I stumbled on an interesting strategy.
I just bought a Ninja Creami (a machine that makes homemade ice cream).
So I searched for “Ninja Creami Recipe Books” and got the following search results:
All those covers look surprisingly identical. This is not uncommon on Amazon, but you usually only see a handful of books pop up with similar designs, and they typically vary slightly from book to book.
In this case, those look like they were designed by the same person, and there are a lot of them (nearly two full pages of books with the same cover).
Several of them are also sponsored (i.e. they show up as ads in addition to showing up organically).
Digging deeper, they’re all written by different authors.
And each author has written only one or two books (about the Ninja Creami).
When you click on the author profiles, you read something like the following about Marwan Ghabour:
And here’s another about Diane Geller:
And another about Marthar B Malone:
The common theme among all of them?
They all seem fake.
A quick internet/ social media search turns up nothing. No awards given to Marwan, no Instagram presence for Diane, and no trace of Marathar.
The profiles have an AI feel to them, and they’re stuffed with keywords (I assume to return higher in the search results).
Not sure exactly what’s going on, but I’m guessing it’s mass repurposing with fake profiles.
I haven’t bought/ read any of the books, so I can’t tell if they are similar internally, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are.
The concern here is that this strategy might “crowd out” others.
So if you’re an author trying to compete in this space, and those books take up the first page or two, then the chances of someone seeing your book drops significantly.