Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

 

I hope someone can verify this and then get something done or just give it some light.

I am so tired of having my authors banned from amazon, notifications like this dissapearing for select authors, etc.. it is the definition of anti-competitive behavior and really irks me. Especially since the majority of the authors books that dissapeared are in KDP, which means that you can't find them anywhere else but on amazon. Amazon still gets their money from my subscription but authors I'm interested in are banned or pushed into the background and harder to find, while publishing house authors that aren't in KDP are promoted. Just GRRRRR!!!! I really like the authors from the publishing houses that show up in my list as they are ones I selected to be shown their books when publshed but the current situation makes me want to boycott their books because of it. That is an emotional reaction I know and they are not responsible for amazons actions but still GRRRR!!! You can say why don't you just go check your authors once in a while to see if they published something new or sign up for their email lists. I follow over a 1000 authors.. I can't even remember who all they are. Only ones I remember consistently are the rock stars that put out a book every month or two.. if you are an author that only gets out a book every year or two then I will never remember to check.

This issue has serious consequences for 90% of the authors out there that are on amazon.

 

I know this is not the most convenient option for you, but some indie authors have their own newsletter that readers can subscribe to, in order to be notified when the author releases a new book. It's not as convenient, in that you have to sign up for each one separately, but it might be an option if you're interested.

 

Yep. I do this with a few authors but its not a good solution. See my last post
. 1000+ authors.. I would need a dedicated email address to not overwhelm my email. Some authors only do notifications on release of a new book and thats ok. However some do weekly blurbs.. it would be to much. I use authoralarms.com for notifications and it most of the time works the best for me except those times amazon blocks them or changes how they are allowed to scrape Metadata for new books. The follow feature on Amazon is more straight forward when they actually let it work.

 

Hmm, yeah thanks for mentioning this. I have no idea what to do about it, but I'm very sure I would have never known if you didn't say it. Seriously, thanks

 

You follow over a thousand authors? Really?!

 

I read an average of 350 to 400 books a year. My base reading speed is over 600 words a minute. I read a 10000 page book last week felt like it took forever since it took me just over a week to read one book

I have a physical library with over 10000 books in it and a digital one that is much larger. Chronic packrat collector

 

Thank you for bringing this up. I'm crossing my fingers this is just a glitch.

 

Thanks for bringing it up. Very disturbing, though at the same time I can't say that I'm really surprised

 

What's betting it's been so successful that they've decided to make money from it by having trad publishers pay for their books' covers to be visible as part of their marketing packages that they sell to trad publishers and not available to us lesser mortals.

It's the same with hidden categories. You can have 10 to help with visibility but many times Amazon only auto generate 5 or so. There is a site you can check your categories that are hidden so you can develop a list to have them added to make it up to 10, and in fairness to them they do it very quickly. I've just updated mine on 9 books. I searched some trad published books (Lee Child). In the UK and on one of his books he had 23 category strings.

No wonder it's an uphill struggle unless you have deep pockets for sponsored ads.

We were useful for them when trad-publishers kicked back against them in the early days for them to build a catalogue and sell kindles to disrupt the market. Now trad-publishers are onboard, they don't really need us.

Do you get notifications of new releases from indie authors?

 

Feels like indie authors could/should do a class action...

 

It makes me wonder... If this authoralarms site is effective, maybe one solution would be for us indie authors to work with them directly? Have some sort of form where we can submit our new releases to them directly. Maybe we should reach out to them, see if something like this could be set up?

 

The power of authoralarms.com is that readers submit authors they are following and get a daily email if any authors they submitted publish a book on that day. I typically get an email with 2 to 8 new books published each day. I don't think authors submitting stuff would work. Also they only scrape stuff from Amazon. Im am pretty sure that in the future amazin will block them totally. I have seen them and amazon go through some rough spots where it was obvious that amazon has limited what they were displaying. They turned off a major feature that I like just a few months ago and their emails on each book have a notice that they are no longer allowed to show the text blurb with the cover image and title of books included

 

I'm pretty sure authors alarms makes money on the click through as an amazon associate marketing thing. I have found over the years that amazon hates successful ones that make a lot of money. It really is weird as the more successful they are the more it drives sales but amazon doesn't seem to like paying even if it is boosting their bottom line. I got kicked out years ago for mysterious to me reasons .. I didn't even make that much money with my links for products that I reviewed. Just stuff I had used and really liked. Maybe 20 or 30 a year... i only made100 dollars a year or so. But it seems to be a theme with Amazon as the neurotic evil empire. Recently I read that they were even stealing delivery drivers tips and using that money to apply to the drivers base pay so that they didn't have to pay as much. It is really incomprehensible to me the mindset of the person or persons that would come up with some of this stuff.

 

You could also just follow authors at BookBub, plus Bookbub sends out new releases to followers and authors can see their followers. It's much more transparent.

 

Not everyone is on BookBub, though.

 

to test this i just followed two authors known to me as indies who've never had trad deals

of course you can still follow indie authors

trust but verify

 

Okay, I just tested as well by adding an indie author who i know has never been trad published.

All her books appeared including her Jan '21 release, right at the top.

OP, maybe it really was a glitch that's been fixed? Or they are split testing something like they love to do.

 

saw where the last person had stuff show up in his when adding author.

I just looked at my list and i cant even find most of my indie authors in the selection of authors I made now. If I go to the amazon page for all my indie authors I can think about they still show me following them. Definitely no books from them showing up. I suppose I could now re add them and see if they start showing up again. kinda painful for me though. I have no clue who half of the authors I have added are now. lot of them only publish every year or three... literately hundreds of authors, most of whom I don't think about every day but read their books when they pop up and remind me the next book is out.

just double checked un-followed and re-followed a couple of my authors. Mackey Chandler and John Van Stry. One had a book come out this week and the other in October.. no books for either of them showing up on the follows list. It took me only 30 seconds to scroll to last October. Normally it would take me an hour as many authors as I follow. They are all just missing.

 

@ImaWriter do you have any trad authors you're following too? Cause, considering what @audeojude just wrote, I'm wondering if the system isn't just designed to highlight the trads. So if you have a mix, the trads would always show first... or something like that.

Could also be linked to the sheer number of authors you follow. Maybe the more you have, the more it'll start focusing on the trads?

Just some wild guesses here.

 

It sounds good till you realize hundreds of books that were already in my feed for the last 6 months disappeared. Also I can scroll through 10 pages of authors on the followed page and every one is trad. After I noticed the lack of books a few weeks ago, the indie authors were still there. Today they are missing also.. if i go to the authors amazon page it shows i am still following there and I still seem to be getting digest emails with their books in them. Just zero on the follows page

 

All the indie authors I follow, myself included, are still on my timeline.

 

So... it looks like this is actually a fairly old issue.

I was looking for something else entirely (whether there was a way to see if you have any followers on Amazon--the answer is no, BTW) and I came across this 2017 thread here on kboards...

The conversation starts intersecting with this topic with post #4 in the thread, and there are several other posts that address the issue. Lots of similarities with what has been said here.

How to tell how many followers for one's author page?

I'm running a Give Away promotion on my latest title, 'Granted Wishes' - a short story collection, and the entry requires entrants to 'Follow' my author page on Amazon. How can we tell how many followers we have? I don't see anything on the Author Central page. Thanks for answers!

www.kboards.com

Unrelated side note: that trick mentioned in #14, of looking at a profile of a reviewer to see if he's following you? That's apparently a different thing (ie they are following you as a customer, not as an author). It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I just read about it on the Kindle Forum.

 

Maybe there's a limit to how many authors one can follow before the technology becomes overwhelmed.

 

One of the peaves about following other authors is that it skews statistics. Granted authors buy books...but, you have a disproportionate number of authors in "list" headcounts.

 

D2D sends out new book alerts too. All readers have to do is sign up to Books2Read.com. I think it's free for readers. I have the BookBub alerts, but don't sell any regular priced books after they send them out. Readers there only want free books. Marti's Books

 

Class action suit? Lord, have mercy. On what grounds? You can't sue a company because they don't highlight your books on their website. They can do whatever they want on their site. If they don't wanna put indies in the Also Boughts, they don't have to. Amazon doesn't owe us anything except paying us our share of royalties. They don't owe us visibility or anything else. I mean, if anyone should be suing it's erotica authors. They're treated like second-class citizens. And I write erotica on the side so I know. They can't even use Amazon ads! But yet they know they don't have the right to sue. And this will never happen because you won't find enough indies to do this because they know that there is no grounds for it.

And why resurrect an issue from a year ago I thought this was recent until after I posted.

 

I retract the sarcasm