SO EASY. I wouldn’t have noticed if I didn’t have Google Alerts set up, because I never check my books on those sites.

It hasn’t yet happened to me on Google Play, but it has to other author friends, and sometimes those books start selling well. And Google pays really quickly, right after the end of the month.

So you need to be vigilant. Set up Google Alerts for your pen names and your book titles. If you have an assistant, make doing the rounds of the sites and making sure everything is in order with your titles part of their routine.

And maybe brace yourselves for book sellers to require more documentation of identity before creating a sellers account, because this is only going to get worse, I think.

Here’s the screen shot of Fall Away at iBooks last month. I didn’t take any screen shots of Scribd, but that looked pretty much the same, with the seller listed as me.

ETA: It’s still up on Scribd, so here’s that screen cap. You can see that there’s no way for a reader to even guess that I didn’t upload this.

The post Heads up for other authors…keep an eye on book retailers for scammers uploading your books appeared first on Zoe York.