Ever since the John Locke paid reviews scandal came to light, indie author granddad Joe Konrath has bent over backwards to defend Locke and other authors who’ve abused the review system. In his first commentary on the issue, he points out that since many techniques used to sell books aren’t 100% pure, no one has any right to judge Locke for buying hundreds of fake reviews. Next up, he proposed that we would all sell out, cheat, and lie to help our friends or further our career, so really, in our own ways, we’re all little Lockes at heart. Anyway, there’s no proof that buying all those reviews helped Locke at all, so who was hurt, really?
From there, Konrath argued that leaving one-star reviews is “shitty” and “mean,” but since millions of other people do it all the time, what’s the big deal that author RJ Ellory left anonymous one-stars on his competitors’ books? He might be a dick, but the system is filled with millions of dicks! Also, reviews are about free speech. So even when an author violates the policies of a company’s own website–and attempts to deceive readers into thinking his one-star reviews have been left by other readers with no stake in the game–this is no different from any other one-star, and anyway, “It’s wrong to not allow people to speak their mind.”
Next up, Konrath posited that some fake reviews are a good thing. Satirical reviews of wolf t-shirts and tanks are creative and funny, and if we wipe out all the fakes, we’ll lose these treasures, too. Being against fake reviews is being in favor of censorship.
As always, he drew false equivalencies, conflating an innocent or murky issue with a blatantly wrong one, then declaring they’re all one and the same. There’s no difference between leaving a satirical review, leaving a review on a friend’s book you genuinely enjoyed, and, say, calculatedly lying to customers in order to get them to buy your books. If you’re against one case, you’re against them all. Either that or you’re a hypocrite. Oh, and you’re anti-freedom, too.
All this time, he condemned the “moral panic” he saw brewing around fake reviews, warning that it would lead to mob lynchings and witch hunts. If you’re against fake reviews, you’ll wind up hurting the innocent.
Recently, Amazon started deleting whole bunches of reviews. Some of these disappeared reviews were tainted, some were pure, and others were somewhere in between. The other day, Konrath took this as proof he was right. Who was to blame for the loss of many innocent, truthful reviews? Losses that dismayed both reviewers, who lost their voices, opinions they worked hard to provide, and authors, whose books now have lower ratings than they used to? (Then again, if, as Konrath claims, reviews don’t matter, why is that an issue?)
Not the authors who bought fake reviews or used sockpuppets to harm others.
Not Amazon, for casting such a broad, flawed net that many genuine reviews were caught up in it as well.
Nope. Instead, fault lies with those who complained about these problems, especially the low-hanging fruit of ad hoc (and, I’ll concede, self-righteous) groups like No Sock Puppets Here Please.
As usual, Konrath deflects blame from those who deserve it–the authors who created this whole mess–and splashes it over everyone else instead. For the record, I don’t think Konrath’s an idiot. I’m also wary of witch hunts, and I think he raised some interesting points about the shades of gray involved in selling books. Too bad he used those points not to ask “Where do we draw the line?”, but rather to declare, “Oh my god, there are no lines at all!”
I’m sure he believes everything he says. That he’s acting as the lone voice of reason amidst a hysterical mob of moral crusaders. The problem is that he’s wrong. Authors abused the system. In response, the system cracked down. Innocents got hurt. The lesson here isn’t that it’s wrong to complain about cheating. The lesson is that it’s wrong to cheat. Even when the harm isn’t immediately clear, it has a way of coming back to hurt those who’ve been playing fair, too.
ETA: For the record, in my research for this post, I discovered Amazon has been sweeping up big batches of shady reviews since at least late June. The Locke stuff broke in late August. So is this purge of reviews a direct result of people complaining about John Locke and his review-tainting cohorts? At best, the answer is “partly”; possibly, the answer is “not at all.” Amazon cares very deeply about the integrity of their review system. Because they know reviews sell books. Did the supposed “witch hunt” accelerate or heighten the review-deletion process? Possibly. But it is indisputable that this review-deletion was going on months before anybody started calling for heads on a platter.
Meanwhile, some clarity has been shed on exactly why Amazon is deleting so many honest reviews. The best summary of the situation I’ve found is in a post in the Amazon forums.
The gist is this. Reviews aren’t being removed because of some mysterious new policy, but rather because Amazon has decided to more strictly enforce (and possibly has reinterpreted?) its preexisting policies–probably in response to the Locke scandal. The poster (Peter Durward Harris) mentions two ways reviews are in violation: those given in exchange for any form of compensation, including gifted books, and those given by people who have a direct financial stake or are in direct competition with the book.
What’s the matter with gifting books to reviewers? Isn’t that in line with Amazon’s policy that you can’t provide any form of compensation except a free book? Well, it’s tricky. One way to interpret this is that when you gift someone a book, you have essentially sent them a gift card for the value of that book–and the receiver of the gift card doesn’t have to actually spend it on the book. The gifted book is a form of compensation, funds provided to purchase a book, which Amazon does not allow.
The second area–no reviews from those with a financial stake in the product, including competitors–is being enforced with similar semantic strictness. Harris’ post mentions that a graphic designer was informed that she’s not allowed to review books she’s done covers for. Meanwhile, many authors who’ve left reviews on other books have since had those reviews yanked.
Harris doesn’t mention the phenomenon of “linked accounts,” which appears to be the third violation Amazon is targeting, and may actually be a new policy. In my last post, I mentioned that reviews area being deleted if they are found to have (unspecified) connections to the writer or to other reviewers, which may include things like connecting to Amazon through the same IP address.
What we’re seeing here is an enforcement of rules that errs on the side of suspicion. Reviews that fall into a gray area, or those with the potential for abuse, are being axed without regard for how “pure” they may actually be. Amazon appears to be pretty serious about preserving the integrity of their reviews, even if it comes at the cost of many that did nothing wrong. If it has the appearance or potential of wrongdoing, it’s a target for deletion.
I’m not sure exactly how strictly these areas are being cracked down on. Lots of reviews based on gifted books are still out there. A quick update after further examination–Amazon might be touchier when it comes to giving gift cards rather than gift books; in any event, the removal of reviews based on a gift/gift card seems to be reserved for specific abusers. Lots of reviews left by authors are still out there. Customer service responses indicate it’s okay to review books as an author, but that malicious and/or fake reviews are against guidelines–yet many legit author-penned reviews have been deleted. My best guess is they’ve ginned up some programs to flag reviews that exhibit certain suspicious signs, then flagged reviews are checked and deleted (or left alone) manually. It remains highly confusing. The only thing that’s clear is that enforcement is selective, inconsistent, and imperfect.
I haven’t seen any real punishments handed down from on high, at least. Reviews just.. disappear. If you email Amazon to ask why, they’ll give you a vague explanation; if you try to repost your review, you may receive an email warning you not to try again or face the risk of having your reviewing privileges curtailed or revoked. It’s all kind of weird, largely because it’s still not all that clear, but at least the streets of Amazon aren’t running red with the blood of unwitting reviewers.
But perfectly innocent reviewers and authors have lost reviews. It’s frustrated many; possibly, it’s discouraged reviewers from reviewing, and could well have hurt the sales of authors who’ve done nothing wrong. That’s the fallout from John Locke, Stephen Leather, and RJ Ellory’s wrongdoing. (For the record, I consider Leather’s small-scale sockpuppetry far less insidious than Locke’s purchase of hundreds of fake reviews.) So I suppose Konrath’s right about one thing–if no one had cared, no one would have been hurt.
But people do care. Because reviews matter, if only to those who give them and those who receive them. I don’t blame those who complained. I blame those who knowingly acted to compromise the system.
Over the last few days, quite a few reviews have disappeared from books on Amazon. Link to a discussion on Kindleboards here.
I was alerted to this by someone who had reviewed Breakers and was upset to see their review had been pulled. This is a fellow KB author, but I don’t know them. I’m not sure we’ve ever spoken directly before. They grabbed the book while it was free–they probably saw it mentioned on KB–read it, enjoyed it, reviewed it. Legit, yes? Does any part of that sound remotely shady? Five months later, their review was pulled without warning.
Followup emails indicated Amazon had pulled their review because their account was related to another Amazon account that had reviewed the book. The reviewer says this isn’t true. Obviously, I have no way to confirm this, but I don’t see what this person would possibly have to gain by lying. So what’s the deal?
For a little more insight, see this post. In short, an Amazon customer recently had her account terminated and her Kindle wiped. When she tried to find out why, she was told her account was linked to another account that had violated Amazon policies. The customer replied that this wasn’t true–that she had no idea what Amazon was talking about–but they insisted. From their email:
“While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened.”
And that’s where it ended.
The KB thread speculates Amazon is tracking IP addresses. This is a potentially reasonable way to catch sockpuppet reviewers. Most fakers probably aren’t driving to a different coffee shop each time they want to post a new five-star review of their own book.
The problem, of course, is that IP addresses aren’t Social Security numbers. A given address can wind up assigned to different people at different times. If, say, someone is accessing their account from the workplace, that IP address may wind up matching a coworker who’s also using their own account. Same thing might happen if someone ever checks their account from a coffee shop, a library, or, as I did back when I was too poor for internet, the neighbor’s unprotected router. ISPs don’t always assign you a static address, either, meaning if you only ever check your account from your home internet, you could still wind up “linked” to the accounts of strangers.
Caveat time–I don’t know with perfect certainty that ISP matching is how Amazon traces links to different accounts. I am reasonably certain, however, they don’t have a private eye installed in your closet. So they must be pulling links from whatever digital data they do have. So much of Amazon’s processes are automated that I assume the process of sniffing out linked accounts is based on an algorithm of some kind, too. Some of the consequences–such as the termination of accounts–is, in all likelihood, processed and approved by a real human, but that hardly makes them immune to error, if the woman with the axed account is telling the truth.
I don’t know this sudden purging of reviews (I’ve now lost three) is a direct response to the John Locke scandal, either. I suppose the timing could be coincidental. Just for fun, Locke’s Saving Rachel currently has 481 reviews. I don’t know how many, if any, have already been deleted.
What we do know–or what I think I know–is that Amazon’s review-deletion system is far from perfect, catching not just the sockfish they’re after, but plenty of innocent dolphins, too. Additionally, their review policies aren’t exactly crystal clear, either. If there is the remotest chance of people getting in trouble for leaving a review that breaks the rules, those rules need to be very, very straightforward.
Looking at the reviews that are getting deleted, though, it appears that Amazon is targeting at least two classes of them. First, multiple reviews on a single product from people who appear to be related to each other. One opinion per household, please. My fiancee is probably going to be annoyed to learn she no longer gets a say, but since her vote doesn’t count anyway, I guess the point is moot. Second, reviews from other authors may be getting erased. Of the three I’ve lost, two have been from other authors. A fair number of the people reporting on the KB thread have noticed a similar trend.
I can see how both types of these reviews are more prone to abuse, but that hardly means they’re all sketchy. On the other hand, Amazon’s store, Amazon’s rules.
This post is more about awareness than anger or action. Be aware that Amazon is deleting some reviews. The reasons aren’t entirely clear, and the deletion of a review doesn’t necessarily mean it was fake or shady. If you’re an author, I don’t know whether Amazon frowns on leaving reviews of other books, but I’d say it’s worth looking into at this point. (ETA: Reading Amazon’s response to deleted reviews in this blog post, I’m betting reviews by authors are being specifically targeted. Still needs more confirmation, though.)
My three deleted reviews to date–two five-stars and one one-star, for the record, so my rating has actually gone up–have been yanked from a book that had 73 reviews before all this began. Other than being annoyed that three reviewers no longer get to have their say about my work, I don’t really care. 70 reviews is still a lot, and like I said, my overall rating has actually improved by a very small fraction.
But many reviews are being lost from books that don’t have many to spare in the first place. I really sympathize with those authors. Getting off the ground is really hard, and losing reviews just makes it that much harder. I hope Amazon sets down the axe and picks up a scalpel.
Last post, I looked at how to run big giveaways in order to build up your floor as an author. As long as you’re comfortable giving away thousands of copies of your books, it’s a fast, low-effort way to grab your first real visibility. Along the way, you’re gaining fans, which will help you sell your next book, as well as reviews and likes and tags and all that, which will help you sell this book the next time you promote it.
This whole strategy is based on KDP Select, however. Which requires selling exclusively through Amazon. Which continues to be a contentious and divisive topic within the indie publishing world.
The pro-Select crowd more or less believes this: “Select is a tool, nothing more. I’ve gotten better results through it than I ever have when my book was available at all the other stories. Until that changes, I’m going to stick with what’s working for me–Select, and Amazon exclusivity.”
The anti-Select argument has a few facets to it. Some people have a philosophical problem with exclusivity; they want readers to be able to buy their books through whatever store and on whatever format they prefer. Others just think Select is a bad business decision: it’s not sustainable, the gains from free giveaways are temporary, and you aren’t factoring in the opportunity cost of exclusivity: you don’t know what your books could be selling in the other stores. “I want steady, organic growth. A long-term career. The best way to achieve this is to make my books available in as many stores and formats as I possibly can.”
This perspective is perhaps most visibly argued by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. These two are long-term pros with all kinds of great advice about protecting your rights as an author and running your business wisely. I’ve met them once, and found them smart, approachable, and downright excited to share what they know with new authors. (Hi, Kris! RadCon 2010–I was the young dude in the Bukowski shirt. Got flustered when you told me he was one of Dean’s favorites.)
But I also think they’re full of crap.
To me, the business plan of pushing your work out to every stores is a strategy of hope. As in, “I’m going to sell my work in every store, and hope the readers there magically find it.” It’s the power of prayer, in other words–and we all know God helps those who help themselves.
So you can hope. Or, you can enroll in Select. At the cost of hoping you might sell at the other markets, you now have a powerful tool to create visibility for yourself in what remains the majority share of the ebook market.
That said? I’m growing skeptical of Select. I don’t think it is necessarily a long-term part of an indie author’s career.
Boy, this is going to be a long post. Here’s the thing. The benefits of Select depend on giving away a lot of books. You can only give away a lot of books if a lot of people know you have a book to give away. The way most books give away thousands of copies is through being listed by the big three freebie blogs: ENT, POI, and FKBT. In other words, your success as a self-published author depends on a new set of gatekeepers.
These gatekeepers have their own sets of standards as to which books they’ll choose to promote. These standards may or may not be public. If you’ve got a book that doesn’t meet their standards–whether because of your cover, your genre, your number or average rating of reviews, or you gave their dog a dirty look nine years back–Select may not be of any use to you. Note that I surely don’t blame these blogs for having standards–they’ve built their own readership by curating titles and offering up what appear to be the good ones; if they had no standards, no one would follow them–I’m just saying that your success in Select depends on factors outside of your control.
Speaking of factors outside of your control: Amazon is not reliable. Not 100%. Using Select, you’ll run into glitches all the time. Your free day may not start as scheduled, or at all. Your book may not go free on time or go back to paid on time. You may not be displayed on the free ranks for hours or days at a time, curtailing the effectiveness of your promo. And you know how much immediate customer support Amazon offers for these problems? Zero. There’s no phone number for you to call. If you email KDP support, you’ll be lucky to get a response by the next day, and it will probably be several days after that before they’ll address your issue. Too late to matter, in other words.
Amazon’s algorithms that help translate free promotions into paid sales aren’t reliable, either. They’ve already changed twice this year: once in March, once in May. They could change again at any time. Could be better, could be worse. There’s no way to know until it happens.
Then there’s the matter of sustainability. I don’t know if it’s sustainable to pick up sales by giving away thousands of free copies on a regular basis. No one knows this. The Select program hasn’t even been out a year yet. If we’re talking about a career, we’re talking about decades of time. Can you get effective results by giving away a book month after month and year after year?
Common sense says you’ll see diminishing returns, but in a business as chaotic as the current ebook world, common sense needs to sit down and shut up. I can relate that, anecdotally, I have seen a handful of people who have been able to run highly successful monthly or semi-monthly giveaways of a title and pick up some real sales afterwards. The May changes to Amazon’s algorithms have made this harder to do, but people are still doing it. (And this mostly depends on POI picking you up every time you go free.)
But they’re not common. There is a larger pool of people who can regularly give away a decent number of copies on a regular basis, but their post-free sales aren’t that inspirational. I’m talking a few dozen extra sales following a giveaway. Probably no more than a couple hundred bucks in income. And then there is an even larger pool of authors who get very inconsistent results. Sometimes, they may give away thousands of copies during a promotion, but other times, they aren’t picked up anywhere and they’re lucky to give away a few hundred.
And there is an opportunity cost. This cost is totally unknown, of course; you can’t know how your book would do in the other stores until it is in the other stores. This is what I’ve seen, though. A book that does well in Select tends to sell in the other stores, too. Probably not like gangbusters. Usually not enough to make up the difference. But it will sell some. And I’ve had some books that gained nothing from Select wind up selling more in the other stores than they have on Amazon. Again, not sales by the truckload. But a few here and there. Furthermore, all the things you’ll learn about selling books by being in Select–covers and categories and all the rest–largely apply to the other stores as well. After seasoning yourself in Select, it should be easier to take what you’ve learned and apply it to Apple and B&N and Kobo as well.
Then there’s the issue of trying to become a big fish in a small pond. Of trying to stay ahead of the curve rather than blindly following what dummies like me are trying to pass along as fresh news.
In order to make Select work, then, you have to rely on the gatekeepers of blogs. You have to rely on Amazon to actually run your promo as scheduled and to not change the program’s effectiveness three weeks from now. And you have to rely on the Select concept being one that will work for years and years down the road. Meanwhile, you can’t know where you’d be at in the other stores if you’d never tried Select in the first place.
All that said? I still recommend Select as a starting point. Right here, right now, Select still works very well for a great many people. Even for seasoned indies, the other stores can be a struggle. Select remains well-understood and easy to leverage. It’s particularly useful for a series and for getting new books off the ground before you have a fanbase to do that for you.
But for all these reasons, I think a longer-term strategy involves more than Select. I, for one, am trying to make a career out of this. I don’t like the idea of my success being dependent on a handful of blogs, a single store, a single program, and a single trick. I still have a couple books enrolled in Select, but I’m trying to make it one of my tools rather than my only tool.
Okay, this post is approaching Konrathian lengths. I’m going to explore medium-term strategies in a followup post instead. But I thought it was necessary to lay out all my thoughts about Select before delving into where you might go with your career after you’re, say, 6-12 months into your career, have 2-6 titles out there, and have run multiple giveaways. That way, you’ll know where I’m coming from, and can adjust your own strategies accordingly.
In my first post, I looked at what to do and what to expect from your first novel release. In brief, the strategy involved enrolling in KDP Select and doing a quick initial giveaway. It’s a very simple strategy. All it takes is a few clicks, some waiting, and some hoping. In fact, if you’re some marketing ninja or already have a huge platform, you’ve probably got better options for pushing your book. So go ninja-tweet instead of reading this post, goofus! This is more for authors who are starting off with no support, tools, or weapons whatsoever.
Anyway, so you’ve run a giveaway or two, resulting in several hundred downloads. If you haven’t been able to garner that many, take a cold, hard look at your cover–this is the first thing prospective downloaders are seeing as they browse the freebie listings, so if they’re not clicking over, that’s the first part of your book to troubleshoot. If your cover’s at least good, though (and I mean actually good, a cover that doesn’t instantly out you as a self-published author–not that there’s anything wrong with self-pubbing, but the idea is to create a product that’s indistinguishable from traditional products), and the downloads still aren’t coming, that could be a problem. I’ll look at that in a followup post dedicated to troubleshooting.
But let’s say you’ve managed to give away, say, 400-2000 copies. You have, hopefully, also gained a handful–maybe even two scoops!–of cold cash sales. Most likely, however, things have quieted down within a week of your promo. You might feel like you’re back to square one. Oh god, we’re writing our names in water!
Yeah, but now it’s time for Phase 2.
Phase 2 can probably only take place if your giveaways have garnered you a minimum of 5 reviews with an average rating of 4.0. I know there’s a good chance this hasn’t happened for your book even if you’ve spent all five of your free days already. One of my novels has been out for 18 months and it still only has 3 reviews (with a sterling 3.7 average!). When you’re starting out, getting reviews can feel even harder than getting sales.
Because it is. Reviews tend to come faster for new books with none, but from what I’ve garnered from my results and those of others, you’ll probably pick up just one review for every 100-300 paid sales. And the ratio of reviews to freebies given away is generally even worse. I’ll talk more about how to pick up reviews in the troubleshooting post (I’ll try to get that up later today or this weekend), but for now, if you’re not there, let me just reiterate: don’t pay for reviews. Don’t use sockpuppets. Don’t do anything shady. You don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot. Fake reviews have crippled or killed the careers of several indies already. Even if you get away with it, and intend for it to be a one-time thing to jumpstart yourself, here’s the thing–you haven’t learned how to pick up reviews legitimately. That’s a skill you will need as your career continues to build up steam.
And building these skills is the ultimate point of these posts. Hopefully this strategy will help you fast-forward through the most grueling, painful, self-doubtful portion of your indie career. But more importantly, the giveaway process is helping you learn what works for you and what doesn’t. What makes a good cover. How to categorize your books. What promo efforts lead to sales and which are a waste of time. Which of your books have big appeal and which don’t. Blah blah blah. You are building the skillz to pay your literal bills. Acquiring honest reviews is one of those skillz. Don’t shortchange yourself.
Back to Phase 2: The Big Giveaway.
There is where we’re going to try to give away a lot of copies. At least 3000. Hopefully 5000-8000. And, if everything breaks right, 20,000+.
That probably sounds like a lot. Because it is. No one will be left to read my novel! Oh no I gave away all my readers!
Nah. Brand-new Kindle owners are buying their first ebooks every single day. Same deal with Nooks and Kobos and iPads. Brand-new readers are being born every day. There isn’t really a limit to how many people could potentially buy your book. I mean, 7ish billion, plus however many aliens are lurking within wireless range. But compared to that, 20,000 is nothing. A piece of Twilight erotic fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off has sold millions of copies this year. If you’ve got a book with the appeal to give away 20,000 copies, trust me, it has the appeal to sell plenty more.
Before your promo, set up a mailing lost. I use Mailchimp, but any service will do. Put a line at the end of your book like “If you’d like to hear when I’ve got a new book out, please sign up for my mailing list,” and include a link to your signup page. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy. The goal is to create a way to get in touch with the people who liked your freebie so you can let them know when your next release is out. Having an initial base, however small, will help get your next book up and running much faster.
Don’t skip that step. I did, because I am lazy and dumb, and then I had a huge giveaway and a great month of sales and I lost out on adding all kinds of fans to my list, which I would regret deeply, except I am too lazy and dumb to care about the mistakes I’ve made along the way.
With that out of the way, it’s time to schedule your promo. You want at least two promo days available. Schedule a two-day free run for 1-2 weeks from now. Now, go alert the three major sites about your upcoming giveaway:
Links go to their announcement pages. Now, wait for your free day to come, and pray to the Bibliolords that one, two, or all three of these sites mention you to their fans.
There is no guarantee this will happen. On any given day, some 4000+ books are free on Amazon. These sites list a few dozen free books between them. They have standards, too. They want a professional-looking, well-reviewed book (and in POI’s case, they’re definitely more interested in certain genres). They have attained their massive followings–followings you are now attempting to tap–by only presenting great-looking books to their readership. If your book doesn’t have strong surface appeal, your chances of getting picked up by these places is pretty low.
These aren’t the only free sites out there, but they are the only ones who seem capable of launching your book into the freebie stratosphere. Alert everywhere else under the sun, if you like (freebooksy, for one, appears to be building an audience), but these are the big dogs.
If they mention you, you’ll probably finish the day with somewhere between 1500 and 15,000 downloads. 2500-6000 is a more typical range. Unless you get more mentions elsewhere on day two, you probably won’t grab as many downloads on your second day, but so long as you’re in the top 100 free, you’ll still get plenty. If you’re still pulling them in fast and furious at the end of day two, add a third day to your promotion.
You may want to save the rest of your free days for a later promo, but as long as the downloads keep coming, there’s an argument to be made to keep adding more days and racking them up. Amazon’s algorithms are currently stacked to favor colossal download counts. It varies wildly by genre, as will your post-free results, but I’m talking 8-30K to really move the needle. If your promo is working, be aggressive with it. In fact, that is the #1 rule of selling books: “If it’s working, be aggressive.”
Some people tweet and Facebook and etc. etc. while their promo is working. It can’t hurt. I don’t, personally. Again: I’m lazy; possibly dumb.
Now your promo’s over. With any luck, you’ve given away somewhere between 3000-20,000 copies. Yay! Now what?
Now you watch, that’s what. Your first day or two or three back to paid might be pretty quiet. It will take a couple days for all those freebies to be counted toward your popularity list ranking and for your alsobots to recrunch and all that. But I would bet that some sales are coming in, and that they will continue to do so for a week or so. Not hundreds upon hundreds. Those days are over, unless you just gave away a ton of copies and have a killer book that’s going to take advantage of its new visibility by hooking every reader who glances its way. But a few dozen. Maaaybe a couple hundred, again depending on genre, appeal, the size of your giveaway, etc. Enough to pay a few bills, though.
And to snag some more reviews. And some signups to your mailing list. And Goodreads reviews. And recommendations to their friends. These things build up over time, adding to your infrastructure. If the edifice of your authordom grows sturdy enough, the lean times will be less lean and the boom times will boom much harder. Right now, we’re building your floor. Floors are very unexciting. Very unsexy (unless you have a skilled tile worker at hand). But they hold you up while you are walking around, which is very preferable to crashing through the basement, or leaping from beam to beam like some kind of fool.
You may see your floor start to strengthen after your very first big giveaway–if you were selling 1/week, maybe after the initial rush of sales you level off at 1/day; if you were doing 1/day, maybe you’re up to 2/day. I know, pretty meager gains, considering you just gave away thousands and thousands of damn copies of a book you nearly killed yourself writing.
But you’ve only got one book out, sir or ma’am. It’s hard to sell consistently with just one book. You have nothing else for your fans to snap up. You have nothing else to promote. Meanwhile, Amazon’s algorithms have become a very harsh mistress. And your first published book–even if it’s not the first book you ever wrote–will probably not be your most appealing book.
So I hope you’ve been working on a second book. And, once that one’s finished, that you’re ready to get to work on a third. This business is a bloodsport! The more gladiators you’ve got ready to hit the arena, the better your chances of producing a champion. Trust me, if you keep at it, if you keep writing and you keep learning to make better books on the inside and out, it will get easier.
I hope Phase 2 has given you your first taste of success, however modest. I’m thinking you’re now 1-6 months into your indie career, depending on how fast it took to get your initial reviews and such. As you continue to publish new books, repeat Phase 2 with each of your books every 30-90 days.
What? Give away thousands of copies of every book every 1-3 months? Is giving away this many books sustainable? I don’t know, actually. I do know it’s more sustainable than you’d think. But there’s a reason it’s called “Phase 2” and not “Permanent, Immutable Plan 2.” Next post, I’m going to look at branching out to the other stores and more long-term strategies. We’re going to go pretty far off the beaten path. GRAB YOUR PITH HELMETS!
July 30-31, it is the end of the world. Well, not actually. Not that I am aware of, anyway. If it is the actual end of the world, I think we’re all going to be a bit too busy dealing with the fog-monsters from beyond the stars to care about how I said the world was going to end and then it did.
Instead, I’m talking about the next best thing to the end of the world: a whole bunch of great books about the end of days are now on sale.
For between $0.99 and $2.99–as much as 75% and $5 off per book–read about plagues, invasions, terrorism, and other horrible things that would be awful to live through but are a hell of a lot of fun to read about.
Check out the full list by clicking here. Books include:
* My apocalyptic thriller Breakers, $2.99
* Phoenix Sullivan’s medical thriller SECTOR C, $0.99
* Steven Konkoly’s pandemic survival tale The Jakarta Pandemic, $2.99
* Amy Rogers’ eco-terrorist novel Petroplague, $2.99
* And Toni Dwiggins’ geological disaster mysteries Badwater and Volcano Watch
It’s a pretty diverse set, but they’ve all got two things in common: low prices, and a whole lot of stuff going kablooey. Please give them a look. And take that, humanity!
So when we last left off, Breakers‘ free days had rolled off its popularity list rankings. That process took three days to finish (since it had been free for three days). Within a week, its sales had dwindled from 50-70/day to 10/day. I still had decent pop list placement, because it had sold so many copies in the last 30 days, but as each day passed, its pop rank continued to slide, because the old high-sales days were being replaced by new low-sales days. The end was night.
All the while, I was having a pretty obvious thought. If a big free run had propped it up in the first place, what if I did another free run? I probably couldn’t match my previous total giveaway numbers, but if I made it free while it still had a lot of paid sales credited to it, would that be enough to boost me back up the lists and continue the ride for another thirty days?
Meanwhile, I was having a second, far less reliable thought, because my brain can’t leave well enough alone. The thing is, Breakers was outselling a lot of the big sci-fi books around it on the pop list. Its bestseller rank was consistently better than Ender’s Game, for goodness sake. If the pop lists were calculated purely by sales, it wouldn’t have fallen off at all. The only reason it did drop relative to these other books was because they were priced higher, and ever since the beginning of May, price is weighted heavily in how the pop lists are ranked.
So what if I raised the price, too? Before, I was selling at $3.99. Would my sales hold steady (or close to it) at, say, $5.99? If so, when my latest free run ran out in another 30 days, would I be able to avoid eating cliff? Or at least suffer a less painful, more gradual decline?
So I set it free again. For two days. That was all the days I had left. And I waited to see what would happen.
And then Amazon botched my promo.
Instead of starting on June 23rd as scheduled, Breakers didn’t wind up going free until around 2 AM June 24th. I emailed KDP and called AuthorCentral (KDP has no phone number), but KDP was no help. That left me with just under one day to get as many downloads as I could. When it finally did go free, things went about as well as I could have hoped–POI picked me up, and so did ENT–and I finished the day with about 5600 downloads. On the one hand, that was really good, but on the other hand, with another day, I probably would have finished with between 8000-10,000. I needed every one I could get to restore my lost placement.
In the end, it wasn’t quite enough. I bounced back up the pop lists, but not as high as before. Initial sales were pretty good (25-30/day), but even at the higher price, it wasn’t enough boost to keep up with the higher-sales days of 30 days ago that were continuing to roll off my rank. I think my worse bestseller rank was hurting me here, too, but it’s really hard to say. Sales held steady for about ten days, then halved after July 4.
Since that end of the experiment was a bust, I decided to learn what would happen if I raised the price to $7.99. Interestingly, sales held steady around 10/day for another couple weeks. Three weeks out, they halved again. A few hours ago, Breakers ate cliff again, falling from #27 in Science Fiction > Adventure to #113. I’m guessing its sales are going to be pretty slow from now on. (Well, until more magic happens, anyway.)
For all I know, the higher price crippled its ability to stay as sticky this time, too. But I don’t think that’s the only factor. Over the last couple months, I’ve watched several books try this same trick–doing regular free runs to prop up their pop list rank for another 30 days. Every time, they don’t come back as strongly as before. Don’t get me wrong, they still do very well–coming back at #1500 instead of #500, say, or #2200 instead of #1500–but there is, in this limited sample size, a clear trend of diminished returns.
What’s happening? Are these books, including Breakers, slowly exhausting their audiences, even with similar pop list placement as before? Is it the case that, after an initial giant free run, a book is essentially experiencing what it’s like to be a popular new release, and when it pops back up after its first cliff, it’s being met with a lot of eyes that have already seen it?
Likewise, these books’ second and third big free runs are never as big as their first. Not that I’ve seen, anyway. The obvious conclusion–which isn’t to say the correct one, necessarily–is that they’re draining the well, so to speak. Massive free runs depend on just a handful of sites. Once you’ve tapped those sites once, the well has that much less water in it the next time you return. It refills over time as new subscribers sign up, but in my observation, it doesn’t refill completely within 30 or even 60 days. In fact, it may take much longer than that.
We’re back in the realm of speculation now. But the logical conclusion is this that riding free runs every 30-40 days can be an effective strategy (although ENT now says they won’t mention a book within 60 days of the last time it was free, meaning you’re basically down to POI, FKBT, and paid ads for exposure). This can last for several months, anyway. But it appears to be less effective the more you do it, and there is a point where a diminished 30 days of sales + a diminished free run isn’t going to be enough to prop you up to a significant place on the pop lists. When that happens, the run’s going to be over for a while. At least until the wells refill. Or you discover some other way to get your book back up there.
There’s also the question of whether giving away that many books might hurt your long-term sales. I have no answers to that question. People are buying their first ereaders every day. Considering there are already millions of Kindles out there, giving away 50,000 copies of your book over the course of a year may be a drop in the bucket of your potential audience. Readers aren’t a nonrenewable resource. Still, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question, especially if you might be better served waiting to reach those readers for when you’ve got the next book in the series ready, say.
This is getting far afield. Nearly three months after the new algorithms spraing into being, here are my conclusions, which may or may not be remotely accurate:
* The Select program continues to reward far fewer books in the past
* The few books it does reward are well-positioned to continue to exploit their appeal
* If timed right, and with the right luck, these books can chain several months’ worth of strong sales together
* However, there will likely be diminishing returns after two or more of these runs, and it is unlikely to be something that can be maintained for more than a few months in a row
* While Select may no longer be very useful for most single titles, it continues to be quite useful for series
As for me, I’ll be leaving my fantasy series in Select for the time being, but I’m letting Breakers‘ Select contract expire early next month. I’d like to explore the other storefronts with a book I know is capable of selling. I’d like to see if I can build sales that are less roller-coastery. And to be perfectly frank, I’m pissed off at Amazon’s shitty customer support (grumble grumble bitch&moan). I’m sure they will be devastated to have lost my exclusivity.
What might this mean for your book? That is virtually impossible to answer. Maybe you’ll strike it rich on your next free run, but the chances of that are pretty low, unfortunately. And the strategy discussed above certainly isn’t a long-term plan (although giving away and selling that many copies may build you a readership that is very long-term indeed).
At the same time, what’s the alternative? De-enroll from Select, push the book to all the other stores, and pray it catches on? That’s not exactly an active strategy. Yet the other stores don’t have the same kinds of tools for discoverability that Select provides. It’s possible to make books free on iTunes and Kobo, yes, but that doesn’t result in the same list placement going free provides on Amazon. (Well, it kind of does on iTunes, but it’s clumsier, it takes much, much longer, and it’s far from guaranteed.)
In other words, we’re still in the same boat we’ve been in since mid-March. Select doesn’t sell like it used to, but the other sites are a cross between a roulette wheel and a wasteland. I’m growing restless and disillusioned, so I’m going to go exploring. I don’t know what you should do, but I’ll report back with anything interesting I find along the way.
Last time I looked at Amazon’s current algorithms, I speculated what would happen 30 days after Breakers‘ giant free run. At that point, all the free copies it gave away would stop counting towards its rank on the popularity lists. That was a frightening prospect, but at the same time, I’d racked up some 2300 paid sales (and another 600 borrows) in the 30 days since my giveaway. Would those be enough to sustain my place on the pop lists? If not, what would happen? Would I face a slow decline, or a swift one? Would I stroll down a hill, or smash down a cliff?
Well, here’s a look in chart form. Here’s Breakers‘ entire sales history:
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| Pictured: D’oh |
That doesn’t look so bad. That nice, flat line goes on forever and ever. It’s just a little jagged there at the end is all. Wait, let’s take a closer look:
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| Pictured: D’oh, Part 2 |
Okay, that’s a better look at what happened. What we’re seeing here is twofold. First, notice that downward slope starting around June 16? That’s when my free days stopped counting. The descent was swift–nearly 1000 ranks a day until I hit #4000, when the decline slowed. That is not a gentle hill. That is a brutal cliff. The drop from #1000 Paid to #2000 Paid is the difference between roughly 70 sales per day and about 40 sales/day. And rank declines more slowly than it rises, meaning my drop was even stiffer than that. Within a week of my free days beginning to roll off, I’d dropped from #1000 to #5000. In terms of daily sales, that was a drop from 50-70/day to 10/day.
I had braced myself for it, but it’s hard to brace yourself for a freefall. Mostly what happens at the end of the cliff is a puddle composed of you.
“But wait,” you say. “Bottoming out at #6000 isn’t so bad. That’s a pace around 500 sales/month. And anyway, rank spiked just a few days after that, taking you back to #2000. What are you bitching about?”
What am I–? Look, we’ll get to that in a moment, Captain Impatience. First, I want to talk about the why some more. Why such a steep decline? After all, my bestseller rank was still really good. #1000 overall, which was something like #8 in Technothrillers and #22 in Science Fiction > Adventure. That’s quite a bit of visibility, isn’t it? And what about also-boughts? At that point, I had a lot of popular sci-fi books pointing back to Breakers in the form of the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” lists.
Well, it turns out those things just aren’t all that important. Ha ha! That is way too flippant of an answer. Totally misleading. In truth, bestseller rank and alsobots clearly matter to some degree, but the more I do this, the more dismissive I am of them in general: while they certainly help generate sales, the bestseller lists are so volatile your book can sink extremely rapidly, and the alsobots are such a harsh filtering process (basically, your book needs to be on the first page of a book that has just been finished by a reader who is interested in buying another book right now) that they are of limited use. I think if you have a very high bestseller rank, or first-page placement on the alsobots of a very popular book, then that can do a lot for your sales, but otherwise, those are the supporting cast to a book’s sales, not the star.
The star is the popularity lists. And your book isn’t on just one of them, it’s on a bunch. For instance, one of Breakers‘ category paths is Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction > Adventure. Each of those is a separate popularity list, which means the book is listed (somewhere) on each of them. Say it’s showing up at #20 on > Adventure; that would place it somewhere around #40-50 in > Science Fiction, and somewhere like #1200-1600 in > Kindle eBooks. In terms of discoverability, it would be very easy to find in SF > Adventure (second page), pretty easy to find in > Science Fiction (page 4-5), and totally awful in > Kindle eBooks (page 100+). No one is going to click through 100 pages in the eBooks category to find it. But this is part of the reason mega-popular books like 50 Shades of Grey or The Hunger Games stay so sticky for so long: when you’re #1 in the store, everyone sees you every time they visit Amazon. Plus the whole “world-destroying word of mouth” thing. But extreme visibility in high-traffic categories leads to a lot of clicks on your book, which in turn generally leads to a lot of sales.
That’s essentially why Select free runs used to do so well on the old pop lists. And that’s why taking a sudden tumble from, say, #10 in > Science Fiction (where I peaked)–the first page of the entire category–to #40-50 or wherever makes such a big difference. And remember, you’ve got another subcategory you’re listed on, too. Once your visibility is lost when a big free run rolls beyond the pop list window, you’re not going to regain it without another push.
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| Breakers’ peak rank on the Science Fiction popularity list a week before I ate cliff |
In my last post examining the effects of a large free run under the current algorithms, I looked at how Breakers‘ sales had been in the week after giving away 25,000 copies. They looked steady. And given that the book would have very strong position in the popularity lists for 30 days, my best guess was that sales would stay strong throughout that period.
Still, that was just a guess. And I thought it was also quite possible that sales would slow. Significantly so, even–maybe regular browsers of the popularity list would all snap it up in the first few days, leaving it much more sluggish after that. There was no way to know for sure until more numbers came in.
Okay, by my count, it’s now been 17 days since Breakers reverted to paid. Here’s a look at its last 30 days of sales:
That is a line. An almost-straight one. That line represents numbers that are frankly humbling and my-mind-blowing; I’m not sure how to address this without it coming across as bragging. That line represents some 1250 sales and 400 borrows.
Yet it’s also a bit deceptive. That graph is measuring all numbers between #1 and #60,000. How does it look at a more micro level? Here’s the graph for the last two weeks:
By Authorcentral, it peaked May 22, ending the day at #550. It declined every single day after that, reaching its nadir at #1583 on May 31. On June 1, it leapt to #1099; it reached #821 by June 3, and while that graph isn’t showing its latest increase, at 12:45 PM June 5, it’s at #852.
What caused the rebound? Borrows are a big part of it. Breakers has been listed at #1 in Science Fiction in the Kindle Online Lending Library for at least a week now. Despite the top placement in its genre, in the last four days of May, Breakers had 37 borrows, averaging 9.25/day. In the first four days of June, it’s had 110–27.5/day. Clearly, most Prime members had exhausted their monthly borrows by the end of the month; as their borrow refreshed June 1, many new readers snapped up the book.
But an extra 18 borrows a day isn’t quite enough to boost it from #1600 to #800. The borrows can be explained by the start of a new month, but raw sales are also up, too, from 57.75/day in the last four days of May to 77.5/day over the first four days of June. That’s a 34% increase(?!?).
How to explain that? I don’t know. Its pop list ranks have been steady for days now. Presumably, as borrows came in, boosting Breakers‘ rank on various bestseller lists, the additional visibility led to a few more sales, but I don’t think that’s the only–or even the primary–driver of these extra sales. Its bestseller ranks haven’t rebounded that much. All I can offer on this front is conjecture: Are shoppers more free with their money early in the month? Does Amazon send out extra recommendation emails at the start of the month? It’s also gotten 23 new reviews since going free (it had just 9 before); is that helping to convince shoppers to click “buy”?
I don’t know. All I can conclude is that a free giveaway can pay off heavily in borrows as well as sales–right now, Breakers is #12 on the popularity lists in all Science Fiction, but none of the books above it are enrolled in Prime, meaning it gets the #1 spot in the KOLL. The frenetic pace of early-month borrows is already slowing, but that was a nice shot in the arm–my sale : borrow ratio is currently at almost exactly 3 : 1. I believe very few of those borrows are cannibalized sales. My gut feeling, having seen numbers on a bunch of other books, is that a more “normal” sale : borrow ratio would be more like 10 or even 20 : 1. In other words, a full ~25% of my total income so far this month is directly due to having such ridiculously high placement in the KOLL.
17 days in. That gives me another 13 before my free downloads slide beyond the 30-day window of the popularity lists. In another two weeks, then, I expect the gravy train to run out of steam. Possibly to fly off the rails altogether. But it won’t vanish from the popularity lists altogether–by then, it’ll have somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 sales credited to its ranks, meaning it might only drop from page 1 to page 2 or 3. Even so, that could lead to a death spiral, a negative feedback loop where lower visibility –> lower sales –> even lower visibility –> even lower sales, but we’ll see.
Wherever it goes from here, I can’t consider this as anything but a success. It’s been fascinating to watch, and from a personal angle, it couldn’t have come at a better time–my fiancee’s workplace is reducing everyone’s hours, and our ability to scrape by, already rocky, might have become downright jagged. Even if it crashes and burns in another two weeks, it’s already saved our bacon.
Reapers
When the plague came, federal agent Ellie Colson fled into the Adirondacks with Dee, the daughter she barely knew. They began a new life as subsistence...
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