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Tags Are Toast
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Yup! I can imagine some Amazon CEO cackling in a tower somewhere, with lightning flaring in the background. They know what they did, and they probably got a kick out of it.
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You're right, Andre. It's much worse, the only counter to my own angst is my natural optimism. I've read nightmare story after nightmare story, not just between Indie authors and Amazon, but between Amazon and fully viable businesses they could profit from so much more if they worked together. Amazon thinks they're Macy's and the rest of the world is Gimbels. Does Macy's ever tell Gimbels anything?
Not only did they waste time and effort of all us Indies, but the Trads as well. They wasted the time of their customers, who took a moment to click the selections when they didn't have to. They wasted quite a bit. My only concern now is one question long.
What are they going to chop next? They have to save money somewhere. They really upped the global bonus of KDP Select to over 2 million. No business gives away money for free. It's going to cost something, and when the hatchet falls to save bandwidth, or possibly man-hours in coding to interlink something they feel is a perk we're not earning, we might regret that change too.
I shiver to think about it.
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http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/12/ma...
Andre, thanks for the link to the Mark Coker piece. I found it very illuminating.
Sorry, I'm not a big fan of Coker, and it's not his name that turns me off. Coker says in the piece: ..."My crystal ball gets murkier from here on out, and for reasons you might not expect. The doubters like Donald Maass are becoming the exception, not the rule, and that worries me. When everyone starts swimming in the same direction and believing the same group think, that’s when I start wondering about what comes next..."
That statement is true, and is why I'm not a fan of Coker. I believe he is partly responsible for encouraging authors to keep their prices low, scaring them into 'swimming in the same direction' of belief that ebooks have lesser value, thus convincing readers of that same belief.
What comes next, indeed...
I'm a little confused (or simple) here. Why would Amazon want to kill the tags? I figure anything that helps people find product and spend money is a good thing from a corporate perspective.
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They're bound to have a reason. Amazon always does. And the reason is always turnover (rather than strictly profit, but that's a discussion for another day). That much we know. But, like you, I fail to see how the absence of tags turns into bigger turnover for Amazon.
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I believe he is partly responsible for encouraging authors to keep their prices low, scaring them into 'swimming in the same direction' of belief that ebooks have lesser value, thus convincing readers of that same belief.."
I prefer to consider policies rather than personalities. In that perspective, Coker is far, far more acceptable. He sounds more reasonable, more in the mainstream of economic liberalism. It doesn't matter whether Coker is forced by his circumstances into being more reasonable, or was born more reasonable.
The price books should be is an opinion Coker is entitled to. He doesn't try to enforce his opinion by any means whatsoever. My own opinion is that books were priced about right under the gentlemen publishers and the resale price maintenance agreement then in force, and legal. Put more negatively and pointedly, I believe that the recent drastic lowering of book prices, which Amazon forced through in their failed attempt to establish the Kindle as the permanent dominant tablet, is a catastrophe for literature and for writers, and will in years to come be described by the historians of literature as opening the floodgates to the destructive tide of pornography just starting.
I don't doubt there's a reason. I just can't wrap my mind around possible explanation. I'm interested, however, in hearing more about turnover vs profit.Speaking of the floodgate of pornography, there's a mildly interesting thread on Writers Cafe about the responsibility of writers. I'm struck by the majority attitude of the posters that writers (communicators) have no moral responsibility for what they write. Zero. Write what you want, write what you feel, and then toss it out there. Furthermore, no one should be allowed to have an opinion that hints of judgment on what one writes. However, if it concerns utilitarian issues of pricing, fake reviews (the irony inherent in that is breath-taking), marketing, what-have-you, everyone suddenly has strong opinions.
Sorry--rather off-topic, but your mention of pornography inspired me.
Put more negatively and pointedly, I believe that the recent drastic lowering of book prices, which Amazon forced through in their failed attempt to establish the Kindle as the permanent dominant tablet, is a catastrophe for literature and for writers, and will in years to come be described by the historians of literature as opening the floodgates to the destructive tide of pornography just starting. Yes. This.
I think KDP Select changed readers behaviors in how they perceive and "buy" books (buy being relative, since the concept of free has flooded the market of readers and changed their perception of value.) Bloggers (POI, ENT et al...) promoted the free books and readers gobbled them up perhaps to a saturation level. There's only so many avid readers in the world. How will they ever get through that pile? I know we've all had a modicum of success with KDP Select, but I finally got out January 1st. It's been like staying off of sugar (hard to do), but I am focused on getting my books everywhere in lieu of exclusivity and rankings. I close my eyes at the computer (sometimes), so I don't see the rankings fall so much. : )
Tags be damned...there's more to follow I am sure. IMHO, readers are finding books to read via blogs, not necessarily via Amazon. This is a problem for them. People buy and get off the site. Amazon wants them to stay there and load up, but I don't think that's happening quite as much. YMMV but that is what I am seeing in the sales trends for my books based on past sales and rankings.
In the mean time, people read from a variety of devices, including their phone (iPhone, Droid, iPad). I've done it, too. I put my Kindle down in December in lieu of an iPad Mini (Christmas Gift!!). OMG, I can do everything from that little thing, which includes getting to my Kindle books from the Kindle app. I haven't touched my 3G/WiFi Kindle in four weeks. True.
Life is good and ever-changing, but I keep writing.
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Christopher wrote: "I'm a little confused (or simple) here. Why would Amazon want to kill the tags? I figure anything that helps people find product and spend money is a good thing from a corporate perspective."I posted this message before Xmas in the Goodreads author group to warn the authors who were exchanging tags that they were wasting their time tagging their books. But of course, everyone was too busy tagging to pay me any attention. Before tags started disappearing, Amazon disabled the tag function on certain author's accounts. Here's what Amazon told the author who inquired about her inability to tag her books:
"The original idea of Tags was to allow customers to tag items they were considering buying (for example, tagging items for a specific person as a gift), tagging products that they have purchased for later recommendations and tagging products to suggest better organization of them for Amazon. Over time Amazon has introduced new features that have replaced the TAGS functionality, including Wish Lists, Customer Reviews and Recommendations. Since the introduction of those features the usage of Tags, and therefore their value to our customers, has declined. We have removed TAGS in favor of the replacement features. Tags that you created are still available under Your Profile page."
And in a second letter:
"I'm sorry for any misunderstanding regarding our Tags feature. We are phasing this feature out as it wasn't as popular as it had been in the past. However, some people may still see it available until it is completely removed from the system and the entire site."
Whether or not the reason given is factual, this is the official response given about why the tag feature was discontinued.
Kevis, I'm sorry I didn't see your previous post before Christmas. I was busy with other things, not necessarily with tags. A year ago, Andre wished me a Happy Birthday, and I didn't see it until a month almost passed by, to my ultimate horror, back then. I understand Amazon's double talk. I've seen it before. In order to grasp what I'm talking about, I need to tell this short teeny tiny true story.
Back in 1999, Dell Computers had a policy that 3.5 calls per hour is the targeted average, when helping customers with technical calls on the phone. Now you could do 2 calls and hour, or even 4 to 5 calls an hour, just as long as the customer was happy. The mid-line happy route for management was 3.5 calls per hour.
So one fine day in 2000, they make a Policy change. They threw a party. The stats were dropped. No more 3.5 calls per hour as the green line for phone techs to keep management happy. With the upgraded, new policy was called the average handle time. Or AHT. The Average Handle Time they wanted a phone tech to have was 17 minutes per call. Now it could go as long as 30 minutes, or as short as 10 to 15 minutes, as long as the customer was happy. On top of it, they introduced a whole new slew of penalties and highewr end responsibility for all phone techs.
I made management frown back then, because I told them I didn't like having my intelligence insulted, during this all-important meeting on the changes and higher responsibilities. I went up to the white board that was there, and did long hand division in front of 1500 phone techs who were already steaming out of their ears. 17 minutes per call, divided by an hour... 60 minutes... was 3.5 calls per hour.
The moral of the story was they wanted to up the penalties, change policy, under the guise of something that would save time and effort.
Amazon is pulling close to the same thing. They're changing policy. They're not playing nice. Something that was beneficial to their customer got ended. They are saying it has been replaced by reviews, wish lists and recommendations. Those things were there from the get go, there is no real change in that. By telling authors there is a beneficial change is insulting our intelligence.
There is a bottom line at stake somewhere. It's not about their income, but on their current revenue they already have. Millions have been allocated elsewhere, into a system where they pay for lending, not for selling, which is nothing but a marketing money sink.
It will backfire and burn them. How do I know this? The year 2000 was the last year that Dell won an award for service and support, and has been struggling ever since. I told them then, mess with policy and screw your customers, the money will go elsewhere, and all the re-directed money spent on for marketing will be wasted.
I could warn Amazon in the same manner, but like back then, I don't think my word will mean very much to them. They think they're too big to sink. Like the Titanic, and we all know how well it worked out for that ship.
Thanks, Kevis. That helps. I somewhat see their rationale.
Daniel wrote: "Kevis, I'm sorry I didn't see your previous post before Christmas. I was busy with other things, not necessarily with tags. A year ago, Andre wished me a Happy Birthday, and I didn't see it until..."Daniel, love the Dell story (well, it makes me sad because of its truth), but I understand exactly where you're coming. Your points are right on about all of it.
To be honest, I don't think this will hurt Amazon. The reason being, I think the utility of tags for customers really has been dropping for some time. I'd been assuming that one of the reasons the tags were being removed was also because of the heavy abuse of them as well.
This has been something that was talked about back and forth, particularly a year or so back.
Indeed, one shady "strategy" that some people had been using was purposefully tagging their books with other popular authors, titles, et cetera, or just content that didn't have anything to do with their book.
Basically, people trying to use the old tactics of the late 90s SEO kings slapping every possible keyword into their webpage metadata to get to the top of the search pile whether or not it was relevant.
I'd been using them less and less to find that books, personally.
I don't know how much of a problem it was in absolute terms, but the fact that it was commonly done (and in some cases actually RECOMMENDED by certain people) suggest that the signal-to-noise ratio associated with tags, at least as far as books go, was steadily going down.
Heck, in several cases back when I was still doing a lot of reviews more regularly, I'd be surprised at some of the bizarre (and heavily repeated) tags that would end up attached to certain books. In some cases, the authors didn't even know. For example, I asked one person I did a review of if their next book in their series was going to have paranormal content because her book was tagged with half-a-dozen different vampire-related tags, but her book was just a straight-forward suspense. She was rather surprised and noted there was no vampires in her book.
You don't have to put a lot of pollution into the information system before the algorithms and what in that system start getting fouled up.
In addition, setting aside indies, various "protest tags" and/or hate tags and what not had become very common place. A very common one to see with trad books was something like "overpriced e-book" and what not.
If Amazon is being remotely truthful in their statement, the lack of popularity may be partially related to the tags being both used in a way not anticipated and attempts to game the Amazon system through misuse of tags.
I'd been expecting this ever since Amazon's somewhat panicked overreaction to the fake review thing. A lot of their moves seem to be about making sure that at least the APPEARANCE of integrity exists in their system and/or making sure their algorithms are somewhat reasonably delivering the desired product to the desired customer.
To be honest, I'm surprised that it took them this long to finally kill tags, accordingly.
J.A. wrote: "...I'd been assuming that one of the reasons the tags were being removed was also because of the heavy abuse of them as well..."That was my thought as well. Amazon removed tags a while ago, apparently because of abuse, and later reinstated them. They must be getting tons of complaints.
Andre, I suppose I should have said, I don't like Coker's business policies. I don't know the man, I have no opinion on him as a person. He may not enforce his opinions per se but he is thought of by many, especially new authors, as an expert, to be blindly followed.
It never ceases to amaze me that authors blame everything on Amazon. They set their highest royalty structure (a generous 70%) for books priced between $2.99 and $9.99 US. This suggests they wanted to encourage authors to price higher than $2.99, not that that should become the benchmark. When they set this pricing there was a hue and cry from authors who mostly wrote pulp and wanted to price at .99 cents. Other so-called 'experts' recommended keeping their prices at $2.99, and that became the norm. Pretty hard to put prices up after establishing the low prices. We have no one to blame but ourselves, for readers believing the value of ebooks is, what, 25% of an average paperback.
Write good books, keep promoting as best you can, and forget about wasting energy blaming Amazon or anyone else. The paradigm has been formed, and between that and the economy worldwide, it is going to be a long road ahead to pull ebooks up to the level of perceived value of 'real' books.
The paradigm has been formed, and between that and the economy worldwide, it is going to be a long road ahead to pull ebooks up to the level of perceived value of 'real' books. Good point!
In fact, I've been reading this and nodding my head. Don't have anything to add, except "I agree."
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I agree with Sharon, too. Getting into a flap about what Amazon or any other retailer does or doesn't do is a waste of energy really. I rode a lovely wave on the back of Select for a while, then I was dumped into the sand. All I can really do is wait for the next wave and keep creating, because not creating is worse than not selling.Someone repeat this back to me one day when I'm in a flap about what they're doing?
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Sharon wrote: "J.A. wrote: "They set their highest royalty structure (a generous 70%) for books priced between $2.99 and $9.99 US. This suggests they wanted to encourage authors to price higher than $2.99, not that that should become the benchmark. When they set this pricing there was a hue and cry from authors who mostly wrote pulp and wanted to price at .99 cents. Other so-called 'experts' recommended keeping their prices at $2.99, and that became the norm." I'm not blaming amazon for everything, I did check the box that said I agreed to their terms. I read the whole thing, which most people tend not to do.
Amazon is pretty loose about enforcing their Wholesale terms. Which is the true crux of the issue. Smashwords, Apple, Banes & Noble, all subscribe to the Agency terms.
The differences are crucial. Amazon wants ALL the prices to be higher, because their retail cut will be bigger, and they have the power, believe it or not, to price your ebooks whatever they like. It's in their terms of service. For now, because everyone else in the market offers Publishers/Authors Agency terms, meaning they can set their own prices and control their own profits, Amazon 'pretends' to allow the same type of deal by giving us options. Options they can take away whenever they like. All we can do as the product provider, if and when that time comes, is to determine if Amazon should sell our products at all.
The differences between Wholesale terms and Agency terms are huge. One important factor is pricing control. You see, wholesale terms allows Amazon to upcharge or downcharge prices of the product, which here is our books, to leverage a profit.
Say your book goes best seller on Amazon, and I mean a huge best seller. You're liable to log on one morning to see the price of your ebook triple, all without your input. You get a bigger royalty, all money goes where it should go, your cut is established.
Or they could give it away on the cheap. Or even for free. The price you put in is a MSRV... Manufacturer Suggested Retail Value. As of right now, they usually stick with what you want. Until of course, you want to change your price into a realm they don't want it to be.
Agency terms will allow you to price however you see fit, the retailers cannot change your prices on a whim. Plus, it means a fixed % on the sale no matter what the price range is. 9 cents, 99 cents or 99 dollars, 60% - 70% goes to the author.
Amazon doesn't like that. They feel your book should be priced between $2.99 and $9.99 and you might ask, what is so bad about that? Well, that price scale is controlled 'not' by you, but by Amazon. They could shift it up next year and say the 70% royalty is only for books prices between $9.99 and $19.99... cutting the royalties down for all of those under $9.99 to just 35%.
Agency terms prevents that by having the same higher royalty for ALL prices that are set by the author.
Wholesale terms are predatory when it comes to a product with no physical costs to sell copies. I'm talking about ebooks here. Electrons. It's not like they have to pay people to print and package it, out it in a box and pay shipping costs to your front door. It's not like there's a manufacturing plant that has a wholesale price, and the suggested retail is for the store to discount or not.
Agency terms belongs to the world of ebooks, and Amazon doesn't want anything to do with it. Why? Because with Agency terms, they will have to pay you evenly for whatever you charge. With Wholesale terms, that they have right now, they pay you what they see fit, because they can set the pricing scale however they want. What 'you' may want isn't part of their plan.
Heck, if anyone here wants to set one of there series starter books to free for a promotion to sell the sequels, you'll be lucky if Amazon will let you do that.
Well, to be honest, if you want 5 days to promote such a book in such a manner, you have to list them in KDP Select. In other words, sell through them and nobody else for 3 months or more, just for 5 days of freebie promotion?
That's not options folks. That's extortion, in my opinion. I can't help but blame Amazon for most of it. While I agreed to their TOS... I didn't write it. Amazon did.
This article by indie author David Biddles on HuffPost Books fits into the discussion that this thread has evolved into:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-b...
That's a very good, well-reasoned piece, LeAnn, thanks for posting the link.
Daniel, having my background in business, I am well aware how wholesale pricing works. In most of my businesses I sold over the suggested retail. When I first started in business I attended a conference where an expert in my field stated that when one's sales were not as projected, most owners tended to lower their prices. He told us that was the exact opposite of what they should do, which was raise prices. We went back home and raised our prices. He was right; not only did our gross sales numbers increase, so did our numbers of clients. It's a perception of value. From that day forward, my wares were priced at competitive or above. My two latest businesses were located in an upscale area of town. In both cases (very disparate products), I was often priced higher than my competitors in nearby areas. I never bought items that had a sticker price on them. I used my business intuition. Sometimes I sold for less than the suggested retail, but most often I sold above it.As Biddles said in the HuffPost piece, ..."If it could sit at $2.99 with no purchases, why not have at least a little pride and make it $4.99?"...
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Biddle's best point is in fact that a book is not a commodity but a luxury item. (Well, excluding pornography, which is an addiction.)
Unlike Biddle though, I have access to the numbers on a good range of books through my connection to CoolMain Press. Some of those are consistent sellers, constantly on one or another of Amazon's "bestseller"; our books have been on hundreds of different ones of "bestseller" lists. We've also had books in Amazon's Top 100. We made some pricing experiments.
Basically, what we found was that you could give books away until you were blue in the face, and then for a short time charge 9.99, but the boost would wear off in a few days, a couple of weeks at most. This is what Biddle also experienced.
What actually works about giving books away, is giving them to known people by name in the hope of getting reviews. Individual reviews don't sell books by direct connection, but over a period of time the fact of reviews will work up to a pump priming charge. Most indies are too inexperienced not to be impatient at this stage.
In pricing, we found nothing startling, only what some who came after us reported as if it was news brought by persons from Porlock. At $2.99 income to the author and publisher is maximised, almost regardless of which book you're talking about. Sales are not generally increased at 99¢, and of course at the lower royalty income drops dramatically. Authors just cheapen their reputations at 99¢. Some books, my own about Larsson for instance, have such a head of steam that even $9.99 doesn't kill them (it killed paperback sales instead, being seen as better value — don't ask me to defend the logic of this), but sales units multiplied by the higher royalty didn't total as much as before. That's basically what Coker has been reporting for a couple of years.
About Dean Wesley Smith's latest recommendation, I'll wait and see. I suspect he and Konrath are using their fame among the indies not to give impartial advice but as sales tools for their books; in that case the temptation to say something controversial may be overwhelming.
Thanks for the info, Andre.Andre wrote: "...About Dean Wesley Smith's latest recommendation, I'll wait and see. I suspect he and Konrath are using their fame among the indies not to give impartial advice but as sales tools for their books
I concur, especially for Konrath, whose agenda always seemed to me to get everyone else to price their books low, as he valued his. Gotta give him his due; it worked...
We are going to have to work hard and with faith to crawl out of that bottom.
Sharon wrote: "Daniel, having my background in business, I am well aware how wholesale pricing works. In most of my businesses I sold over the suggested retail. When I first started in business I attended a confe..."I hear you loud and clear, Sharon. I agree completely about the value as determined by the mindset of the customer, and to go too cheap doesn't bode well in the long run.
So how long is too long?
My prices were $6.99 in 2009. They were the same for 2010. I lowered to $4.99 in 2011. At the beginning of 2012, I decided that two years of absolutely horrid sales was enough. I gave away my short stories, priced everything longer than 50K words at $2.99 and the sales trickled. Most of my numbers in 2011 were the freebie short stories. In 2012, I decided to go with the talking heads who were saying it was getting results. I gave away the series starter and priced the rest of the trilogy for my Passion series at 99 cents. Devalued, right? I think so, myself. The results were undeniable, though. In Q4 sales of 2012, which is going to pay out anytime now from Smashwords, I made more than 2009 and 2010 combined.
When 1 quarter of sales can trump two years, it's easy to understand why I'm starting to lose faith in the 'experts' and their understandably logical advice.
With my Valinthia series, I priced the starter of that series as free, and the sequels are $2.99, which at the beginning of 2013, will be neck and neck in the metrics department. Does the 99 Cent trilogy outsell the $2.99 trilogy? With 2013 as the official starting line, I'm going to find out.
As for any new releases in 2013, since they will be crossing the 100K words per novel line, I'm going to price them at $5.95 to see if any of the low key popularity I drummed up will help me earn a better income.
I can only hope. ^_^
Good luck with all your books, Daniel, and keep us informed. Should be a good experiment.Are we talking the same numbers of books offered in each time period?
Sharon wrote: "Good luck with all your books, Daniel, and keep us informed. Should be a good experiment.Are we talking the same numbers of books offered in each time period?"
No, but I did let them run an equal amount of quarters before price adjusting. My non-fiction titles ran 4 quaters each at the higher price. When I priced them down, I allocated the time differential on a spread sheet to keep the metrics even.
My first trilogy, the Passion series, I priced the books as they were released, independently, at the higher tier. When the full trilogy was available, they ran a full two quarters at the $4.99 slot together. When I released the first book for the Valinthia series, I dropped the first passion novel to free and 99 cent stamped the other two Passion books.
I pretty much did the same thing for the Valinthia series. Even though sales was churning up for the first trilogy, the second series sat literally untouched until I offered the first book free, but I did not stamp the other two novels at 99 Cents. I took them down from $4.99 to $2.99 after two full quarters at the original price.
Which is why 2013 is an equal starting line for them both. I am not promoting them anymore as I work on the new novels, and let them run a full year. When I break those metrics down, I'll post results.
And thank you for the well wishes. ^_^ I think we're all still at the 'Great Experiment' stage, where the market shifts and is fluid in many areas, until the newer technologies solidify their grasp on the Internet market places.
As of right now, around 30,000 people have read my books. That count includes the freebies. I could up all of my prices tomorrow and leave them as is, and there wouldn't be any hollering over it from millions of customers who may feel jilted. If I can't triple those numbers and income by 2014, I'll do it then, when there's at least a little more exposure and more than 1 review for most of my released works.
:)
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Thanks for sharing that information, Daniel.
Have you spent time at a Tag party on Amazon? Did you carefully build your tags between yourself and your readers?
The Tags Have Been Butchered - TTHBB!
Like pigs to the bacon factory, the tags for all novels across Amazon are all gone.
It's, you know, for the best, right? RIGHT?
Ug. Where are the hundreds of villagers with pitch forks and torches to storm Amazon's castle?