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.
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.