So hey guys, I dunno if you’ve heard about this–it’s not like every single person with an interest in self-publishing hasn’t weighed in already–but according to the New York Times, John Locke paid for upwards of 300 fake Amazon reviews on his books.

Obviously, he wasn’t the only one.

First off, I’m not going to name any names. I would dearly, dearly love to. My vigilante gland is fit to burst and has taken on a demonstrably Batmannish shape. But frankly, I don’t want to be involved in a witch hunt, I fear reprisals, and in many cases it’s just too hard to be perfectly certain that some of these sketchy reviews are in fact fake. I don’t want to torch any innocents.

If you wanted to go check out which authors have bought reviews, though, you could–theoretically speaking–go check out one of Locke’s books, find a cluster of 5-star reviews that all showed up within a day or three of each other, then check out those reviewers’ history to see what else they’ve rated.

This method isn’t foolproof. Sometimes, a bunch of reviews clustered by date means a book was selling really well around then, or did a big giveaway, or the author was seeking out legitimate reviewing outlets at that time. But sometimes, what you will find is that the same group of authors keeps showing up across a bunch of different reviewers all reviewing around the same day. You can be nearly certain those are fakes.

It very quickly becomes clear that there is startling proof that dozens and dozens of authors have paid for fake reviews. And by following the rabbit-trails–if a reviewer has several obviously fake reviews, then every review they’ve left falls under suspicion–some shocking names pop up. Big, big people in the indie world. It’s also shocking just how many there are. There’s evidence that hundreds of different authors have paid for fake Amazon reviews. And this is just from the stuff linked back to John Locke.

First item of note: not all of the authors implicated are self-published.

There’s trad stuff there, too. From big houses and small presses alike. Who knows whether these reviews were bought by authors, publicists, agents, friends, family–impossible to know. But they’re out there. This is not limited to self-published books.

Second item of note: seriously, there’s proof here for hundreds and thousands of fake reviews.

Many of the accounts used to leave these reviews were run by people operating off Fiverr and Craigslist and wherever else. They didn’t leave a single fake review and then quit, they left dozens. Apiece. There are so, so many. We all knew there were fake reviews out there, but to be confronted with evidence of such widespread fraud.. it’s deeply disheartening.

Third item of note: if you’re innocent, you can’t really prove it.

I mean, I guess you can say “I never paid for fake reviews, or used sockpuppets, or review-swaps, or any other shady method of convincing strangers that other strangers loved my book and they should buy it.” You can point out your negative reviews, your reviewers who’ve reviewed dozens of other books, have a fan videotape themselves waving their birth certificate as they log into their Amazon account. But everyone’s got a few reviews that look dodgy to the scrutinizing eye. There’s really no way to prove they’re not fake.

That suspicion is just something we’re going to have to live with, then. To address, when it comes up, as calmly and reasonably as possible. If someone accuses you of faking your reviews, it probably isn’t personal. (And if you have faked a review or two–look, nobody wants to string you up. That’s different from what Locke did. But you should probably stop.) But authors like Locke–and hundreds of goddamn others–have pooped in the pool, to borrow a phrase from one of my fellow indies. Now everyone’s going to look at us like we all stink.

On the other hand, if your sketchy-looking reviews aren’t fake, an accuser is going to have a hard time proving anything. “This review smells funny” is as far as they’ll get. I don’t think that’s going to do any damage to your sterling reputation.

Unlike all these authors whose fraud is exposed. Provable. Documented. Saved. Shared. I would be pretty surprised if other names don’t emerge soon. The internet isn’t that kind.

This scandal feels like it should be the start of a movement to self-publish with integrity. But I’m not sure what that would accomplish, really. It’s just so easy to lie. To cheat. To deceive. Making a bunch of promises and passing out “I Don’t Buy Reviews!” badges won’t prove anything. The ease of deception (and the rewards for deceiving) is why so many have done it.

So starting a movement isn’t the point of this post. It’s much easier–and, I expect, effective–to try to scare the shit out of anyone who’s contemplating buying fake reviews right now.

It’s easy to find you. Anyone can do it. Yeah, other people are cheating. But some of them are being exposed. This is your career we’re talking about. Do you want to put it at risk like that?

Yeah, apparently that happened. It is something of a tangent–an introduction to Mark Coker (found of Smashwords) discussing how many indies may be underpricing themselves–but still, very surprising and very cool. Would have been nice if they’d linked directly to my blog posts, but you know what they say about beggars. Very little, because nobody likes beggars.

Anyway, I’m in general agreement with Mark–I think $2.99 is a viable price, but it may be a little low for some titles. A gut-check tells me that $3.99-5.99 is a great price for a book–that’s cheaper than virtually every paperback format–and his numbers seem to bear it out, too. Pricing a little bit higher also leaves you with some wiggle room to charge more than $0.99 for shorter works: novellas, short stories, collections, etc.

I’ve been meaning to write a longer post about all this stuff for a while, but in the meantime, this article is some food for thought. And my name is at the very top of it for some reason. Go read the Forbes piece that very briefly mentions me.

So in my last look at the iTunes storefront, I saw that Apple’s bestseller lists appear to be extremely volatile. I guessed that volatility was due to low total sales, meaning just a single sale or two could cause a big swing in your book’s rank. I saw my novella The Zombies of Hobbiton jumping up and down the lists and surmised it was averaging about a sale per day.

Well, a couple weeks ago, Smashwords updated my sales figures. In May, The Zombies of Hobbiton sold 8 copies on iTunes. Wait, what?

On the surface, that makes no sense–it was climbing back up the ranks every single day. Every morning, I’d open iTunes, and I’d see it around #30 in its categories. One morning, #34. The next morning, #35. The one after that, #34. Next day, #34 again. It was almost as if, instead of being boosted by overnight sales, it was just returning to the exact same ranking it had yesterday…oh. Oh, I see.

Before my sales figures came in, I already had a sneaking suspicion of what was happening: Apple’s ranks move around a lot during the day, then snap back to their “correct” ranking every morning. That ranking draws on a very long sales history–at least the last two months, maybe much longer. With low total sales across the storefront (or at least in the category of Science Fiction & Literature), and a long window in which sales are credited towards your rank, you can go days on end without a single sale and still get boosted back to your old rank every morning.

That ranking system of “float freely during the day, snap back every 24 hours” is massively different from the very linear ranking systems I’m used to seeing on Amazon and B&N. But I kind of like it. Snapping back every morning ensures ongoing visibility, while the high volatility during the day allows for books that sell a few copies to fly up the charts and maybe sell a few more.

The other implication here is that iTunes is very sticky. Get a book highly-ranked, and it will be there for a goodly while, leading to regular (if quiet) ongoing sales. But that same mechanism means it’s going to be hard to get sticky in the first place.

That’s all the insight I’ve got for now. But the iTunes storefront is pretty interesting, and while the rewards are significantly lower than doing well on Amazon, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to sell enough copies there to do pretty well for yourself. I’m still not sure what to make of the Select conundrum, but the potential of iTunes and Kobo is really starting to pique my interest.

So have I mentioned I’m currently participating in a $0.99 sale with a bunch of other authors? No! I didn’t! Because I’m a bad man whose life has gotten much busier than I’m used to. Anyway, here’s the deal: we’ve got 11 books, including fantasy, thriller, romance, and historical fiction, all priced at $0.99–including what will soon be the newest Kindle Single, George Berger’s Midnight’s Tale. There are some very popular books up right now–Mel Comley’s latest thriller, Monique Martin’s Out of Time (the series to which she’s just released the third book), and of course my someselling epic fantasy novel The White Tree–sequel coming out next month.

Technically speaking, this sale ends after today, but if you’re coming at this even later than I did, I’m sure several of the authors will keep their books discounted for another day or three. Give ’em a look. I said look!

The other day, I read this post by Rolando Garcia looking at trends among Amazon book reviews. He identifies several distinctive distribution patterns among reviews and noted that there may not be any books that have a majority of three-star reviews.

I don’t really have anything to add to his study. I just thought it was neat and interesting and apparently very thorough–he mentions that he looked at 4000 different books to put this together! A trainspotter after my own heart.

From here, it would be particularly cool to take a look at each different distribution pattern and try to identify what kind of book provokes that particular pattern. For instance, his example with Hugh Howey’s Wool would probably be “the fan favorite” whereas Robert Jordan’s Crossroads of Twilight would be like “the former fan favorite who has finally pushed all those fans to the breaking point.” If you had a significant enough number of reviews on one of your own books to see a clear pattern, you could compare it to the catalogue of distribution patterns and get a pretty good idea of what kind of book you wound up writing.

Which.. might just be a roundabout way of confirming something you already knew. Still. It would be interesting! I swear!

Yesterday, Taleist put out their survey of the self-publishing climate, Not a Gold Rush. The biggest news to come out of it is that self-publishing is no get-rich-quick scheme: last year, half of all self-published authors who responded to the survey made less than $500 a year. This was apparently so shocking it was worth mention in the Guardian.

My response? Yeah, no shit.

Having spent most of last year down in the ranks of #100,000 – 866,000 on Amazon, I can attest that there are a lot of people there. Like a literal million!

Let’s do some numbers. It currently takes about 1 sale/day to sustain a rank of #100,000. If you’re selling your book at $2.99 like a good old-fashioned indie, you’re making about $2 per sale. If your book sells 365 copies at $2 apiece, it’s pulling $730 per year. To sell slightly less than that, about 5 copies/week, your rank will hang out in the neighborhood of #150,000. In other words, some 850,000+ books–roughly 85% of Amazon’s listsings–potentially fall beneath that earnings threshold. (Obviously most are traditionally published works that retail for more than $2.99, but bear with me.)

If your rank’s around #500,000, you’re probably only selling about 1/month. In more other words, 50% of the books in the Kindle store are selling 20 or fewer copies per year.

Of course, we’re talking about individual books, which authors are known to produce more than one of. And I don’t know how many of the 850,000+ books that fall beneath that potential earnings threshold are self-published. But that should provide some picture of the scope we’re working with. There are a lot of books. There are a lot of authors. And most don’t sell very well at all.

And you know what? I don’t see how it’s a knock on self-publishing that half of the authors reported in the survey (which covered 1,007 participants) are making $500/year or less. Selling books is hard! It’s amazing that half are making more than $500 a year!

Then again, they probably aren’t, because the survey was self-selecting. Rather than being a truly random sampling of authors, those surveyed opted in, volunteering their information. Almost inevitably, this will skew results towards the most successful side of the environment–people who are doing well be more enthusiastic about sharing news of their success. The more successful writers are the ones most likely to be active on the forums etc. where Taleist culled their data. They’ve caught a lot of flak on this front for a small and unrepresentative sample size.

I’m inclined to be more forgiving. 1,007 authors is actually a pretty big sample. If it were random, the results would be pretty reliable. Even assuming there’s a built-in bias towards the successful side of the scale, we’re looking at results that are probably somewhere in the ballpark of accurate. Same league, anyway. Then again, the Rangers are in the same league as the Twins. That is a baseball joke.

Rather, my main issue with Not a Gold Rush is that most of its stats are correlative.

For instance, they report that “authors who get help (paid or unpaid) with story editing, copy editing, proofreading, and cover design make 34% more than the average.” But what does that mean? That’s not proof that getting help causes success. Instead, outside help correlates with–is somehow related to–success in selling books. But is that because a proofread book will generally sell more books? Or because those authors who are already successful are the ones most likely to be willing and able to hire a proofreader?

Some of these correlations don’t pass the smell test, either. According to their data, authors who tried and failed to acquire agents and traditional book contracts sell worse than those who never tried the traditional route at all. That doesn’t sound at all right to me. That’s the kind of counterintuitive stat that would have me suggesting that perhaps this survey skewed towards the proudest indies out there.

To be fair, the survey purportedly doesn’t present the data in terms of “Doing X causes a YY% increase in earnings.” But we should not rush to draw those conclusions for ourselves, either. You can see how the meaning of these stats is already getting fuzzy–“Judging by this survey of authors who are disproportionately successful to the rest of the self-publishing world, those who did this, that, and the other thing are somehow related, in ways we can’t prove, to a modest increase in royalties.”

So is the data (and the book it’s sold within) worthless? No. At the very least, it is, as others have said, an interesting historical snapshot of where the self-publishing world was at (or nearby) at the time the survey was taken. It will be particularly interesting to compare it to next year’s results, which they’re already planning to collect, and the next several years after that. Furthermore, although much of the data isn’t hard evidence of a cause and effect relationship between the choices you make as an author and the impact of those choices on your sales, it is slight evidence that doing this or that could help give your sales a boost. (I was shocked to learn that only 41% of those polled paid artists to design their covers. Either there are a lot of multi-talented authors out there, or people need to start cracking their wallets!)

Overall, however, I’d treat it with caution. The numbers might not mean what they appear to mean. They’re pretty fuzzy. Interesting, but far from conclusive. Take anything in the book with a grain of salt. Oh, and you should probably treat my perspective on it just as skeptically. After all, it’s not like I read the damn thing.

I’ve been interviewed over at the Self-Publishing Podcast today. The topic is, naturally enough, Amazon’s algorithms past and present and what they currently mean for indie authors, particularly those in Select. The guys asked some really great questions. On top of me rambling about numbers, we got into several discussions about possible strategies to start looking into in light of these new changes, including the importance of categories, pricing, how to best manage your free runs, etc.

Oh, they’re pretty funny, too. I had a great time with it. And according to themselves–always the most reliable source!–they’re the #1 iTunes podcast on self-publishing. I can see why. Go have a listen.

Earlier this month, I predicted unhappily that the recent changes to Amazon’s algorithms would mean Select authors would see fewer sales after making their books temporarily free.

Last week, I made Breakers free anyway.

I don’t really remember what I was expecting out of this run. I think I was hoping to get between 2000-6000 downloads, to sell a few dozen extra copies in the week after, and to get some personal experience with Amazon’s new system. Instead, I gave away nearly 26,000 copies of my book.

I’m going to pause for a second to say that if this makes me sound like some sort of expert at giving away books, I’m not. This was a happy confluence of circumstance. I hadn’t given away many copies of Breakers before and had only been mentioned by any of the major sites once, back in early March and late in the afternoon. When I went free this time, all the major sites listed me. And the book was almost completely fresh to their entire readership. If you want to try to duplicate that, go ahead, but trust me, “do mediocrely for three months in preparation for a gamble on a single massive free run” wasn’t exactly my strategy.

Anyway. So I thought the recent changes would be bad for free runs (and most reports indicate people are seeing a steep decline in post-free sales), but I had a suspicion that if you gave away enough copies–“enough” meaning “enough to land high on the popularity lists despite your giveaway copies being steeply discounted by the formula”–you might be able to do well anyway. And since the new lists count for 30 days instead of 3-4, if you could do well, there’s a chance you’ll do very well.

A day and a half after my free run ended, here’s Breakers:

That’s based on 173 sales and 93 borrows over that span.

I feel like I might have just buried the lede. Lead? Whatever, it’s early. Anyway, what does this mean long-term? I don’t know. I’m trying not to know just yet, because I don’t want to get my hopes up. But prior to this free run, Breakers was #121 on the Technothrillers popularity list and worse than #500 on Science Fiction > Adventure. On day three of its run, it improved to #10 Technothriller and #27 Sci-Fi > Adventure. Right now, it’s #8 and #24. I’m guessing sales will slow down after an initial rush, but hold, driven by the pop lists, at a decent clip, for an unknown length of time. If that happens, I will be a very happy Ed.

Other results: three new very nice reviews, a 5-star and two 4-stars. Also, I learned borrows report almost immediately. Possibly because borrows are completely internal to Amazon and they don’t require any payment processing. So if you have a run like this, when you revert to paid, you’re going to see a wonky ratio of incoming borrows : sales until sales reports start catching up.

I’m going to try to force the goo between my ears to not analyze this any further for the next week. By then, the trend should be more clear. Right now, I’m just going to be happy.

Since going free has been less effective lately (although…), I’m trying out some other strategies to see what happens. So right now, The White Tree is just $0.99 on Amazon (formerly $3.99). I plan to leave it there until Tuesday, 5/22, but I reserve the right to change that plan at any time. It’s my book! I do what I want!

Ahem. In brief, The White Tree is an epic fantasy novel about two young men dragged into a shadowy war and their attempts to hold onto their morality in the face of escalating chaos, violence, and lies. It’s about 150,000 words long–somewhere around 450-600 pages, depending on how you calculate things. I’m currently writing the last chapter of the sequel, The Great Rift, which will be somewhere around 180-200,000 words, depending on what I do with my revisions. In other words: big fat fantasy epics!

Anyway, buy it. Or don’t buy it. I’ll never know. But, you know. Right now, it’s kind of a bargain.

Here’s the cover:

Snazzy, right? Well what are you waiting for?!

Yesterday afternoon, after a lot of discussion and deliberation, I decided to make Breakers free on Amazon for another day. Today, here’s what I woke up to:

At the time, though, I wasn’t at all sure it would be the right decision. As of around 5 PM PST, I was crossing 17,000 downloads. I’d been in the Top 10 all day.

(cont. in a minute, just want to get this picture online real quick…)