The first part of this series, “Fake Witchy Authors on Amazon” is over here and has caused quite a stir. And as I promised there, here’s some more information. Part 3, the next part of this series, “I Have Been Contacted by Lisa Chamberlain – and May Have Found the Re-Spin Seed” is over here.

I learned a lot from that first post. I’ve never had anything I’ve written go “viral” before, and it’s definitely a learning experience. So before we launch into “new” information, let’s clear up some misconceptions first.

Nom de Plumes/Pen Names – I am not shitting on authors for using fake names here. I, myself, use a pen name and I know that a lot of people do for a huge variety of reasons, none of which needs my approval. That is not the issue I am discussing here. People using pen names/nom de plumes/fake names are still REAL people under those names, it’s just a different name slapped on top of a real body/real spirit that goes about living a real life. The substance under that name is still real and genuine, still going out and living their truth and writing about it. This issue is about folks making up one (or more!) characters or personas who are entirely fictional that they then use in order to sell books. They have no personal experience in regards to what they’re writing about (in this case, witchcraft), and have not even done real research on it – they’re just rewriting/borrowing what other people have written before in the way that kids are taught to rewrite the points of their homework reading “in their own words” to prove comprehension in school. AT BEST. In the worst cases, they are doing something far worse, and we’ll discuss that later on.

Ghost Writers – I am also not criticizing what people USUALLY think of as ghost writers. But we have two “varieties” of ghost writing happening now. One is the more “traditional” version – where someone wants to write a book, like a president, but they don’t have the time or skills to do so. So they sit down with a ghost writer, have a lot of nice long chats with them about what they want their book to be about and their personal experiences, that ghost writer takes lots of notes (or pays REALLY close attention), and crafts their stories and wisdom into a beautiful book and is paid REALLY well, as is appropriate. This is a craft as old as writing itself (like, the Bible, for one), and is a beauitful thing. But we also have new ghost writers out there who are tossed a topic or maybe even an outline and told to go do the thing and come back with a book. This I have a different opinion about and is what we see with bigger fiction franchises like Nancy Drew, Animorphs, the Babysitter’s Club, the Jason Bourne novels (these ones listed are out in the open and totally transparent about it, so good on them and yay! Others, not so much, so…..). This is likely what is happening with Lisa Chamberlain’s books, as I’ve had 4 different people contact me claiming to have been approached by her to write her books. And her books ARE significantely better quality than the other writers I’ve been looking at. But even using ghostwriters in this way, her books are not about her knowledge nor her experiences, so while the information may be useful, the experiences relayed are not hers and I don’t like that misrepresentation. And in even WORSE cases, people are hiring writers from places that are habitually underpaid, underpaying them even more ($150 for an entire book), without a care for content, putting their own name on the cover, and taking it to the bank. THE WORST.

Self-publishing – Some people have interpreted my article to say that self-publishing means that someone is disreputable and that just by making the decision to self-publish, they, too, will be “cyber-bullied” and “ostracized.” I painstakingly listed out multiple factors – frequency of publication, identical covers, titles, topics, and book summaries, fake naming conventions, and bad writing all to make it CLEAR that NO SINGLE FACTOR was the determinant. I have friends who have self published. I have professional editor friends who provide consultation to help people become self-published. I share information with people to help them get self-published. I think self-pubishing is FANTASTIC. I love traditional publishing, yes, but I can absolutely see the benefits in de-centralization of knowledge, money, and power and self-publishing is part of that public good. YAY self-publishing but also YAY critical reading skills!

Cyber-bullying – “Is this not just an attempt at cyber-bullying? How dare I/we bash our witchy sisters (little sexist there, yeah?)! Curses upon me and all that jazz.” No, I’m not attempting to bully anyone. I don’t think these are real people. If they are real human people, I would like to specifically NOT direct my ire and frustration at them, which is why I keep asking that if you know that someone is a real actual person to let me know so I can fix it! I would RATHER be wrong, but the more I look, the worse it gets.

People Don’t Click Links – Maybe this is my fault for not realizing this – like I said, it’s the first time anything I have written has gone viral, but I probably put the explanation for some of my statements behind too many links last time instead of using screenshots because I wanted everyone to see my sources and also get the AMAZING explanations that other people did and let those other writers get the credit/clicks that they deserved. My bad. There will be more screenshots in addition to links this time. So let’s get to it.

The World of PLR and MRR

Thank you to this WONDERFUL commentor who replied to the original article because I finally learned the term I was looking for (“recycling ebook content” is not a useful phrase to put into Google and neither is “romance industry scandal”):

PLR stands for “Private Rights Label,” MRR is “Master Rights Resale,” and RR is “Resale Rights” – these rights govern how digital products can be sold and what changes can be made in the process. The short version is that RR products are what we are used to – you can buy them and then sell them to someone else, but you aren’t supposed to alter them in any way and the people that you sell them to aren’t supposed to resell them. MRR products aren’t supposed to altered, either, but now the people that you resell them to can resell them as well, but still, no one is supposed to alter them.

But PLR lets you go hogwild with those rights – you can alter the product as much as you want, you can claim authorship, change the appearance (including the cover), change the sales pitch, repurpose the content in any way you like, give it away if it makes you happy, and do anything you damn well please. Including uploading it, if it’s an eBook, to Amazon with a brand new cover, claiming that you wrote it, and selling it for whatever price makes you happy, with no need to share any of the profits with anyone else.

Screenshot from Way to Changes [dot] com

“But wait!,” I hear you saying, “Amazon checks for plagiarism now, that would never work!” Lo, I hear you, and we already discussed that. But it was behind a link, so it was easy to miss.

Over in this great article by The Hustle by John Havel, we learned how easy it was to make up a fictional author persona (in his case, Amber Ward, a middle aged woman living in Ohio with her husband, two daughters, and a yorkie, and who refuses to eat green things, and has an amazing made up award), steal a romance novel he had thought had fallen into the public domain in regards to copyright (whoops, it hadn’t!), get caught by Amazon’s plagiarism algorithm, rewrite the ENTIRE novel just enough to pass it in about 3 hours, and then game the system (using fake reviewers and low-traffic categories) to hit number 1 on Amazon and make just under $10 before he pulled the plug in only a week from when he chose the book off the internet.

I know, I know, $10? For 3 hours of work? Who cares and why bother, am I right? But the author here was testing out a technique that he learned from another guy, an anonymous guy, who sells 6,000 books a month and takes home $150k a year. NOW we’re talking motivation and the reasons why.

Those articles are from 2015 and getting caught by the Amazon plagiarism bot is a lot riskier now and a lot less forgiving, and the Kindle Unlimited payouts have been restructured, so aren’t quite as lucrative, but the system still works. After spelunking in various PLR forums (ew, gross, do not recommend), the advice is to make sure you use a re-spinner or a re-writer for your PLRs before you upload them.

Re-Spinning and Re-Writing Articles and eBooks

Wait, what? Yeah, it took the writer at The Hustle three hours to change the names and locations in his stolen book, but that was 2015 and those days are gone now.

It’s 2020. We have software and algorithms and the baby beginnings of actual Artificial Intelligence now, there’s no need to even READ the material you want to claim as your own and sell anymore.

But how does this software REALLY work? It’s… awkward, but not terrible. I found a service with a free trial (Cleverspinner) and gave it whirl on one of my own old articles about the benefits of Aventurine. Here’s the original:

Aventurine is a gorgeous green stone comprised of tiny crystalline structures, providing it a gorgeous shimmering as well as metal gleam.

Aventurine is mainly used in 2 magic types: visions and luck.

Aventurine may be utilized to boost perceptive prowess, offer lucidity when wanting to the future, and raising expressions and creativity. Have a little piece in the pocket of yours, on a band, or perhaps in a necklace in order to get better insight, a wider view of items, as well as in order to encourage your creative self. Touch a portion to each eye to increase the overall perceptions of yours.

Aventurine is employed in luck magic and is actually preferred by others and gamblers that are actually taking chances and seeking the fortune of theirs. It attracts gifts and money to the wearer.

To be a green stone, it’s also used to cure and ease the feelings as well as draw healing energies to the wearer. It’s particularly helpful in drawing out harmful toxins and cleaning the entire body of poisons.

~ Nathara, @ CrowSong Lodge

Haha, just kidding! That’s the “spun” version! I mean, it’s a little obvious if you’ve been reading thus far, my writing isn’t THAT bad, but if you’ve been reading some of these PLR books on Wicca from Amazon, the writing style seems a bit TOO familiar. And keep in mind, I didn’t use any of the customization options or change any of the default settings and I didn’t go in to make any of the changes that it recommended I do (highlighted here in red)(btw, by “pass CS” it means to pass CopyScape, the favorite plagiarism checker on the internet):

Check out this passage from “WICCA FOR BEGINNERS: The ultimate beginners guide to Wicca candle spells, herbal magic, crystal spells, moon magic, Witchcraft Rituals, and magic rituals” by Scott Spells

“A few Wiccans oppose the term and draw a clear differentiation among themselves and pagans. In any case, this differentiation is pointed more at present-day (or “Neopagan”) profound developments than the general feeling of the word as a class of “relgion.” What Neopagan conventions, Wiccan and non-Wiccan the same, share for all intents and purpose is a fondness with more seasons, pre-Christian conviction frameworks that may not be well-spoken to in recorded history however have held a spot in the human creative mind, regardless of whether their specific articulations have transformed and changed after some time.”

~Scott Spells, Page 131, first full paragraph

It is far easier to illustrate this issue in examples than in precise language, but I’ll give it a shot. There’s a certain flow and nuance to language that is natural and even conversational that is found even in academic or scholarly texts, and this isn’t it. These are technically sentences that mostly make sense, but their lack of elegance and flow obscure their meaning and make reading and comprehension more difficult than it out to be. That the above-quoted paragraph carries on for four more pages does NOT help!

Artificial Intelligence Writing Articles and Books

Re-spinners and re-writers are one thing, but can bots (baby Artitifial Intelligence programs) write books? Well, we’re definitely getting there. Check out this article from The Next Web, who is already using a bot to write articles about Bitcoin:

If you want to read Satoshi Nakaboto’s articles, head this way: https://thenextweb.com/author/satoshi-nakaboto/

And The Next Web isn’t the only company employing AI/algorithms to generate articles and sales copywriting for it. Persado is a company that develops algorithms to help a variety of companies create headlines, sales emails, ads, and other marketing copy to pull in the most sales possibles and maintain the image they want.

Why does any of this matter?

I’ve received a LOT of comments – PLR has been around forever, so it showed up in the witchy world FINALLY, who cares? The future is coming for all of it, what are we even gonna do? They’re just re-spinning existing books that have actual good information in it, so what does this matter anyways? People who know what’s what are going to know the difference and buy real books, so who cares if Amazon is filled with fakes?

Or as John Havel put it in his article over on The Hustle:

It isn’t true for me, but it DOES cast doubts on the reliability and veracity of other self-published authors – here’s what John Havel even had to say for himself:

And Laura Tempest Zakroff made a great point in her own article over on Patheos that I had not even considered – when people buy books and connect to authors, they look for events and classes, and then they find the reputable parts of the community. But when these authors are fictional characters themselves, that isn’t happening.

On top of that, these fictional, made up authors that are gaming the Amazon system by releasing books rapidly (pushes you up the book listings without sales), buying fake reviews (yay, up the listings higher without sales), and giving away free books during their 5 day promotional window (these actually count as sales for the purpose of Amazon rankings!), are pushing actual, genuine writers DOWN the rankings, making it harder to find them and preventing them from getting eyeballs on their books – the books they spent real time writing, based on their real-life experiences and actual hard-worked research. the blood, sweat, years, and tears that we ALL put into our crafts that we’re excited to read about when we hand over our money and reach for a new book. That we expect to find when we’re three decades into our practice and know there will be some new nugget of information or a shiny new insight or perspective even when we buy a basic beginner book.

And if these real authors can’t find success selling their books, why would they keep writing for us? Will they need to learn to game the system too, just to get sales? Will it be cut-throat for everyone to make a living? Could we end up with only fakes or authors with BOMB-ASS social media marketing able to make sales and no room for anyone else? I hope not, and I don’t want to find out.

I appreciate that there are folks out there who are jaded and bitter because this world is filled with shady people cheating any system they can to make a buck and maybe those people are doing it because we have a nasty, corrupt system and it’s the only way they can put food in their mouths. I get that. I waded through the PLR forums and I checked out the PLR marketing programs and I waded through the Fiverr listing selling me 8 million ebooks guaranteed to make it past plagiarism checkers because they’re including re-spinning software with my purchase that only costs me $5 – I feel pretty gross and disenchanted myself.

But we can’t forget that we can share this information with each other, boost the community up, help each other out, and make it better. And if we make it better for just one other person then we did a good thing and that MATTERS. And it’s impossible to know what far reaching ripples that good thing might have, but knowing that they have them MATTERS.

/sermon

Recommendations

A common complaint I had with the last article was that I didn’t give suggestion on how to know an author is a good one and I didn’t give recommendations on WHO to read! So let’s do that!

Picking a Good Author:

• Google them! Names can be tricky to search, so slap some quotation marks around it, just to be sure (ex: “Mat Auryn”) Are they on social media? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Amino, Tumblr, anywhere at all?
  • If you DO find them on the internet, do you like them? Do they seem to have a good reputation and sound like they know what they’re talking about? Do they sound like an asshole and you hate them? Your feelings about them DO matter!
• Are they doing classes, events, interviews, workshops?
• Do they have a shop? Are they in a coven? Are they having conversations with anyone?
• Do they have a bio? Does it make sense? If someone has been running covens for 23 years and is a prolific writer but they only have 1 audio book out, does that even make sense?
• Do they have a photo up? Is it a stock photo? I love using TinEye for reverse image searches. You upload the image/put in the URL and it’ll find everywhere else on the internet that image appears!
• Does their cover/title/book look like a standard copy of every other generic book on the topic written by this list of authors compiled by Kelden? If it does, I’d pass!

We want to pick authors who are real people with real experience, who aren’t assholes, who seem like people we can respect and who aren’t copying everyone else. We want them to pass this checklist, but if ONE of these things is off, use your critical thinking skills, reach out to a friend, or, hell, contact me! I will be your witchy big sister.

Personal Recommendations*

(*There are no affiliate links in here)

I am going to start out by saying that I WILL forget people here. I’ve read a lot, there’s a lot I haven’t read, some books are dated (I’m an old, for reals), so take it with a grain of salt and use your own discretion.

Kelden just came out with The Crooked Path which is a great book on Witchcraft in general, and then more specific information on both Wicca and Traditional Witchcraft, with more emphasis on Traditional Witchcraft. He does amazing research, so he gives a lot of information about how these paths developed as well as how they are practiced both in theory and in practicality (because people SAY one thing, but sometimes they DO something else). We had the pleasure of doing an interview with him on our podcast, too, and you can find all his personal social media links over there, too.

Mat Auryn’s book, Psychic Witch, was just released a couple days ago and it is also great! It’s a fantastic book about your psychic/spiritual/energy work foundations aimed at people who are familiar with Wicca/Witchcraft and want to integrate a more energetic/spiritual approach into their practice – which you should do. It really builds information and techniques from the very basics to a more advanced level and includes a lot of exercises. We also had the pleasure of doing an interview with him, and you can find all his personal social media links over there, too.

For working with animals and nature, I really love anything by Ted Andrews. He has since passed away a few years ago, but his books are so very reliable and he wrote amazing exercises in them. He also did a lot of work with spirits, including land spirits, angels, and the departed. Here is a good list of his books from Goodreads.

Laurie Cabot is a foremother of the modern witchcraft movement and an active member in high esteem, with books coming out across the decades (including this one), so definitely check her out.

Christopher Penczak is also a well respected member of the witchy community whose books have been recommended to me countless times and I have yet to read them! But I follow him in all the places online and I like him a lot and he’s super knowledgable, so I’m confident his books are amazing.

Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler is essential reading. It’s a little bit dated now, but still absolutely essential. If you want to know about all the different sects of witchcraft, Wicca, and Paganism, this is going to be your starting point.

I am also going to broadly wave my hands at the Llewelyn catalog of authors, which includes Silver Ravenwolf and Scott Cunningham – I grew up on them and they’ve got a fond place in my heart. They’re somewhat more general and generic, but that serves it’s own purpose. Llewellyn has been “in the game” for a long time and it’s NICE to have a publisher who is familiar with the community, our work, our information and puts out products that people consistently enjoy, like, and recommend.

And a new favorite publishing house of mine who has kept my reading list delightfully full lately has been Weiser Books/Red Wheel. Another publisher who is familiar with the community, Weiser/Red Wheel is a bit edgier, and a little less mainstream (these are compliments! COMPLIMENTS!), serving up new and more independent and experimental authors and making it impossible for me to get caught up on my reading (a goddamn JOY).

If anyone else has recommendations they LOVE, PLEASE add them to the comments! Like I said, I know I forgot some!

Thanks

So there we have it. Special thanks to Kelden, again, for being my investigative buddy on this one. Investigating is fun, but this topic is shitty. He found the link for Persado – he got to enjoy the absolute depth of angst with me on this one and compiled that AMAZING list. His audience is bigger than mine, so he got to experience more abuse for it, too (sorry!). He also did this great video over on the YouTubes that you should totally check out and drop some love on.

We both tried to find the EXACT PLR book that was being used by these witchy book authors yesterday, but no luck. I ran across a lot of comments and hints that suggested they were somewhere in one of these bundles from Fiverr. As you can see, eight thousand (8,000) PLR ebooks, a variety of topic categories that are mostly unlisted, bulk rewriting software included, comes with covers and sales templates, all for just five dollars. And this is a smaller package – I saw others listing nine million ebooks. I’m not going to buy it – frankly, I’m sick of looking at these. I am starting to suspect that our fake witchy authors are not specialists at all, but rather have a ton of personas in a bunch of different genres and… that is too damn much.

Once more, though, if I’ve misrepresented something or if you are one of these authors, drop me a message and let me know!

The Series

The first part of this series, “Fake Witchy Authors on Amazon” is over here and has caused quite a stir. And as I promised there, here’s some more information. Part 3, the next part of this series, “I Have Been Contacted by Lisa Chamberlain – and May Have Found the Re-Spin Seed” is over here.