Mylius Fox said:
Amazon has every reason to love and embrace promotions, IMO, and no real reason to frown upon them.
Amazon doesn't love us, as Patty says, but it doesn't hate us, either. I think a good argument could be made that it doesn't care about us one way or the other. It does, however, care about sales, so yes, there really is no obvious reason to try to kill promos that would in the long run bring in more sales.
To borrow one of Patty's metaphors, Amazon is like a large ship that takes forever to change course. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that much of what we complain about is either efforts to stop scammers that develop too many false positives or outright malfunctions, neither of which get caught quickly enough. I think I've used this example before, but every so often, the automated mechanism that discounts paperbacks goes haywire. I've seen several instances of my paperbacks being sold below cost. Amazon has absolutely no rational reason to do this, and it cleared up a while ago, presumably when a live person actually noticed. That one glitch is obvious--but how many other things are glitching that we don't know about?
It's also important to keep in mind that totally innocent authors can have a successful book targeted by scammers to camouflage their own activities. We have no way of knowing when or how much that happens, which makes it doubly difficult to analyze what Amazon is really doing. It's no wonder so many conspiracy theories flourish. That will inevitably happen in the absence of sufficient data.
I used to like stacking promos, but I'm now shifting to a model that spreads them out, instead. It's true that I may lose some sales from not hitting a really high place on the lists, but at this point, that seems safer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the algos now seem friendlier to slower, steadier growth than to sudden spikes? Of course, that wouldn't help with a Bookbub (which I never get, anyway
) but perhaps cushioning the Boobkbub with some smaller promos beforehand to make the rank-boost less sudden.
I'm also taking the advice of someone on another forum and diversifying. I make a fair amount (from a prawn's point of view) in KU and made much less in my too earlier attempts at going wide, but I'm planning to take at least one series wide. At this point, that seems prudent.