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Amazon is intermittently admitting to errors in it's KU page reporting.

401K views 3K replies 323 participants last post by  Jan Hurst-Nicholson 
#1 ·
TL;DR - If you have books enrolled in KDP Select and you think your reported page reads have been unusually low recently, you should send an email to ecr-support@amazon.com, kdp-support@amazon.com, and jeff@amazon.com. Provide them with data and if your numbers don't look right, be firm. You might get results that are worth your time. Others have.

For the past few weeks dozens of authors have been reporting that their page read counts on new releases have been...off. Not off by ten percent, but by 50-95%. These are for consistent releases with expected patterns of performance (as expected as you can be in this industry). I don't want this discussion to get bogged down in conjecture about bad books, bad promos, etc. Sales numbers and sales ranks are as expected, but page reads are drastically lower.

As authors have started to come together in their genre-focused forums and support groups, they started to compare their data and take action. Emails began to fly, initially meeting with a stalwart wall of "We looked into your pages read and can confirm that they are accurate." Most of us took that and gave up. But one didn't. They insisted on getting someone on the phone and elevating their issue up the chain.

After thirty minutes on the phone, insisting something wasn't right, something kind of miraculous happened: On Friday Sept 30, Amazon admitted that there's a problem on their end and that they have to get their legal team involved. Since then, a handful of authors have gotten emails stating that a "small number of pages" were erroneously left out of their reports and were now being credited. One author saw their September page total go up by a little over 1,000 KENP and another saw it go up by over 30,000 KENP.

But so far, those small handful of responses are the only thing we've gotten. Interestingly enough, the author who first broke through the Amazon shieldwall and got the admission that there was something wrong hasn't received an email about additional page credit yet. In fact, concurrent with these developments this weekend, Amazon was still emailing authors with massively suppressed page reads that everything was fine.

Just to make a few points clear: the pool of authors who have noticed things aren't right includes those with fewer than five books under their belt and NYT bestselling authors with over 100 books who regularly break into the top 100 or top 50. This issue does not seem to be system-wide: it's only affecting new releases (perhaps since July, but mostly those published in September). These are books which are selling well, ranking well, but the reported pages are vastly lower.

I had a promo push on September 23. The book sold 80 copies and had 100 pages read. The prior books in the series had about the same sales but 20 times the page reads on their promo day.
I had a promo push on September 30. The book sold 118 copies and had 300 pages read. This should have been 10-15 times higher based on prior series releases.

If you recently published and your page reads look off, you should reach out to Amazon and let them know. The worst case scenario (unless you're me) is that they tell you that everything is fine and you're right back where you started. We're in a weekend, and it's not clear what will happen next week. But Amazon reaching out to individual authors seems to indicate that only the squeaky wheels are getting grease.
 
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#403 ·
I've got a multi-author bundle getting sales that hasn't had a single page read reported since sept 24.

That 2% correction thingy that put money into our September bucket- I've since had some removed like Becca has.

Anyone else with the paperback options on their dash that has every unpublished title on their dash missing a cover? 
 
#405 ·
Going Incognito said:
I've got a multi-author bundle getting sales that hasn't had a single page read reported since sept 24.

That 2% correction thingy that put money into our September bucket- I've since had some removed like Becca has.

Anyone else with the paperback options on their dash that has every unpublished title on their dash missing a cover?
Yes, my unpublished work is missing a cover now, which is fine with me.
 
#406 ·
I republished an unpublished story recently and the cover (missing on the dashboard) went right back up. Just thought I'd add that to the mix...
 
#408 ·
Now I imagine those same Amazon people all screaming "Hold on for a damn minute, will you!!" .....frickin authors just can't quit their bitchin!.  :mad:

So we had Prime Reading, the paperback dashboard thing, and the page-flip addition, all at once. Plus a possible algo change.

"Who's the dumbass that said 'Let's do it all at once!' ???

-fingers point-

"Great idea, Carl!"
 
#410 ·
I just got this email back from them. I contacted them a few days ago and this was their reply. Sounds like they are working on it:

“We have completed our monthly audit of September pages-read data. We regularly monitor pages-read systems for accuracy with a particular focus on making sure we have correctly filtered out fraudulent reading activity, while including all legitimate customer behavior. Total audit adjustments for the month were an increase of roughly 2% of pages read (though the amount will vary from author to author). We are currently updating reports and changes should be visible within the next day.

We expect the September fund to increase again compared to August and will release the new figure by mid-month as usual.

Thanks for the recent questions from some authors about how Page Flip is being used by customers and its possible impact to pages read. Page Flip is designed to make it easy to explore and navigate in books while automatically saving your place, and that is how customers are using it.  We checked for effects on pages read before launching Page Flip, and investigated it again to re-confirm that there is no impact. We do not see any material reading volume happening within this feature, but we will continue to monitor it closely.”

 
#412 ·
I got the "Thank you for this information" email too, like a lot of other people up-thread.

A couple of data points:

- A fan contacted me after reading my blog post, said she was going to read Island of Glass, and contacted me again when she was done. Those pages registered, but she didn't use page flip mode.

- The rankings of my books have all gone belly-up -- but strangely enough, when I checked yesterday, Yseult had climbed back up from 200,000+ to around 70,000 -- after 20 pages read. Huh? That definitely looks like the page-flip problem to me.

- My sales for everything have tanked, not just older books. I personally think that whatever algorithm they are using now factors in how prawny an author is to start with. :/
 
#413 ·
Randall Wood said:
Now I imagine those same Amazon people all screaming "Hold on for a damn minute, will you!!" .....frickin authors just can't quit their b*tchin!. :mad:

So we had Prime Reading, the paperback dashboard thing, and the page-flip addition, all at once. Plus a possible algo change.

"Who's the dumbass that said 'Let's do it all at once!' ???

-fingers point-

"Great idea, Carl!"
That made me literally lol, thank you.

And thanks, Carl! *to be read in the 'Thanks, Obama!' voice.*
 
#415 ·
I can't honestly tell if my page reads are off or not but what I have noticed is my sales have disappeared. The last sale I had was 4 days ago and since I'm running Facebook ads I have a pretty good idea of my sales conversion per ad click. Has anyone else noticed a complete drop off of sales these past few days?
 
#416 ·
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Content removed due to new owners; VerticalScope Inc. TOS Change of 2018. I received no notification of a change to TOS, was never asked to agree to their data mining or sharing of my information, including sales of my information and ownership of my posts, intellectual rights, etc, and I do not agree to the terms.

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#417 ·
I've been following this thread for quite a while now, and the drop in page reads issue seems to be very odd, and perplexing. Some have seized on the Page-Flip being buggy as the possible reason but I am not sure that it isn't just a another bug in the overall system.

The key thing I have noticed is that it is not too easy to tell if your page-reads are decreasing normally or it is a systemic error caused by Amazon somehow intentional (algorithm changes) or unintentional (just incorrect lower counts due to errors). As the problem orginally seemed to be noticed by more people as occuring at some timeframe within Sept. and Amazon seeming to acknowledge via tech support that issues in that timeframe were legitimate; I decided to focus my analysis on this snapshot in time. (despite seeing some other zero day patterns in a smaller way appearing in early August too).

I publish one author's group of over 50+ titles of which 90% are in Select. Using the Sales Dashboard I looked at each of those titles KENP read for 90 days view to see if I could see any specific patterns. At first it was almost random or inconclusive, and I ended up discarding all the bottom 25% as slow sellers anyways. Of the rest I then began to see some chunks of time in September that had recurring zero days. Looking at the previous 90 days I also discarded a few more that had normally occuring dry spells of 3 or more zero days in the previous 60 days. That left about 12 titles that seemed to have a pattern of 3 or more days in a row (or more) - this data was transferred to a spreadsheet so I could see the overlaps. (image below - purple boxes are zero pages day for that title)

What I noticed was a set of 'chunks' where numerous titles all had zero pages read, 9/02-9/07, 9/08-9/12, 9/12-9/22 or 23. To me this really feels like an error of some sort due to a reporting code change (perhaps on the backend), that effected some titles groups as opposed to others. You can see the earliest chunk on my graph is only effecting one series. Then maybe even a attempted fix that then affected other titles than the earlier problems. Only a theory...but maybe others could look for similar time 'chunks' of zero page days reported too. And, see if like me, older titles had longer zero day drought periods which could point to a algo change favoring newer releases.

Would be great if we could get DataGuy to jump in with some more statistical analysis on this mystery for us...Hugh tell us if your Sept. page counts are looking wonky at all...inquiring minds want to know. :)

 
#418 ·
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Content removed due to new owners; VerticalScope Inc. TOS Change of 2018. I received no notification of a change to TOS, was never asked to agree to their data mining or sharing of my information, including sales of my information and ownership of my posts, intellectual rights, etc, and I do not agree to the terms.

************************************************************************************************
 
#419 ·
The problem isn't page flip.

1. The feature is only available to a limited subset of our readers. Older Kindle devices that make up a big chunk of the user base haven't had firmware updates issued that would allow it at all. Not all users with newer hardware or the Kindle app on their iPhone/iPad or Android devices have run the updates needed to get the new feature. And it's not available at all on the PC reader software. That leaves a very substantial portion of our readers who don't have access to it.

2. A lot of the users who have access to the feature probably don't know about it

3. Most people reading fiction aren't going to use it at all. It's really not particularly useful if you're reading a short story or novel. Yes, there are a small number of cases where it can be, but for the most part people aren't going to be using page flip to read entire novels.

While we may be losing some tiny fraction of page reads to people using it, especially if your book is non-fiction, it doesn't make any sense to blame the sudden massive drop-off in page reads on it.
 
#420 ·
Ren Benton said:
I updated an old book to add the description of my new book to the back matter. It's now 29 KENP shorter.

Since the beginning of September, I've seen high-performance AMS ads die, returns double, and sales and KU cut in half. I hope someone is benefiting from whatever they did while I change every plan I had for the next year to reflect the new reality.
This wasn't KENP. It's the page count on the book listing page. I think KENP did go down, but I don't remember what it was for sure. :(
 
#421 ·
Oh for frack's sake. I just did a quick run through my bookshelf and four of my six books dropped 5 pages each in terms of KENP length recently without my uploading any changes.  It's less than 1%, granted, but still.  First the KU crap over the last few weeks (or I suspect, months... my last two releases haven't behaved normally), and now they're nickel and diming on KENP.  Has the almighty Zon figured out its current KU business model is too much of a loss leader?
 
#422 ·
Eric Thomson said:
Oh for frack's sake. I just did a quick run through my bookshelf and four of my six books dropped 5 pages each in terms of KENP length recently without my uploading any changes. It's less than 1%, granted, but still. First the KU crap over the last few weeks (or I suspect, months... my last two releases haven't behaved normally), and now they're nickel and diming on KENP. Has the almighty Zon figured out its current KU business model is too much of a loss leader?
What about page length on the product pages? Any difference there?
 
#425 ·
KelliWolfe said:
The problem isn't page flip.

1. The feature is only available to a limited subset of our readers. Older Kindle devices that make up a big chunk of the user base haven't had firmware updates issued that would allow it at all. Not all users with newer hardware or the Kindle app on their iPhone/iPad or Android devices have run the updates needed to get the new feature. And it's not available at all on the PC reader software. That leaves a very substantial portion of our readers who don't have access to it.

2. A lot of the users who have access to the feature probably don't know about it

3. Most people reading fiction aren't going to use it at all. It's really not particularly useful if you're reading a short story or novel. Yes, there are a small number of cases where it can be, but for the most part people aren't going to be using page flip to read entire novels.

While we may be losing some tiny fraction of page reads to people using it, especially if your book is non-fiction, it doesn't make any sense to blame the sudden massive drop-off in page reads on it.
You may be right, but I just checked every one of my 40+ books. Page flip is enabled on all of them.
 
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