[David VanDyke]

It sounds to me like Amazon is running a bot that is checking the authenticity of page reads and borrows, and this bot is creating a huge reporting lag. It's possible this bot is reporting in batches, and the strange, jerky bounces in book ranks that people are seeing are caused by this.

Not according to my experiment. My own full borrow/all pages read of my own book showed up within 12 hours. A different borrow using my iPhone and page flip mode for a different book showed 1 page only read, also within hours.

The main books that are ridiculously flat (two 3000-KENP box sets with hundreds of retail sales) now have 9 days of track record and the borrows are negligible. Something would have shown up with 9 days, and my experiments would not have shown up so fast, if that's what was happening to me.

 

[A past poster]

My sales have flat lined for the past two days, and this is after a promotion. The only book I have in KU hasn't had page reads since Sept. 13.

 

[Going Incognito]

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Anyone else with the paperback options on their dash that has every unpublished title on their dash missing a cover? 

 

[dorihoxa]

The paperback line disappeared from my dashboard. So, so strange 

 

[Nancy_G]

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Anyone else with the paperback options on their dash that has every unpublished title on their dash missing a cover?

Yes, my unpublished work is missing a cover now, which is fine with me.

 

[Queen Mab]

I republished an unpublished story recently and the cover (missing on the dashboard) went right back up.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...

 

[KelliWolfe]

Testing in production. Pure win.

 

[Randall Wood]

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!. 

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!"

 

[KingSweden]

Taking a stab at the suggestion to re-upload all I did was sub out one keyword. Have a Countdown Deal next week, we'll see what happens...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[horrordude1973]

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.”

 

[Hope]

I just looked at my new release.  My page length just decreased by 16 pages.  I haven't done anything to it. 

 

[RuthNestvold]

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. :/

 

[Going Incognito]

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!.

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.*

 

[Gertie Kindle]

As a reader, I hate page flip. When I tried to sync an audiobook to the ebooks, page flip doesn't allow it to happen. And it's not as if I turned on page flip myself. If I accidentally tap the wrong place on the screen, it turns on page flip.

 

[MarionMyles]

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?

 

[Atlantisatheart]

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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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[Loosecannon]

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.

 

[Atlantisatheart]

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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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[KelliWolfe]

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.

 

[Hope]

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.