Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Well does being able to write "Amazon.com Bestselling Author" on your book actually sell books?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
If I were an author (or a musician, or someone selling anything else on Amazon), I wouldn't care too much about the Amazon rankings. I have been shopping at Amazon since it opened, and have never bothered looking at any of the "Top Ranked" for suggestions.
..." feature. I know many times something of interest has popped up using this feature, especially with books, movies, and music.
What definitely gets more customers looking is the "Other customers that purchased also purchased
Spending $10k to bump up a ranking that not too many care about seems to be a misdirected waste of resources.
If your book was a cheap paper back, say $1.99, I bet you could get the #1 spot for a lot less.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Something similar is happening in the podcast world, Scott Sigler, an author who releases all his books for free via podcast, is releasing his second novel to hardcopy in about a week. He's going through a big promotion to try to get Ancestor number one on Amazon for at least a few minutes. Here's a link to his plea. Pretty interesting, but too bad it's probably my least favorite out of all the books he has written.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Sure, but then again book sales are also a function of publicity (which would explain why crappy, ghost-written books by famous people get sold). I remember reading an article on how the NYT bestselling list in itself is largely a publisher scam.
So, I doubt if *just* good writing helps -- one just has to look at the "best sellers" anywhere. And I know several excellent authors who've just not sold enough or are not famous, yet their books (and writing) are phenomenal.
Then again, my writing is largely limited to the crap I spew forth on Slashdot. =)
Thanks for posting that -- and kudos to you for putting forth all of the work necessary to get published! As someone working towards being published, let me attest to the fact that it is a lot of work towards improving your craft. Have I removed unnecessary 'that's and other dead words from my dialogue? Have I struck the right balance between descriptive prose and pushing the plot ahead? Is the POV jumping around? Am I keeping track of persistent issues, such as injuries and the locations of objects? Have the characters' motives for their actions been made clear enough? Do plot and action elements catch the reader up soon enough? The list goes on and on. Looking back at my earlier drafts, I've come to realize why it's recommended that you go through a dozen proofreading/revision runs before you start to submit.
Writing is a business in which supply vastly outweighs demand. It's intensely competitive -- especially in genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, horror), which I write. A query letter to an agent typically has less than a one in a thousand chance of landing representation. For the big agents, the number may be in the tens of thousands. There's a lot of junk out there, it's true -- but there's also an awful lot of talent that you're up against, and only a limited demand. It's not for money -- authors get 15% of sales (less if you buy from places that purchase in bulk, such as big chains). People just want to write. And with all of these people being rejected, there is a staggeringly huge market for scammers.
All writers should know about this site: Preditors and Editors. Writers should live by this rule: You don't pay anything to agents or publishers; they pay you. Not reading fees, not representation fees, not editing fees, nothing. An agent may *deduct* their expenses from your 15% that the publisher pays, but this comes *after the sale*. You never give them money. Ever. Look for AAR representation in agents. If an agent isn't a member, figure out why before you submit. There are good reasons -- new agents starting out, agents who've been in the business for a long time and have a good reputation already, who subscribe to the AAR guidelines without paying for memembership, etc. But be extra cautious. Never submit to an agent without finding what they've sold recently. Double check.
Scam agents aren't the only ones conning people; I've seen all sorts of grabs for writer cash. The "Sobel Prize" writing contest is a good example. There's bulk querying services that e-query your query letter for a fee (and ticks off a thousand agents at once). There's the POD People (Print On Demand**) -- companies that convince people to pay to self publish with them to bypass that evil publishing industry. They sway authors into believing that they'll get the books on the shelves and market authors to readership. Almost nobody stocks them, and almost nobody they publish ever gets heard of by the general public. The facts are that the publishing industry is very picky. There's far less demand than supply, so they have the right to be picky. Sure, they're not perfect. Almost every good author has a laundry list of rejections. But the cream does, overall, tend to rise to the top. If a hundred agents rejected you, you may want to pause for a minute and think about why. It's not them: it's you.
In a way, the industry is biased *toward* new authors. Let's say a big house signs you, and you sell 25k copies. You better sell 50k copies with your next book, 100k with the one after that, and so on. Otherwise, they're not going to keep wanting your books; they want to clear space in their list for the next up and coming author who will sell a million books.
Anyways, one final recommendation for unpublished authors: Miss Snark. If you have any nitwitted ideas about the publishing industry, she'll knock some sense into you.
** - Not all print on demand is bad. It
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
The problem is, there are a huge number of writers out there who think, "My writing's great! If only I could get my book in front of a few more people, I'd be selling thousands of copies..."
Yes, they're deceiving themselves. But taking advantage of that is just downright rude.