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Why your book may not be selling...
Ugh. Then again I don't have sales to drop off, so what do I care lol!
Theodore wrote: "Just saw this article in Indies Unlimited...the culprit, as you may have guessed, is Amazon:https://www.indiesunlimited.com/2017/..."
Thank you Theodore. Very interesting.
Anna Faversham wrote: "Theodore wrote: "Just saw this article in Indies Unlimited...the culprit, as you may have guessed, is Amazon:https://www.indiesunlimited.com/2017/......"
As always, follow the money.
That's very true and useful to remember when we start our wondering whys.
Nice article. I think one of the biggest problems facing indie authors is other self-published authors that aren't what many of us would consider being indie authors. They are just copying whatever book they see selling, or copying the theme, flogging it and selling poorly made books at cheap prices. They're flooding the market with this junk. I think it will sort itself out over the next year or two, but not all of us will be around.
Hi everyone there!One more thing I noticed. If you compare the sales chart on "sales dashboard" and sales reported in "month to date" on KDP on day to day basis till the end of the month, there is difference up to 4 copies. It happened to me in September and despite of several emails, I couldn't get any satisfactory reply from Amazon.
Prakash wrote: "Hi everyone there!One more thing I noticed. If you compare the sales chart on "sales dashboard" and sales reported in "month to date" on KDP on day to day basis till the end of the month, there is..."
It may be because one of them includes the current day and the other does not. If you see a discrepancy, check to see if one of them is reporting sales for today, and if so if those sales are the difference.
The whole thing is confusing - but then, most things concerning Amazon confuse me.Amazon has always been about low price. There was even a brouhaha between Zon and the big trad publishers a few years back over what to charge for books.
Now they've gotten their wish. There are acres upon digital acres of low-cost or free books that are just as enjoyable as their $24.99 hardcover competitors.
They seem to have been undone by their cultivation of self-published authors, and are now trying to re-engineer the landscape to reap larger profits.
But what do I know? What does anyone know? Amazon is opaque. We can only guess how their algorithms work or what goals their executives have. It could just be that now everyone is in on the "Kindle gold rush," which means each author's slice of the pie is getting slimmer and slimmer.
Dale wrote: "Prakash wrote: "Hi everyone there!One more thing I noticed. If you compare the sales chart on "sales dashboard" and sales reported in "month to date" on KDP on day to day basis till the end of the..."
I have checked thoroughly and then I reported the matter to Amazon, they simply deleted 4 units from the chart and asked me to provide screenshot. LOL
Matt wrote: "The whole thing is confusing - but then, most things concerning Amazon confuse me.Amazon has always been about low price. There was even a brouhaha between Zon and the big trad publishers a few y..."
As one agent explained on LinkedIn writers' discussion, Amazon has no skin in the game, so they don't care. They don't put up money to get books published, and they reap profits from whatever sales they get. So they are happy to have anyone put anything out there at whatever low price will entice people to buy. If a book doesn't sell, they loose nothing. If it does, they get something. They are so big that even small amounts of income add up to big profits.
Unfortunately, Amazon and other mega-corporations of their ilk are engaged in a race to the bottom, both in terms of price and quality, in order to make their top execs huge sums of money. They get customers to play along because, well, everyone loves low prices. But it is a race to the bottom, nevertheless, and it can't be sustained forever.
Ben I agree with you which makes apps like bookbub worthwhile they reject the rubbish..You need the reviews to get it on.
I have four books and will figure how it's done across third party platforms.
good luck
Dale the guys who publish 1000 books a year pay homeless people in the US to write hm.they publish 1000 books a year sell at low prices and are millionaires.
how do they get 300 reviews hm it's rigged.
@Dale: "Unfortunately, Amazon and other mega-corporations of their ilk are engaged in a race to the bottom, both in terms of price and quality, in order to make their top execs huge sums of money. They get customers to play along because, well, everyone loves low prices. But it is a race to the bottom, nevertheless, and it can't be sustained forever."But, according to the folks in the linked posts, prices may have gotten too low for Amazon.
As Cate Baum put it: “So if your book is 99 cents, but another book is selling at $2.99 but not as many as you, it’s likely Amazon will recognize the $2.99 book higher in rank because it makes Amazon more money.”
Data Guy also makes excellent points, so much so that I feel the need to paste in one of his comments from the Passive Voice post:
"But I think that Amazon’s general business philosophy provides a pretty good guide to why they might do so: after all, most of their decisions are based on what they think serves Amazon customers best, rather than what serves their suppliers.
By putting a thumb on the scale to keep traditional publishers financially viable, Amazon ensures that Amazon can continue to offer their customers books from a wide diversity of supplier types, in the widest variety of formats.
Keep in mind that indie self-publishers aren’t (yet?) a significant supplier source for certain types of books. Deeply researched journalistic nonfiction, for instance, that requires years of travel and interviewing is often only made possible because a large traditional publisher pays a hefty advance for a book proposal. And peer-vetted scientific research similarly depends upon a variety of grant-funded publishing ecosystems that indies haven’t yet tapped into. Maybe indies will eventually move into those niches and dominate them, too, but until that happens, Amazon customers aren’t well-served by the collapse of traditional publishing.
Self-publishers also don’t yet do a lot of hardcovers, and many can’t afford professionally narrated audiobooks right out of the gate. Amazon customers as a whole buy a lot of both; traditional publishers still fill a lot of those needs, and their absence would impoverish title selection in both formats.
I think there’s historic precedent for Amazon tweaking their own sales mix to protect traditionally publishers from self-inflicted business wounds. I can think of at least two recent instances where Amazon reached deep into their own pockets to soften self-inflicted publisher damage from poor pricing policy decisions that otherwise would have severely hurt many traditional publishers’ long-term prospects for survival.
The first time was when Amazon discounted overpriced traditionally published ebooks down to breakeven on average, earning zero profit themselves and instead passing on to publishers a full 100% of the dollars consumers were spending on traditionally published ebooks.
The second time was when the biggest publishers fought for the right to prevent Amazon from discounting their ebooks, Amazon steepened their *print* discounts instead, giving up a big chunk of Amazon’s own margin on print to keep publisher print sales from collapsing as brick & mortar outlets shrank.
Of course, Amazon didn’t do either selflessly. In both cases, they served their customers better *and* grew their own market share. But I am almost certain that they don’t want to see traditional publishers die out, and today traditional publishers are so dependent on Amazon sales that it’s a very real medium-term possibility."
That's not a race to the bottom. If it was, Amazon would have discarded the whining, "buy my $25 hardcover" trad publishers years ago. But, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint, they still want them around because they can do things we indies can't.
It's a race to a point near the bottom, perhaps, but not at the absolute "lower than a snake's belt buckle" bottom.
Again, this is all conjecture. As even Data Guy put it, "As to Amazon’s motives, I can only speculate."
Matt wrote: "It's a race to a point near the bottom, perhaps, but not at the absolute "lower than a snake's belt buckle" bottom."Oh, I don't disagree with any of that. But "bottom" is a relative term. Obviously no company is going to intentionally commit corporate suicide, but there are only so many ways to get to the lowest possible cost, and many of them result in sacrificing quality, be it in the writing, the editing, the physical production of a print book, the formatting of an ebook, etc.
Amazon did in fact try to force large publishers to cut prices on ebooks below what publishers felt was reasonable, and even had the gall to ask authors to pressure their publishers to capitulate. (I know because I got that email.) It took the power of a company like Hachette, the oldest and one of the largest publishers in the world, to say no to them, and that refusal came at the cost of lost sales.
To say that Amazon cares about customers more than suppliers is definitely true. But without suppliers, they wouldn't have any customers because they'd have nothing to sell. Forcing your suppliers to slit their own throats is one characteristic of a race to the bottom. A company should have a somewhat more holistic view. It's one thing to try to get the best deal. It's another to dictate terms without regard for the realities the other party must contend with.
By the by, as a small niche publisher, I know something about dealing with Amazon. I don't sell print books through them because their non-negotiable terms would require me to take a loss unless I managed to publish a book that sells significantly better than any I've yet published. B&N I can at least deal with. But I sell more books directly and through a couple of specialty distributors than I do through either retailer.
@ Dale: "A company should have a somewhat more holistic view."Data Guy illustrated two instances where Amazon allowed its own income to suffer in an effort to shore up trad publishers. I'd count that as having a holistic outlook, at least in those two cases.
I'm no Amazon cheerleader. They're a giant company with plenty of shady practices. But neither am I a cheerleader for trad publishers. They haven't adapted to self-publishing and ebooks in general, which has allowed self-published authors to catch a pretty insane slice of the market.
I don't see it as a David (trad publishers) versus Goliath (Amazon) type scenario, where we're all supposed to cheer for David. It's more like numerous Goliaths (the big New York publishers and Amazon) wrestling with each other, with each side proclaiming the righteousness of their cause.
Matt wrote: I don't see it as a David (trad publishers) versus Goliath (Amazon) type scenario, where we're all supposed to cheer for David."No, nor do I. There are tradeoffs in everything, and most companies will try to use their power (when they have it) to force things to get done in whatever way they see as advantageous to themselves.
At the same time, from a variety of perspectives the power that a handful of extraordinarily large, powerful corporations have seems problematic to me. If publishers didn't feel they needed Amazon, Amazon wouldn't have the power it does over them. But that's the relationship, and it's not an entirely friendly one.
I actually think there is less wrong with traditional publishing than a lot of people think. It has its strengths, among which are the facts that: (1) before a publisher will offer a contract to an author, the author's work has been reviewed by professionals and found worthy of publication, and (2) before a work is released, it has been fully and professionally edited.
The main downside to traditional publishing is only that publishers have their own programs, which does in some measure limit an author. If we write something that doesn't quite fit with anyone's program, we have nowhere to sell the work. But it's not wrong that they have their own programs, anymore than it's wrong that different homeowners have their own ideas of what color their kitchens should be.
The strength of the indie model is great freedom in storytelling, without genre boundaries and other "rules" (within reason, anyway; one generally can't effectively break the "rules" without first understanding what they are and why they exist). Its great weakness is that it allows anyone to publish anything, no matter how incompetent, and puts the onus on readers, instead of editors, of wading through the slush pile before finding the gems. I have to wonder what effect that will have on readers over the long haul. Time will tell.
Alex wrote: "I'd dispute this one, publishing houses have proven remarkably bad at knowing which book is going to be a hit."That's true, but that wasn't really my point When they do publish something, it's been reviewed and found worthy of publication. That's not to say that everything worthy of publication is found by them, nor that everything they publish will be great. Just that what they do publish will be written reasonably well. Poor writing is weeded out by the selection process.
Mod
I had posted the following comment on another thread, but after reading the comments here, I decided to re-post here.I noticed something when I was researching top indie authors on Kindle, Nook and iBooks. Amazon has 14 publishing imprints for different genres. They are publishing not only ebooks, but also print books. This isn't createspace or kindle.
7 of the top 10 books on the top 100 for kindle were published by an Amazon company. You can access the list by clicking on the link (see top 100 paid in kindle stores) next to the sales ranking. Then click on the book to identify the publisher.
Getting onto that list is a huge sales boost. Seems a bit of coincidence that the list is skewed in their favor. Especially when you look at the top ebooks at other outlets. Makes a person wonder if they are stacking the deck?
Carole wrote: "I don't know- I've read some real dogs put out by reputable publishing companies. I think Wool was Simon and Schuster."I'm not sure people are getting what I'm saying. Maybe I'm not saying it well. (That's always possible.)
A "real dog" is to a certain degree in the eye of the beholder. I personally regard Ray Bradbury as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. But not every one of his stories is my favorite, and some people have criticized him for one thing and another. But that man could write. You cannot say that his writing was incompetent, even if you absolutely hated his stories.
I've read some indie fiction recently that I thought were great stories, but not very well written. Some of these stories, as good as they were as stories needed so much work that I feel they were nowhere near ready to be published.
I have never read Wool or the other titles mentioned here, but I'm willing to bet that they were not so badly written that they were nowhere ready to be published. They might have been wretched stories, and they might have had other sorts of flaws. But I'll bet the writing itself was at least mostly competent.
Unfortunately, that's not the case with a lot of indie publications, and I'll even include my own first two novels in that. While I don't think mine were as poorly written as some I've read, I can see now that they needed more work. It's a process, of course. It's just that before the indie revolution, that process mostly took place through long years of struggling to get one's work up to publishability, whereas now it gets shoved out into the world without anyone there to really tell the author, um, sorry, this isn't ready yet.
Yes absolutely true there are indie books and there are indie books. Some are readable. Mine are readable. Are they perfect? No. Will they ever be? No. Are they gibberish? No. Unfortunately some indie books are utter gibberish and read like first drafts with no error checking. Trad books will have been through a process to reduce errors and all the rest of it. That won’t make them good books it will only make them correct. Some of us suffer from being lumped into a group of authors where we are all seen as utter rubbish just because some indie authors can’t string a sentence together.
Mod
That being said, I have read traditional books that needed a lot more work. Why isn't someone telling Dan Brown his hero is tired, his plot line is beginning to fray around the edges, why hasn't anybody mentioned to Clive Cussler people don't talk that way anymore and we don't want to read about the same thing over and over. Why are those editors sleeping. Some people know how to reinvent themselves or take a bow and close the curtain. Some people surround themselves with sycophants who don't let them know their nether regions are exposed and they look like a fool.
Agree, not necessarily about those authors as I haven’t read them. I have read plenty of trad published books where I’ve thought there’s nothing here I couldn’t write myself. I just wouldn’t be as polished as them as the money for the editing goes into feeding my kids. Some of these trad books are full of guff and that’s after they’ve been edited.
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I can’t even go to my “local” business meetings. (90 minutes away) Too much anxiety. I have no idea if we have hinges like that over here. I wouldn’t go to them though.
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@ Dale: "It's just that before the indie revolution, that process mostly took place through long years of struggling to get one's work up to publishability, whereas now it gets shoved out into the world without anyone there to really tell the author, um, sorry, this isn't ready yet."If it's not ready, the author will receive poor reviews. Then they'll either a) throw a tantrum and say that no one "gets it," and continue to release sub-par work, which will continue to get poor reviews, b) quit self-publishing because they can't take the blows to their ego, or c) hunker down and improve their craft.
I don't see the need to fret about the deluge of content indie authors are putting out. They'll either sink, or swim - or maybe just tread water.
"Its great weakness is that it allows anyone to publish anything, no matter how incompetent, and puts the onus on readers, instead of editors, of wading through the slush pile before finding the gems. I have to wonder what effect that will have on readers over the long haul. Time will tell."
It hasn't had a negative effect, apparently, because self-publishing is capturing more and more of the market, until what people think was Amazon's recent course correction.
Readers are savvy. They know how to search the Internet for recommendations and how to read customer reviews. The voracious readers have Kindle Unlimited, which allows them to drop a book instantly and start another. They'll be fine.
It always seems to be the authors who complain about the "deluge of content." I don't know if I've ever seen a reader gripe about too many options. Then again, maybe I'm hanging out in the wrong places.
Finally, as others have said, trad publishing routinely releases crap and calls it gold. The fact that professionals have handled it means little - a few typos won't dissuade me from reading a good story, but a terrible story doesn't become better because the editing is flawless.
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I was shocked when it happened to me the first time. I though I was having another heart attack. It was strange, because I've preformed, I've been on television, the radio, I've appeared on stage, danced on stage in front of tons of people and then after I turned 50, this happens and where...when I have to deal with clients. I never had fear or panic in my life and when it comes it's both crippling and uncontrollable.
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That was an excellent post, Matt.
Carole wrote: "Matt wrote: "@ Dale: "It's just that before the indie revolution, that process mostly took place through long years of struggling to get one's work up to publishability, whereas now it gets shoved ..."Thanks, Carol.
By the by, are you saying "Wool" by Hugh Howey was terrible? That surprises me, because it was such a huge hit. (Then again, so was Twilight, as Alex pointed out.) Why didn't you like it?
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That being said, Matt, I didn't leave a review. This was my opinion and I will never leave a bad review that might influence someone not to buy a book. He had like a billion people who loved it, so who am I to say it was bad.
Carole wrote: "I bought it because of the hype- an indie writing it while he worked in a bookstore. I was excited- one of us- he made it. Ridley Scott is making the movie. I opened it prepared to be amazed. The f..."It's on my Kindle, and I'm like 2% into it, but I've been sidetracked by other reading. Like you, I got it because it's so huge it's impossible to ignore. It's like the "one true indie novel" that proves someone can hit the jackpot.
I'm interested to restart it now.
Matt wrote: "Carole wrote: "I bought it because of the hype- an indie writing it while he worked in a bookstore. I was excited- one of us- he made it. Ridley Scott is making the movie. I opened it prepared to b..."Ah - I see I misspelled your name in a previous message. Sorry about that! :(
Mod
I never read Twilight beyond the first chapter. For me, it was unreadable. But, others loved it. It's a matter of taste. Last weekend, I tried to read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. So, here's a highly acclaimed traditionally published book that was a brilliant idea, but I couldn't get through the author's monotone delivery.
I think I’m Carole’s clone. I’ve also performed on stage. I spent my 20s singing, dancing and acting. I did every school performance they’d let the fat kid take part in. But those things were appearing not as me. As me I can’t handle crowds and have other issues with travel and people. There’s was a thing last year at a celebratory lunch. I had to leave. It was my 15 year long service lunch in my current job. But I couldn’t stay for it. I’m also Carole’s clone because I loved The Martian and have Andy Weir’s next book on preorder. I read Fifty Shades because everyone else was and I was researching what the establishment considered viable erotica. It’s a great example of a badly written trad book. I know it didn’t start out as a trad book. It might have had all the commas in the right place but that doesn’t make it a good book, that just makes it grammatically correct. The critics couldn’t get past the first 100 pages because of the repetition. I read the lot to allow me an opinion. And my opinion is, I write better than that, but I’m a nobody.
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Nah, you know so much more than I do, I'm trailing along behind trying to pick up bits of information. We have similar views. And then I sit around wondering how you do all the things you do.Ugh, it's like my IT career, one of the reasons I left was I really couldn't be bothered with relearning everything every six months. I only went into IT because it was expected, it wasn't what I wanted. Now there's all this stuff attached to being an author that I don't want to do. Where is my lottery win?
Funny you should say that. In order to save a stonking £18 a month, I've recently stopped buying lottery tickets. They must run out soon if they haven't already. As soon as I cancelled them online I won small amounts on both, one of them twice. Tell me that's not rigged. I hadn't won anything in over a year.
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I actually won the money though Carole. I cancelled, I still had three or more weeks left on the subscription and it was like they were trying to entice me to stay, I won three times before my tickets ran out. That's not normal.I've never looked into Premium Bonds. I suppose for similar reasons of not having money to spare.
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I liked the lottery because it funded things for other people. Naturally I would have liked to win a jackpot. We got four or five numbers once. Thought we'd scored a huge win. Four or five numbers used to get people loads of money. We won less than £100, split three ways. Oh well.
Alex wrote: "I want to get Premium Bonds when I finally have some money to spare, but I need to get my driver's licence updated with my current address(I only have a provisional because I have no interest in dr..."I bought £100 worth of premium bonds 22 years ago and I've won just £25 in all those years. But there's always a chance I could win the million so I'll keep them going.
I run a lottery syndicate at work and we've won quite a bit here and there, but again, we're waiting for the BIG one.
So this has definitely been on my mind lately and I've just done two things to two different books to help my sales.For my book Opium Warfare I increased the kindle price from 2.99 to 3.99. I feel I should stop jipping myself and feel the book needs to be higher to see how it does.
Also I finally added links to my email list and something else on my last book. I felt it was necessary and may add it to all my books on kindle.
I increased the price of one of my books and has not affected sales at all. It also appears that Amazon are pushing that one more.I only increased it from $2.99 to $3.25. I've kept the UK price at £1.99 - I hardly sell any in the UK.
I keep asking where people advertise in the UK. Someone must know... Always assuming that will help.
I took the opportunity to increase Modified back up from 99p to £2.99 (it's an 86k word novel, not two pages of something someone nicked from Wikipedia.) It hasn't affected my sales either. I had none before, I have none now. (I'm so funny!)
https://www.indiesunlimited.com/2017/...