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And The Hand Finally Closes Around Our Throat

20K views 220 replies 54 participants last post by  Corvid 
#1 ·
I noticed something odd about the release of my most recent book Bloodwing. So I went to investigate. If you'll recall my current plan relies on rapid releases, because that's the supposed key to wealth and riches on Jeff's yellow brick road of opportunity and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. Well, my plan lasted a total of sixteen days. In that time I published about 57,000 words of new fiction. Fortunately I was smart enough to hold on to my rights. I don't trust anyone anymore and I'm about to explain why.

Here's my first book, The Praetorian Imperative, published July 20th, on the 51st anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=B08DDFXT6R&ref=nb_sb_noss

I use this URL for a very specific purpose. This is the URL we normally use to check and see if our books are in the right categories. Over there on the left are the dropdowns for each store. Here's the link for Bloodwing

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=B08F6MQ473&ref=nb_sb_noss

Now then, when you compare these two pages, you will rapidly discover a problem. (I did this logged out to prevent any shenanigans). When you examine the drop down for "Kindle Store" you'll find that the second book appears in various browse categories. Meanwhile the first book (which has identical keywords) appears in none.

Funny how this automated system can produce two totally different sets of results for two books (with identical metadata that are even in the same SERIES) that are right next to each other in my bibliography, isn't it? If my book isn't in any browse categories, then it won't get a sales rank, now will it?

You'll then find the second book (published three days ago) is absent from either new releases list, while the first book (published sixteen days ago) is on page nine of the 30-day list.

This isn't the first time I've discovered this. During my last investigation, it turned out books wouldn't appear on the new releases list until they've had at least one sale and have a sales rank. This, of course, creates the old "keep the poor people in their place" paradox: you can't be on the list until your book sells, your book won't sell because it's not on the list.

If you will go back and re-examine the links in the URL for the second book Bloodwing, you'll see that the page insists it also appears on the 30-day and 90-day lists. Except it doesn't, despite the fact it was published 72 hours ago. At least it doesn't appear before its series mate, which went live sixteen days ago. I took the liberty of looking up the "hot 100 new releases" lists in all SEVEN browse categories. Only the first book appeared at #70 on the list for two-hour reads. Neither book appeared anywhere else.

This is the 30-day military science fiction new releases list:

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&bbn=158591011&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A154606011%2Cn%3A668010011%2Cn%3A158591011%2Cn%3A6157856011%2Cp_n_date%3A1249100011&dc&fst=as%3Aoff&qid=1596653602&rnid=158591011&ref=sr_nr_n_16

The #4 book on the list is called Direct Fire. Must be one hell of a book too. 55 5-star ratings. Top 1000 in the store. Only problem is it was published 15 days ago. The book right after it Forgotten Empire, in the number five slot, was published 27 days ago.

Both are in Kindle Unlimited too but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong (God knows nobody on this site is bashful) but this accounts for the very last avenue any author had on Amazon for organic visibility, absent some wild-ass random search result. If there is no organic visibility on Amazon, then it makes no difference at all how fast books are released, which means no matter what an author does, or how hard they work, they will get no sales on Amazon unless they bring their own readers. Amazon is not going to provide you with even one opportunity to put your book somewhere it might be seen unless you drop some cash on the table, even if you write two books a month.

In other words, you can't just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Getting favored treatment is mandatory. You cannot earn it. You must be chosen.

The other thing we can conclude from all of this is there are criteria for appearing on the "new releases" list that have nothing to do with whether your book is a new release. Actual new releases are locked out until those criteria are met (we have no official word on what those are) while the clock runs. Authors are left to guess, and what better use of an author's time than to speculate and experiment with "solve a puzzle, win a prize" on a site they don't control? It reminds me of people who believed there was such a thing as SEO while they fretted day and night trying to untangle the mixed signals they got from Google's search results. Then once they figured out how to get their sites visible, Google changed the rules and locked them all out again. These people were invited to believe that deplatforming is new. It isn't. De-platforming is something these sites have been perfecting ever since they put their plans in motion to centralize control and lock the people who built the Internet out. Yes, I sound like Jerry Maguire. You'll recall Jerry Maguire won.

Now I've sent an e-mail to KDP to inquire about this, and I'm sure I will get a very polite non-response. The bottom line here is that publishing a book and getting it in front of a buying audience has become a video game. It's us against Amazon, with our interlocutor doing everything in its trillion-dollar power to keep our books from getting to readers. Amazon wants exclusive rights. They want control over our pricing. They want to slap a $0.00 price on our book and whore it out for pennies while we send hundreds and thousands of fresh new customers to their site night and day. What do we get in exchange for all this? Practically nothing. Amazon takes what they like and then sits on our money for two months.

I'm not an elite. I'm not entitled to visibility or the privileges of being chosen. Neither of my books have sold at all, at least on Amazon. Did Amazon notify my "followers" (lol) I had two new books out? Apparently not. If you go to my book's pages you'll find Amazon isn't advertising anything on those pages. They're completely bare. See if you can guess why? Why would you advertise on a page where you know there will never be any traffic?

BY THE WAY:

I still have the stats from the last time I was stupid enough to spend money on AMS ads. I know exactly how many people visited the Amazon page for Dawnsong: The Last Skyblade over a four month period. You would be shocked to know how few people actually showed up on a site with millions and billions of customers.

I also now know with certainty why my LitRPG, non-fiction, romance and fantasy books didn't sell. Amazon just turned them off because I'm a military science fiction author. The robot doesn't understand anything else, so those hundreds of thousands of words I've written in other genres? Eh, toss 'em. The robot doesn't care about your hard work. All that matters is what number is in the database column labeled "morlock author type."

Amazon has decided that I shouldn't have a writing career. They have decided they are not interested in selling my books (unless I'm innovative enough to just hand them 30% of my gross in exchange for nothing) I was kicked out of a promising technology career in my mid-30s. I was kicked out and left to the streets when my uncle and felon grandmother stole my mother's house from me. Now I'm being kicked out of being an author after nine years of hard work. If I want a writing career, I'm going to have to build it myself, because when I try to work with others, I get lied to and cheated.

If you have a writing career in mind, and you are relying on Amazon, there are some things you should know: 1) You have a job 2) Your job is to send traffic to Amazon 3) You may receive an optional paycheck 4) You are subject to termination with or without cause 5) You work for a robot.

You are part of the new breed of corporate dream employee. You agree to occasional paychecks or no paychecks. You require no benefits or job security. You can be thrown out on the sidewalk on a whim. Your elite corporate paymaster controls the money and all your property. You will have a four-inch-wide leather strap tightly cinched around your neck before you are hauled up on the ever-accelerating treadmill to run for your life. When you collapse from exhaustion or die you'll be thrown in the trash to make room for the next slave.

I've written for Amazon for nine years and sold thousands of books. I still can't afford to go to the dentist.

Now go to this page:

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

See right there under the video where it says "reach millions of readers on Amazon?" (This page hasn't changed at all since I signed up for KDP in 2011)

What they fail to mention is you are responsible for the millions of readers.

Amazon isn't getting another minute of my time.
 
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#52 ·
Shane Lochlann Black said:
If this thread has accomplished nothing else, it has conclusively disproven the organic sales myth. It is no different than the "revenue share" model so many people attempt when collaborating on a creative project. "Join us, and when the product ships we'll all share the revenue!" It doesn't work, no matter how many times it's tried. If it did work, every major developer, producer and publisher on Earth would be using it because it would save them millions of dollars a month in payroll, insurance and taxes. They don't use it. Why? Because it doesn't work. The end.
Coincidentally, I have been trying rapid release at the same time and my results say different. Because I don't believe I can write longer works in the necessary time period, I have been trying the tactic using very short (5K words) erotic stories. In the last month I released 8 such stories under a brand new pen name, and they are ticking along quite nicely. I am not setting the world alight, but they are getting found and bought/borrowed (all in KU). It is certainly enough encouragement for me to be continuing with this project.
 
#54 ·
Organic sales are very much a real thing. The difficulty these days is that the market is so crowded with so many new books that organic sales rarely happen without a bit of a push first.

So, that push might come the way Amanda does it--via releasing 2-3 times a month and those releases are their own form of marketing. She still advertises too, but she doesn't need to do as much as those of us who release less often.

I release more like 2-4 months apart, so I advertise more to keep all my books visible. I started really small, and didn't scale up until my ads were working and profitable. Running ads should make you money.

The organic piece comes in from the results of the paid piece......so the AMS/FB sales lift my books rank and visibility in the store. That then generates organic sales. Especially if you get into a top 100 list--whether a category or overall--people look at those lists and buy off them.
 
#55 ·
J. Tanner said:
I haven't read the book you linked, but I listen to 6 Figure Authors and they don't make the claim you're attributing to them. They advertise rapid release, and advocate doing so. They never said it results in organic traffic on Amazon. They said it rapid release allows for better conversion on early books in the series, and lower advertising costs overall vs spreading releases out. This is very different from your claim.
6 Figure authors' hosts are a LOT more nuanced than "just publish a ton of books."

They are quick to point out that rapid release can be one element of a strategy to building a successful career -- along with lots of other things -- mailing lists, advertising, promotions on sites and many other things. They are very open about what they do and they bring on a variety of guests who have found many different approaches that work for them.

There is no magic bullet to this. There are many different strategies people take and you can't just copy what someone else does and expect it to work because everyone handles details differently.
 
#56 ·
Shane Lochlann Black said:
I never said I was owed anything. I buy my readers. Just like you do.
Except you act like you're owed something over and over again. You've said many times that you're good at advertising. That means you shouldn't have a problem starting small and scaling up. My normal month is 3% ad spend of gross. I make a very good living. It takes time to build but it's certainly not impossible.
 
#58 ·
Amanda M. Lee said:
Except you act like you're owed something over and over again. You've said many times that you're good at advertising. That means you shouldn't have a problem starting small and scaling up. My normal month is 3% ad spend of gross. I make a very good living. It takes time to build but it's certainly not impossible.
The problem with the OP is that he would rather shout to kboards about what he's owed and make declarative statements that he's proven something!

Of course he's right! Rapid releases don't work! Organic sales are dead! You have to buy readers!

It's that last I take issue with. You're not buying readers. You're paying for visibility in an increasingly crowded marketplace. If you can compete, people WILL buy your books. If not...

Maybe it just didn't work for him. Enough people have proven rapid release DOES work. Advertising CAN get visibility and a good ROI when done right. Maybe it didn't work for him because his books didn't appeal to readers, or the covers didn't work, or the blurbs were off. The market has matured. What worked when I started doesn't work as well, but that doesn't mean it can't. I've seen plenty of people break out recently, so I know it can and does still happen. Getting mad at your distributor because they aren't doing what you want is a fool's game and might be time better spent writing the next book.

If you want to earn a living at this, Amazon isn't your enemy. That doesn't mean they have to be your friend, but you have to work within the system. Or not. In indie publishing, it's your choice. Go and sell on your website. I'm sure your visibility will drive plenty of sales there.
 
#60 ·
Go and sell on your website. I'm sure your visibility will drive plenty of sales there.
My visibility on my site and my visibility on Amazon are IDENTICAL. Why? They both rely on exactly the same two things: my mailing list and my ads.

That's the entire point of this discussion. You insist there is some magical advantage to being on Amazon and that somehow, someday visibility there will rocket into the sky while we all sing. All I have to do is publish a new book every morning at 9:30AM Pacific Time.

Except visibility never rockets into the sky. It relies on mailing list and ads, and it will always rely on mailing list and ads no matter how much you wish it were otherwise.

You BUY your readers?
Yes. I BUY MY READERS. It's called advertising. We spend a quarter-trillion a year on it in the U.S. If you advertise you are buying readers too.

That's very insulting and abusive.
So are the bills I have to pay every month.
 
#61 ·
Shane Lochlann Black said:
That's the entire point of this discussion. You insist there is some magical advantage to being on Amazon and that somehow, someday visibility there will rocket into the sky while we all sing. All I have to do is publish a new book every morning at 9:30AM Pacific Time.

Except visibility never rockets into the sky. It relies on mailing list and ads, and it will always rely on mailing list and ads no matter how much you wish it were otherwise.
I could name you countless authors off the top of my head for whom that is not true, but you would dismiss others' experience as you have all along. It is not fairy dust. It is word of mouth

Just because something does not work for you, it does not logically follow that it works for nobody.

There are countless factors to success. The most important is the book. One possibility a rational person needs to look at is: if I'm doing all the right things and am getting NO organic sales, maybe my product is lacking.

That requires looking inward at your lack of success instead of blaming somebody and everybody else. You will never win by wallowing in anger at others. You only have a chance if you take a long hard look at what you, personal you, can do differently.

Your reviews are poor. Check your product.
 
#62 ·
Shane Lochlann Black said:
My visibility on my site and my visibility on Amazon are IDENTICAL. Why? They both rely on exactly the same two things: my mailing list and my ads.

That's the entire point of this discussion. You insist there is some magical advantage to being on Amazon and that somehow, someday visibility there will rocket into the sky while we all sing. All I have to do is publish a new book every morning at 9:30AM Pacific Time.

Except visibility never rockets into the sky. It relies on mailing list and ads, and it will always rely on mailing list and ads no matter how much you wish it were otherwise.
Except it's not. Don't pretend you get the same number of visitors as Amazon. You can advertise using AMS on it to get visibility of readers ALREADY ON THE SITE to try your book. Once there, it's on the product to perform. I see several issues with the product that would turn away buyers, and that's with a quick glance through your author page.

Indie publishing is a long way past amateur hour. You have to look professional to sell. That means quality covers, compelling blurb, and a good book. All of that information is already on kboards.
 
#63 ·
Don't pretend you get the same number of visitors as Amazon.
Oh I don't have to pretend. I know exactly how many visits my book pages get on Amazon and I know exactly how many visits they get on my site. See if you can guess which has more? I'll give you a hint: it's not Amazon.

You can advertise using AMS on it to get visibility of readers ALREADY ON THE SITE to try your book.
I can advertise to my mailing list for free. I can add a new subscriber to my mailing list for pennies and then send them newsletters forever for free. Why would I use AMS?
 
#65 ·
Your reviews are poor. Check your product.
I see several issues with the product that would turn away buyers, and that's with a quick glance through your author page.
I'm writing this reply for all the other authors out there lurking and following this thread. I want you to read what I'm about to write very carefully because it is important to you and your career. Don't ever respond to a critic. This is doubly true if they are a competing author.

You see, people are trained through life to attack others where they think they are weakest. They are trained to believe that creative people are most vulnerable with regard to their confidence. They are trained to try and hurt other people's feelings with as much cruelty as they can muster. They know creative people are worried others will dislike their work, so that's where they focus their attacks. Anyone who attended a public school in the United States recognizes a bully.

If you want examples of this, just read my threads. People take my declarative statements as personal challenges. They absolutely refuse to tolerate someone stating their opinion and standing by it. They accuse me of being angry and bitter and call me a failure. No doubt they will soon be accusing me of constitutional conspiracy theories and being against the whales or some other unhinged nonsense.

As an author, you have to be prepared for this and understand a very important concept: Just because one person thinks your book sucks doesn't make it true. When compared with the thousands and thousands of people who bought the book and the hundreds of people who gave it good reviews, the handful of people who claim there is something terribly wrong with it shrinks to insignificance. When you have read-through rates between 60% and 90% there's nothing wrong with your writing.

I have a superpower that only a tiny minority of people on Earth have. I can sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and write a story total strangers in foreign countries will pay money to read. Good Major League pitchers outnumber people like me. Astronauts outnumber people like me.

You have that power too.

Never respond to a critic. You'll notice the most vocal critics in this thread do not link their books. They carefully hide their own work but have no problem lashing out at other authors because they think that will draw attention away from the fact their arguments are weak and their work is probably not up to par either. They claim to have sold umpty zillions of books yet refuse to stand by those titles in public, which is bizarre, but it's not my responsibility to manage their image.

Understand this. Listen to Uncle Shane: I've been selling on the Internet since Jeff Bezos was working out of his living room. I hand coded my first web site when Mark Zuckerberg was in fifth grade:

There is nothing wrong with your writing. There is nothing wrong with your work. If it came from you, it's good enough.
 
#67 ·
If you want to know how many people visited a web page, take your total unit sales and divide by your conversion rate.

This is information we should already have, because if we knew what our traffic and conversion rates were we could, oh, I don't know, IMPROVE THEM, which would make us and Amazon more money, but then again making new books visible would make Amazon more money too and that doesn't happen either.
 
#68 ·
Shane Lochlann Black said:
If you want examples of this, just read my threads. People take my declarative statements as personal challenges. They absolutely refuse to tolerate someone stating their opinion and standing by it. They accuse me of being angry and bitter and call me a failure. No doubt they will soon be accusing me of constitutional conspiracy theories and being against the whales or some other unhinged nonsense.

As an author, you have to be prepared for this and understand a very important concept: Just because one person thinks your book sucks doesn't make it true. When compared with the thousands and thousands of people who bought the book and the hundreds of people who gave it good reviews, the handful of people who claim there is something terribly wrong with it shrinks to insignificance.

I have a superpower that only a tiny minority of people on Earth have. I can sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and write a story total strangers in foreign countries will pay money to read. Good Major League pitchers outnumber people like me. Astronauts outnumber people like me.
Once again, I think you're missing the point. Despite your insistence of proving your points, your declarative statements of fact are really just opinion, and the opinion of someone who comes across as angry and upset with your publishing reality. If that's not the case, then I'd suggest rereading the tone of your messages. As an author, you want to get your point across clearly. If you're not upset with your publishing performance, then so be it. My point about looking at your author page can be expounded up as this: your covers - excluding your sci-fi - look amateur. I didn't read your blurbs, look at your review, or even do the look inside. If I'm a casual reader, and that was what I saw, I would move on. Regarding the rest, if you're not looking at improving the product, then you're missing an opportunity.

As to your other argument regarding your newsletter costing pennies per subscriber, that's great. You're talking about readers and visibility. As a publisher (and once your book is released into the wild, you're no longer an author but a publisher) you need eyes on the product, and that involves some level of marketing. If you have 1000s of hungry readers who will scoop up your next book and drive you up the rankings like Amanda, you don't need to advertise as much. If you don't, then you need to find visibility somehow. That involves advertising where the readers are. Amazon is the largest bookstore. It's where the readers are, not all on your newsletter. Advertise there to get new readers, have something interesting to read, convince them to subscribe to your newsletter through a strong call to action, and rinse and repeat.
 
#69 ·
Shane Lochlann Black said:
Yes. I BUY MY READERS. It's called advertising. We spend a quarter-trillion a year on it in the U.S. If you advertise you are buying readers too.
When you buy advertising, you are buying an *opportunity* to *pitch* your books to readers. Buying something implies a guaranteed return for money. It also implies a product, and individual humans with self-will are not a product. Honestly, I think the tendency of advertisers to treat consumers as blind, stupid sheep who'll do whatever they're told is incredibly condescending, not to mention outright dehumanizing. Readers deserve more of your respect than that.
 
#71 ·
Kathy Dee said:
Coincidentally, I have been trying rapid release at the same time and my results say different. Because I don't believe I can write longer works in the necessary time period, I have been trying the tactic using very short (5K words) erotic stories. In the last month I released 8 such stories under a brand new pen name, and they are ticking along quite nicely. I am not setting the world alight, but they are getting found and bought/borrowed (all in KU). It is certainly enough encouragement for me to be continuing with this project.
Erotica and a few other genres seem to be outliers, where the rapid release short thing can work for people. Not just you, but I've seen some testimonies on the erotica authors' reddit that imply the same. Of course, you can't use AMS or other forms of marketing that are available to the more tame genres unless you lie, and tell the Zon that it's not really erotica -- at least from what I understand.
 
#72 ·
"I also now know with certainty why my LitRPG, non-fiction, romance and fantasy books didn't sell. Amazon just turned them off because I'm a military science fiction author. The robot doesn't understand anything else, so those hundreds of thousands of words I've written in other genres? Eh, toss 'em. The robot doesn't care about your hard work."

That's not true, you can target a separate AMS ad for each one of your books, or set of books in a specific genre. You train the algorithm yourself by supplying your own keywords, adding the ones they suggest that are relevant, and then curating the keyword list as you monitor the ads' performance. I write in more than one genre myself, for example, action-adventure and creature-feature thrillers, and they are both ranked in their respective sub-categories, even without AMS ads. For me, the ads are a way to keep the books selling after the 6-month or so mark, where my sales usually start to taper. But they've always been visible for the first few months, and that's mostly organic, without ads.
 
#73 ·
"Rapid release" doesn't necessarily mean the books were written quickly, only that they were released quickly. The author could have spent 3 years writing a trilogy, only instead of releasing book 1 after the first year, then writing #2 and releasing it after the 2nd year, etc, they wait until all 3 are done (meaning each is drafted, second-drafted, edited, proofed, beta-read, formatted, covers designed for all formats, pre-order marketing, etc.) , and then release them all one or two months apart according to a preset rapid release schedule. Sure, it may look to the outside world like, "Wow, how is this author putting so many books out so fast?" but it's because they were previously written and released according to a plan. Some authors might actually write fast in order to maintain a rapid release schedule, but if quality is being traded for a quicker release time, that's likely not sustainable.
 
#74 ·
I have been trying the tactic using very short (5K words) erotic stories.
Just wanted to point out that for erotica, rapid release -- or actually continual releases -- are how it's done. If you aren't there already, the Reddit forum erotica authors is a good one to hang out at.

As to the main thrust of this thread, it seems to be a tempest in a teapot. Most of us understand that mailing lists and ads are what's done, that organic growth is good, but it's not really something you can push, unlike ads. Amazon doesn't owe us anything. Nor does Kobo, Apple, B&N or wherever. We're the publisher, we're responsible for doing what it takes to sell books.
 
#75 ·
Shane Lochlann Black said:
This isn't the first time I've discovered this. During my last investigation, it turned out books wouldn't appear on the new releases list until they've had at least one sale and have a sales rank. This, of course, creates the old "keep the poor people in their place" paradox: you can't be on the list until your book sells, your book won't sell because it's not on the list.
This is working as intended. Publishing doesn't guarantee eyeballs and *never has*. I mean, back in the early days, say pre-2014, it was possible to toss something up on Amazon and make some early, quick sales. But that faded quickly as more books became available and the number of successful authors grew. Now every new book is competing with all the other six million Kindle books out there. Organic sales were dead YEARS ago. Sort of.

Because where you still see organic sales happen in very large numbers is after a book begins selling well. For example, I made about $60k last year on one release. Total ad spend was about $200. I 'primed the pump' by hitting not only my email list, but also by getting about a half dozen author friends to send to their list as well. In total those email lists were well over 50,000 people. I made a bunch of sales in that first week, which led to Amazon sending out info about the release to some of their readers. It sold there, too. This in turn leads Amazon to send the news to even MORE readers.

That's how organic sales on Amazon work. It's how they have worked for like, half a decade or so now. You have to get enough sales for Amazon's computer systems to take note and send emails to readers. We do this by building our lists, networking to do email swaps with other authors, and running ads.

Both are in Kindle Unlimited too but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
Absolutely NOT a coincidence. KU books earn more than twice what non-KU books earn, on average. Counting just Amazon sales, KU books earn more than three times as much as non-KU books. KU is an enormously powerful tool for visibility on Amazon, as each borrow counts as a sale for purposes of visibility, rank, etc.

This has been the case, again, for years. KU is about 15% of the English language ebook market, globally. Non-KU Kindle is about 70%. Everyone else combined is about 15%. By entering KU, you lose the 'wide' 15% and gain the KU 15% plus the boost in Kindle sales granted by KU borrows. By going 'wide' you gain the 15% of the market represented by non-Amazon readers, but lose access to the 15% of the market that is KU readers (who buy SOME books sometimes, from favorite authors or nonfiction they really need, but don't discover new writers unless they're in KU). However, going wide means more balance in overall sales, so that massive changes to one platform don't smoosh your career.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong (God knows nobody on this site is bashful) but this accounts for the very last avenue any author had on Amazon for organic visibility, absent some wild-ass random search result. If there is no organic visibility on Amazon, then it makes no difference at all how fast books are released, which means no matter what an author does, or how hard they work, they will get no sales on Amazon unless they bring their own readers. Amazon is not going to provide you with even one opportunity to put your book somewhere it might be seen unless you drop some cash on the table, even if you write two books a month.

In other words, you can't just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Getting favored treatment is mandatory. You cannot earn it. You must be chosen.
I don't understand your rationale here. It's absolutely possible to 'bootstrap' success in publishing. Here's the thing: nobody is getting favored treatment. (Well, very few authors are, anyway). Most success is obtained through a combination of writing a lot of books people want to read and marketing them well.

You 'bootstrap' success on Amazon by:
- Write lots of books people want to read, put excellent covers on them, and write stunning descriptions for the books.
- Using Bookfunnel and other sources to get lots of email subscribers. I have 16k. I want to hit 20k this year, and won't stop pushing for more. Ever. Eventually I plan to crack 100k subscribers.
- Network with other authors in your genre and coordinate email list swaps for your releases. This is an exceptionally powerful marketing tool.
- Learn to run FB, BB, and AMS ads.

The people who write good books and market them well consistently, for long enough, succeed.
The people who don't succeed are either not writing good books people want to read, or they are not marketing them well enough, or both.

I still have the stats from the last time I was stupid enough to spend money on AMS ads. I know exactly how many people visited the Amazon page for Dawnsong: The Last Skyblade over a four month period. You would be shocked to know how few people actually showed up on a site with millions and billions of customers.
If AMS ads are not getting impressions, it's because you are either a) not using enough keywords (they let you have 1000 per ad for a reason) or b) not bidding high enough to compete with other bidders. Or both. If you are choosing high-competition keywords and bidding just 25c, say, you're barely going to get any impressions. Same keywords, $1 bid, and you'll see the impressions skyrocket. Obviously you can't run $1 a click ads on every book out there! :) This is one reason why series are so much easier to sell.

I also now know with certainty why my LitRPG, non-fiction, romance and fantasy books didn't sell. Amazon just turned them off because I'm a military science fiction author. The robot doesn't understand anything else, so those hundreds of thousands of words I've written in other genres? Eh, toss 'em. The robot doesn't care about your hard work. All that matters is what number is in the database column labeled "morlock author type."
This is absolutely not true. I have had bestselling books across urban fantasy, LitRPG, and assorted SF sub-genres. Amazon WILL tend to market your latest book to your existing readers, so some level of genre-focus definitely helps. If you've been writing a ton of SF, then roll out an epic fantasy novel, the computer is going to send out notices to a bunch of SF readers. Some of whom will buy it. Then Amazon will assume SF readers are the target market for this book and start emailing random SF readers, who will not be interested, not buy, and Amazon will stop sending emails.

This is why people talk so much about not polluting your also-boughts. The first 50-100 or so sales you make should ideally be readers from the target market for that book. Sometimes this will mean taking out an ad or running a few email list swaps with authors in the new genre.

Bottom line?

Our success or failure in this business is up to us. That's one of the best - and worst - things about being an indie. Best, because it means that by working hard and smart, we can achieve amazing things. Worst, because it means if we fail at something, there's literally no one else to blame except ourselves.
 
#76 ·
KevinMcLaughlin said:
Our success or failure in this business is up to us. That's one of the best - and worst - things about being an indie. Best, because it means that by working hard and smart, we can achieve amazing things. Worst, because it means if we fail at something, there's literally no one else to blame except ourselves.
To me, this line encapsulates the mindset of a successful entrepreneur in any field. You either make it work or you don't. You can't externalize and blame outside forces for your failures. You need to take a hard look at yourself and figure out what needs to change. If you can't do that, you're probably best off working a 9-5 for someone else instead.
 
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