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You Too Can Be An Amazon Bestseller
Steve1960 writes "For $10,000 to $15,000, you, too, can be a best-selling author — on Amazon.com. Here's a cautionary tale on how easy it is to game Amazon's sales ranking numbers, and why authors who pay for this might be wasting their money. 'The targeted marketing campaigns contribute volatility to sales-ranking numbers that are inherently unstable. Outside the top 1% or so of books, few sell multiple copies a day, so little separates books with rankings tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, apart. Morris Rosenthal, an author and publisher based in Springfield, Mass., who has studied the Amazon charts, says a day without a sale can send a book ranked 10,000 to as low as 50,000.'"
* Disgusting marketting company proposes astroturfing campaigns to shitty authors for way too much money
* Shitty authors get top Amazon ranks for a little while
* Ranks drop back down because, well, the authors are shitty and in the end, what they write doesn't sell and no amount of astroturfing can change that
* Shitty authors disappointed
Well, duh...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Here's more detail about this on the WSJ "Numbers Guy" blog.
I've been writing professionally now for about nine years (wow - it really has been that long), and I hate to say it, but there are no shortage of scammers who want to take advantage of fresh young writers. And, since a lot of people want to be writers, there are no shortage of marks for these scammers.
As the f'ing article says, the fact of the matter is artificial sales are not sales, and simply won't help. The best way for an author to maximize the sales of his/her book is to write a really good book, and then once it's in print, write another one. That's how you build an audience, and that helps a lot towards propelling your sales up. And, for most of us authors, it's not a short process. You have to love this craft to try to make a living at it, and that's probably as it should be.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
True, which is why if you're going to try to game the system, you might be better off spending that money buying multiple copies of your book along with a few selected, sustained best sellers. Then when someone looks at the best seller, they your book listed as something that other customers also published.
Or if you'd like to participate in a more honest way, I recommend these tools on Amazon, which I've used to promote my Moodle and Training books:
Create a So you'd like to... guide with your book on the guide. Make the guide relevant, not just an excuse for self promotion, and people will actually use your guide. The more people who click into items from your guide, the more Amazon will display it.
Create a Listmania list with your book on it. Again, make it relevant and you'll get better results from that list.
Make search suggestions that are relevant and accurate for your book. "You can specify the search for which you think the item should appear, along with your explanation of why it is relevant. Once approved, we'll show your suggestion in Amazon search to everyone."
Participate in Amazon's Search Inside! program.
Add descriptive content to your book's Amazon listing.
Ditto for adding a cover image.And one that I've been too busy (lazy?) to use, participate in Amazon's blog program, AmazonConnect.
These are all much longer-lasting ways of improving the sale of your book on Amazon. And they're much cheaper than paying someone thousands to game the system for you. But if people really thing it's worth all that money for one hour of dubious fame, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would offer a service to do it for them.
User Training for Busy Programmers
In the late 1980s I worked at a chain bookstore. I walked in one morning and the front table was stacked high with an L. Ron title, 'Battlefield Earth' maybe?
I'd never looked at his fiction so I picked one up and pretty much just laughed out loud and put it back.
We never sold any of them. Not even one. It was crappy, even worse than the Honor Harrington series.
Blah, the advances are part of the problem. Two in three books never earn back their advance. Whenever you see a book that's getting a six figure advance, realize that you're looking at ten authors who didn't get published because of it.
First off, how the advance system works. You sell a book, they give you an advance. This is money given to you upfront. Your agent (if you have one) skims their 15% cut off the top, and probably charges you various fees that take another few hundred from it. A big house's advance may well be over 10k. Medium size houses, a few k. Small houses, little to no advance. No matter what your book does from here on out, that money is yours; you never have to pay it back.
Now, your book goes on sale. Both the publisher and agent push you like crazy to do publicity. They'll help you out a bit, but unless you're a big name author, they won't put much resources into it. Every book that sells from a small bookstore nets you 15%, minus the 15% of that amount taken by your agent, if you have one. Big bookstores, which purchase in bulk, get discounts, and they take part of that discount from you. Someone buys a book at Borders, you may well net only 8% or so, minus the agent's cut. Now, neither you nor your agent see a dime of those royalties *until* your royalties start exceeding the amount of the advance. The publisher gets your royalties until that point.
When a publisher pays a big advance to someone, this limits the number of other authors they can afford to take on. That's money diverted from other advances, cover art, editing, and everything else that goes into bringing a book to market. It distorts the industry when they give away so much money, when more times than not they won't make it back.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."