# The beginning of the backroom at the 'zon for self publishers?



## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Amazon has the right to run its business the way they want. It's my job to analyze how it is affecting my sales.

1) Someone brought up also boughts. It looks like the glitch happened because they've profoundly changed how they are now happening. I'll explain further down in the post.

Also boughts seem to be more real time, and they've taken out of mine a lot of the trade authors that were there.

2) Categories. Selfies are given separate categories from trades (unless you hit a certain sales amount, then they'll add you to some of those categories for a short while) that the customers are not directed to first.

3) I just noticed my url kdp.amazon.com no longer takes directly to kdp. It's a cookie in my browser history that now just bounces straight to Amazon.com. Now it's kdp.selfpublishing then bounces to "look" like kdp.amazon.com This is new.

4) Free list automatically bouncing people to paid first (that's been around a while.)

I've noticed for a while, but especially now as I have two major ad campaigns going, that most of my sales are held back (not real time) then dumped into my account in the middle of the night so my ranking gets better when everyone is asleep, then falls in the morning.

I think they are dividing self publishers into two separate groups. Some get real time reporting some don't. Some are getting lumped in with trades, some are being a "little bit" segregated via
1) "categories" 
2) and "when" sales are counted, 
3) and "how" their also boughts are decided (in that when hundreds have bought your books in a month, they can pick from less popular or more popular books, but at least* they used to stick to the same genre*. My history mystery _True Treasure_ and _The 15th Star_ were overwhelmingly other history mystery novels, and now it's self published works_ in other genres_. Mainly Hugh Howey's, which aren't history mystery by any stretch.

These are just observations, and I'm trying to figure out how I can deal with them when I'm not busy writing and uploading new books.


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Lisa,
Please breathe.  It will be ok.  I figure in about 30 days, things will get somewhat back to normal.  Right now, we have a new group of readers coming into the pool.  
Free trial+10 books at a time will have readers trying books they have heard about but did not want to spend money on.  Things will be strange for a bit but your readers still love you.


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## Herc- The Reluctant Geek (Feb 10, 2010)

Amazon loves indies. We are the stick with which they hit the trad publishers over the head. 

Without the content we provide, there would be no digital publishing revolution, no KU, and the Kindle eReader would already be history.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Amazon makes more off of indies than they do trade published books. You need to keep in mind that sales have never been recorded in real time. It has always taken a couple hours for sales to record. The sales dashboard is faster than MTD, but it is not immediate. I have always had sales pile up between midnight and 3 a.m. (When Amazon switches over because they're West Coast-based). The last thing Amazon wants is to kill indies. Everyone just needs to chill.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

cinisajoy said:


> Lisa,
> Please breathe. It will be ok. I figure in about 30 days, things will get somewhat back to normal. Right now, we have a new group of readers coming into the pool.
> Free trial+10 books at a time will have readers trying books they have heard about but did not want to spend money on. Things will be strange for a bit but your readers still love you.


 Thank you. Lol, I'm breathing and publishing. 4 of my books are on bestseller lists for their subgenres and one is on Hot New Releases for its genre.

But...I still notice...changes.



Herc- The Reluctant Geek said:


> Amazon loves indies. We are the stick with which they hit the trad publishers over the head.
> 
> Without the content we provide, there would be no digital publishing revolution, no KU, and the Kindle eReader would already be history.


Yes, we are the stick..._be_ the stick...poke...poke...poke them with the stick, then whack them with the stick.


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## John Ellsworth (Jun 1, 2014)

3 of my 4 books are on bestseller lists for their subgenres and one (published Monday) is on Hot New Releases for its genre. Since KU I've noticed an upsurge in sales. Still, no also-bots for my new one _Chase, the Bad Baby_. But that's probably because I'm overly protective of my baby. My sales reporting seems fine--I really don't pay any attention to my ranking or any of that stuff and really couldn't tell you how to find out what it is, if anyone asked me. I'm more interested in the bottom line: How can i write better and better books.

The genie is out of the bottle. Self pub is here to stay and we're part of the revolution.

Thanks.

John


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

LisaGraceBooks said:


> Amazon has the right to run its business the way they want. It's my job to analyze how it is affecting my sales.
> 
> 1) Someone brought up also boughts. It looks like the glitch happened because they've profoundly changed how they are now happening. I'll explain further down in the post.


The thing is, people here think the alsobot glitch is new because no one mentioned it here until a few days ago. It's not new. It's been happening regularly for a while now. At least a few months, but I think it's been going on _far_ longer. Hopefully, more people knowing about it will prompt people to contact Amazon so they can fix it, but this is an oldish glitch at this point with nothing to do with KU or anything recent.


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## Diane Patterson (Jun 17, 2012)

Somewhat related to this topic...is it possible to find out which books have your book as an also bought?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Diane:



dkgould said:


> I'm sure there probably is a problem with also boughts, but I've found yasiv wrong many, many times folks (for instance, right now, it says I have one book pointing to mine when in fact I know there are at least twelve). If you search google with your ASIN number and site:amazon.com you'll be able to see all the books who have you as an also bought. Some of them really don't have them, like the Deborah Bladon book you mentioned, so there IS a problem, but you might want to check and see if yasiv is wrong on yours.


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## Guest (Jul 24, 2014)

Amazon will slowly and inexorably, with the sureness of the movement of glaciers, shove the indies to the back and bring the big names to the front. It will happen, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to stop it. The same thing will happen at iBooks, Google Play and B&N eventually.

Amazon is just a place to sell books. They want control, because control gives them a way to force money out of their customers and suppliers' pockets. They do not care _at all_ about the people or companies that write/publish the books they sell.

The smart authors are building their own bookstores, consisting of platforms they control, and diversifying among platforms they don't control.

If you don't control your books and how they are sold, you will do all the work and someone else will cash the checks. Plan accordingly.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> I looked at your alsobots for 15th Star. Maybe there's a browser difference, but I didn't see any of Howey's books rep'd there. What I did see was a lot of books that were within the past 60 days advertised on Free Kindle Books and Tips, where yours was advertised on June 10.
> 
> Alsobots have always been a function of the company they keep. Two years ago during the Golden Age of Select I was running 10-12 of our SMP romances free together and pushing them all to the Top 100 via group ads so when they came off free they'd be tightly connected with one another and prop each other up. So what you're seeing is nothing different from what it's ever been. You run an ad, your alsobots will change for awhile.
> 
> ...


Hugh Howey's are on True Treasure, my ENT paid Book of the Day today. I'm showing more, so I assume there is a browser difference, which means not everyone is seeing the same thing.

With 2,000 books a day publishing there is downward pressure on the algos. I'm not saying we should be alarmed, but I do notice more segregation not less, which is to be expected with the volume of books being published. 
More fragmentation into more lists, making them deeper, and less time at the top for new releases. The question isn't if its happening, it is happening. The questions is, "How do we deal with it to keep our books in front of our potential readers longer?"

My way to deal with it will be to connect more with my reader base personally, and instead of trying to put out full length books as I have, I will lean more towards serials, and short fiction that is interconnected.


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## Gone To Croatan (Jun 24, 2011)

abdanna said:


> Amazon will slowly and inexorably, with the sureness of the movement of glaciers, shove the indies to the back and bring the big names to the front. It will happen, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to stop it.


Yeah, they'll definitely do that. Because they don't want me buying any more books from them, since I mostly don't buy 'best sellers' these days.

Back in the real world, Amazon has made its money by providing customers with the things they want to buy, and recommending them more things they're likely to want to buy. They don't care whether I buy the new Stephen King novel or a new self-published novel, so long as they make the money either way.

Besides which, so many previously trade-published writers are self-publishing these days, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot and blowing their ass off with the back-blast.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

FWIW, I'm not seeing Hugh's books on your also boughts for True Treasure right now, Lisa. 

Betsy


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

I do not know if anyone has noticed, but we WERE the stick. The revolution is over, and has been for a while now. Not to be a pessimist (I am a realist), but we are a dime a dozen. Indie publishers are now officially antipodal to Amazon; we are the competition. After Amazon became a publisher with it's own Amazon Imprints brand, we are part of the competition. 

Amazon is keeping us around to keep the OTHER large publishers in check and also as a pool from which to scrape the cream off of the top for it's own use in its own brand. When a weapon has served its purpose and is no longer useful, it becomes a relic of history. The flood of indie books into the market was a financial weapon in Amazon's hands. The war is all but over, and Amazon is the clear winner. We are on the shelf right now in case we are needed, but when the terms are final and the surrenders are in order, we are no longer that useful.

As far as how much indies make for Amazon? Oh wow... 

We are a drop in Amazon's large bucket concerning their yearly revenue.  This concept is grossly overrated. Combined we do not make enough revenue for Amazon to lose any sweat whatsoever, and individually even the best-selling indies do not make a splash in Amazon's bank account. We indies still account for just a small fraction of book sales world-wide, even though we have gained some serious ground over the last few years in this regard. 

Is Amazon becoming biased concerning indies? 

Amazon was ALWAYS biased concerning indies... It is just a simple case of the bias switching against us instead of for us. It is no accident that the search algorithms have changed from promoting independently published book visibility to slowly burying it, or that the promotional tools at Amazon are becoming next to worthless instead of kicking sales into high gear, or that the discovery tools like the 'customers also bought' located on Amazon pages are becoming irrelevant, or that Amazon is one-sided towards its own feedback policies. 

There are many who cheer for the wolf. Fine, cheer! That wolf gave us indies a chance. However, that wolf is gobbling up the trads for breakfast and is not being particularly nice about it. What makes anyone think that the wolf will not turn on us when it is done?

A wolf is still a wolf, and Amazon has proven to the big vendors, publishers and competitors that it is a highly aggressive wolf with an insatiable appetite. 

The Zon has big fangs and has proven that it is not afraid to use them.


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## Gone To Croatan (Jun 24, 2011)

Again, Amazon wants to sell everything. Amazon wants a 30% cut of every sale of every thing on the planet. They can't afford to push customers away by not selling them what they want.

As we're seeing with its weirdo restrictions on perfectly legal erotica, writers are more than capable of finding other outlets for their stories, and they take readers with them. Those readers are then less likely to buy their toilet paper, blow-up dinosaurs and bondage gear from Amazon.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> FWIW, I'm not seeing Hugh's books on your also boughts for True Treasure right now, Lisa.
> 
> Betsy


I think I was looking at the wrong list, down below, at the bottom of the page, is a list that scrolls "customers also bought"... and I must have had my screen on that list. But my also boughts continue to change rapidly, so I guess it's more "real time" than my sales are.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

Edward M. Grant said:


> Again, Amazon wants to sell everything. Amazon wants a 30% cut of every sale of every thing on the planet. They can't afford to push customers away by not selling them what they want.
> 
> As we're seeing with its weirdo restrictions on perfectly legal erotica, writers are more than capable of finding other outlets for their stories, and they take readers with them. Those readers are then less likely to buy their toilet paper, blow-up dinosaurs and bondage gear from Amazon.


Actually, that is like saying Walmart loses customers because they switch their inventory from one brand to another, cheaper brand over a five cent per item cost discrepancy. That has happened, yet the Walmart customers who insist on that brand may buy it from a different store, yet still go back to Walmart for everything else. Amazon is the online version of Walmart. Very few people switch their purchasing habits simply because a particular store quits carrying a favorite item. Those customers you mentioned will still go back to Amazon to buy their "toilet paper, blow-up dinosaurs and bondage gear." 

Walmart has set an example for the field. They demonstrated that a mega-merchant can do practically whatever they like and people will still come back, so long as the inventory is huge and the prices are cheap. Amazon's prices will be cheap, after they are finished hammering on the traditional publishers, and the inventory will still be huge... Even if there are no indie titles at all.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> Shelley, there are several thriller boxed sets I've been watching closely since April: a couple released before April, 2 in April, 2 in May and 1 in June. Each of those boxes have snuggled up in each other's alsobots - including the new releases - pretty much right on cue. A PNR box released on July 3 was quickly pointed back to from the boxes I expected it to be cozy with. I've seen delays before (notably last Christmas) but haven't noticed the latest issue being something that was prevalent before July. I mean, the alsobots that do appear are pointing _somewhere_. If you have evidence, though, about it being an older and ongoing issue, would you mind posting more about it in the alsobot thread: http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,190314.0.html


Technically Phoenix,* you are a publisher*, not a self publisher. They treat you and your books different.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

LisaGraceBooks said:


> 1) Someone brought up also boughts. It looks like the glitch happened because they've profoundly changed how they are now happening. I'll explain further down in the post.
> 
> Also boughts seem to be more real time, and they've taken out of mine a lot of the trade authors that were there.


Here's a handy place to check: http://www.yasiv.com/

Enter your title and "Kindle Store" and it'll show you a cloud of also-boughts pointing to your book.



LisaGraceBooks said:


> 2) Categories. Selfies are given separate categories from trades (unless you hit a certain sales amount, then they'll add you to some of those categories for a short while) that the customers are not directed to first.


Umm... I've seen no evidence of this, and I have uploaded recently. Categories remain unchanged, though I have noticed that some extra, new categories were added sometime earlier this year. New subgenres that were previously not present.

But separate? I help run a site that selects featured eBooks every day, so I'm on the lists a lot. I have seen no such segregation, and I'd have noticed.



LisaGraceBooks said:


> 3) I just noticed my url kdp.amazon.com no longer takes directly to kdp. It's a cookie in my browser history that now just bounces straight to Amazon.com. Now it's kdp.selfpublishing then bounces to "look" like kdp.amazon.com This is new.


Again, I've seen no evidence of this. KDP.amazon.com still works for me same as always. No evidence of anything different, at all. And I don't sell nearly as well as you, so if one of us were gonna get ghetto-ized by 'Zon, it'd hit me before it hits you.


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## Jash (Apr 4, 2013)

I've too have seen no evidence of any of these changes. My sales are possibly a little higher than yours (assuming you don't have other pen names), but certainly not high enough to be put in the upper tier of any kind of two tier system. I have no doubt you observed what you observed, but there may be other explanations for all things, especially the stuff that seems to only be happening to you.


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## A.A (Mar 30, 2012)

Diane Patterson said:


> Somewhat related to this topic...is it possible to find out which books have your book as an also bought?


Diane, yasiv.com is com gives a good visual but often doesn't show all the also-boughts.
If you paste in your book's *ASIN* together with *site:google.com site:amazon.com* into a google search, it will bring up every book that has your book on its also-boughts.

Face-palm! Sorry - was half-asleep last night when I wrote that (curled up in my warm bed on a coldddd winter night  )


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## Quiss (Aug 21, 2012)

Edward M. Grant said:


> Besides which, so many previously trade-published writers are self-publishing these days, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot and blowing their ass off with the back-blast.


I'm about as paranoid as they come these days when things are looking pretty bleak.

However, this is a very important point to keep in mind. Perhaps Stephen King doesn't need to consider self-publishing, but a whole lot of midlisters are.


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## scottmarlowe (Apr 22, 2010)

A.A said:


> Diane, yasiv.com is com gives a good visual but often doesn't show all the also-boughts.
> If you paste in your book's *ASIN* together with *site:google.com* into a google search, it will bring up every book that has your book on its also-boughts.


Did you mean site:amazon.com? That does seem to work pretty good.


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## Guest (Jul 24, 2014)

CraigInOregon said:


> Here's a handy place to check: http://www.yasiv.com/
> 
> Enter your title and "Kindle Store" and it'll show you a cloud of also-boughts pointing to your book.


THANK YOU!  I'm adding this to my files.


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## Guest (Jul 24, 2014)

A.A said:


> Diane, yasiv.com is com gives a good visual but often doesn't show all the also-boughts.
> If you paste in your book's *ASIN* together with *site:google.com* into a google search, it will bring up every book that has your book on its also-boughts.


I received a number of results with the tool Diane posted, but I'll try your suggestion now. Thanks! 

P.S. - That should be *site:amazon.com*, and that was flippin' awesome! Thanks again.


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## Diane Patterson (Jun 17, 2012)

Thanks for the ASIN/site trick! I didn't know that one.

Kdp.amazon.com still works for me. #ontopic


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

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## Courtney Milan (Feb 27, 2011)

As someone who had multiple books out this month--some as a self-publisher, some distributed through Macmillan--I can tell you that the also-boughts are being configured exactly the same way for traditional and self-published authors. There have been some shifts to the algorithms, and those shifts favor books that sell more copies. But I do not think that the algorithm differentiates between self-published authors and trad houses.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> You've made this claim before. They do not. I wish they did treat us differently. I wish we had an Amazon rep and all the perks that come with that visibility. We do not.
> 
> You are wrong.
> 
> I use KDP just like everyone else, with the *exact same* strictures as everyone else. Plus, I - *shocked face* - follow hundreds of books that are not part of SMP to collect and analyze the data I do.





Courtney Milan said:


> As someone who had multiple books out this month--some as a self-publisher, some distributed through Macmillan--I can tell you that the also-boughts are being configured exactly the same way for traditional and self-published authors. There have been some shifts to the algorithms, and those shifts favor books that sell more copies. But I do not think that the algorithm differentiates between self-published authors and trad houses.


They do treat you both differently. Don't you get pre-order buttons? You both have trade books, and hit the NYT, thinking you are not, is naive. Every time you go online, Amazon tailors that experience for you, not dependent on you logging in, but on your ip address. 
What you "see" is not necessarily going to be what I or others see.

Amazon has gotten very good at separating out lower tier from higher tier/or hybrids that have trade books represented too.

I'm not being doom and gloom. I think this is a fantastic time to be a self publisher, but what I'm trying to figure out, is how to get to-and maintain the sales to get to the next level, as algos are certainly dividing just about everything on the buy page including also boughts by the ip address viewing the page.

Craig - FYI - I've mentioned Yasiv here several times before. But Yasiv is also an Amazon beta tool, and there has been a drop on some of my books instead of an increase over there too.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Yo, Pearl S. Buck is in my AlsoBoughts for Tidewater, and it doesn't get much more Big Muckity-Muck in historical fiction than Pearl S. Buck. So I'm not too worried.

I think Cin is right: any aberration you're seeing right now is likely due to the craziness the servers are experiencing from the big influx of new KU users. Things will chill out.

I just keep trying to imagine what possible REASON Amazon would have for ghettoizing indie authors. We've made them a bunch of money so far, and our ranks keep getting larger, which means we're making them a bunch MORE money. And the AuthorEarnings report that looked at how much Amazon profits from indies vs. Big Pub showed no appreciable difference between the two. So why would Amazon cut off such a huge revenue stream? Yes, it's possible they could one day wake up stupid and start doing things like Barnes & Noble. But B&N is going out of business because of their stupidity. I highly doubt Amazon has failed to notice that.


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## abishop (May 22, 2014)

When I read the Author Earnings reports and I see the huge chunk of e-book revenue that Amazon is getting from self-published authors I have a hard time believing they have any interest in making moves that will diminish that revenue.  Individual self-published authors may not mean much to them, but the self-pubbed market on the whole certainly does.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

I guess I'd say that, however level the playing field is or isn't (and Amazon doesn't share, so who knows), isn't it true in any kind of publishing that some authors get more support than others--and that they get that support by having good sales? From what I've heard, bestselling trad published authors get editorial and marketing support that midlisters can only dream of, and as for first-time authors--they pretty much get nothing. 

With Amazon, at least all books start out with the same shot. And you have these tools, Select/exclusivity/KU, permafree and wide distribution, ads, whatever, to select from. 

I'm just glad to have been given a CHANCE. I think all any tool can give you is visibility--the chance for your book page to be seen among the vast sea of books. After that, it's on the book cover to grab them, the blurb to hook them, the first page to make them buy or download--and then the rest of the book to make them want to pick up the author's other books. Sometimes my books succeed in that, sometimes they don't. But whether they do or not, with this method, through Amazon, at least I've had the chance to try. Sure beats sending the book out, and out, and out, hearing "no" so many times, until I thought I might as well give up. Sure beats that. 

Change is alarming. It's frightening. It is. All we can do is adapt. That's what I'm trying to remind myself, what I've been reminding myself since I started doing this. "Life is a daring adventure, or it is nothing at all." --Helen Keller. Writing the books--sure as heck a daring adventure. Publishing them, trying to navigate the rocky shoals of marketing and this rapidly-evolving industry--perhaps even more so. Best of luck to all of us.


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## Twizzlers (Feb 6, 2014)

ElHawk said:


> I think Cin is right: any aberration you're seeing right now is likely due to the craziness the servers are experiencing from the big influx of new KU users. Things will chill out.


I hope you're right.

I checked Yasiv yesterday and my books Lost Alpha Part 1, 2, 3 and Taken By The Wolf Part 1, 2, 3 had also boughts pointing towards them, but not many.

My sales have been dropping like crazy, especially today. I check Yasiv again and they have no also-boughts pointing from other authors books, just my own books.

My also boughts completely vanished.

*EDIT* Taken Part 3 has a few pointing towards it, but that's really it.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

LisaGraceBooks said:


> Technically Phoenix,* you are a publisher*, not a self publisher. They treat you and your books different.


One of those boxed sets she mentioned is Thrilling Thirteen (I'm pretty sure, as we published in April and have all those others in our also bots). We are not published by anyone but ourselves. One author from the set took the reins and did most of the set-up. We have received the same treatment, as far as I can tell, as have the boxed sets put out by Phoenix.

ETA: Regarding pre-order buttons, I noticed a recent romance boxed set had them, but I *think* it had more to do them having quite a few authors who are with Amazon imprints. We had one author with an imprint, but I don't think she was able to get us a pre-order button.


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## gorvnice (Dec 29, 2010)

I've been publishing since 2011, under a bunch of pen names in various genres.

What I've seen is exactly what Phoenix is pointing out.  More and more, Amazon algo's reward steady sales and punish falling sales numbers.  For me, there has been a bit of a "punishment" from having just enough fans to launch my book initially, but not enough fans or continued interest to keep up a steady flow of buys.

So lately, each new book rises like a rocket on day 1 (based on an initial buying spree from my readers) and then it swiftly falls, never to rise again.  In the past, my books tended to have a slow and steady ascent to much higher rankings than I get now.

My Amazon sales are slowly decreasing and my sales at Kobo and B&N are taking up a bigger chunk of the pie now.  This is very concerning to me, because I know that Amazon is winning the war overall.  If I'm not selling well at Amazon, it's a problem for my business.

But more and more there is the great CHURN.  The churn is how Amazon moves books that aren't selling as well down the rankings and pushes upwards the books that are selling well.  It seems to move faster and faster.

Back in 2011 timeframe, I had a book in the top thousand on Amazon for close to A YEAR without doing much to boost it.  Nowadays I'm lucky to get a book in the top 2,000 for longer than a couple of days.  That is a big change.

As to how to counter it or game plan for it, unfortunately it seems to be "write more."  Release even faster.  There are other ways, strategies that I see self-pubbed authors using now.  The field is getting more and more competitive but there are certainly plenty of folks succeeding.  So it's not impossible, and I think I could stand to remember that just because it's difficult doesn't mean you hang your head.  There's still a lot of ways to thrive in this current market!


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Hello folks.  Few little things this morning.
I can say from looking at my personal recommendations that Amazon is hiding the trads from me.  As of two days ago, my total # of orders was over 8000 items.  I get 99% Indies recs.
Lisa, your also bots showed you, Marti and someone named Sarah that I didn't know.
Paul, some places Walmart is about the only choice unless you want to spend 3 prices, so they cannot be compared to Amazon.  Amazon is a choose to shop there.  So Amazon can lose more customers than Walmart.
Now last time I checked the going rate for authors was a dime per hundred.
And now I need more coffee.


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Oh and how to become a million seller, write a book that Oprah thinks is the best thing since sliced bread.


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## John Ellsworth (Jun 1, 2014)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> I'll repeat, NO. I get NO perks whatsoever. I do not get pre-order buttons. What I do get is emails telling me I've inadvertently left a price lower on some other site and get it corrected or the book will be removed from sale. That we have an NYT bestseller this year attached to the account has made not a whit of difference, nor that the authors have backlist that are NYT bestsellers.
> 
> And about that NYT bestseller from this year? Every venue outside of Amazon gave it a promo boost. Other than the normal algos and triggered recs, that title received ZILCH support from Amazon. Sales made there were due to author effort.
> 
> ...


Thank you for this.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

J Ryan said:


> I hope you're right.
> 
> I checked Yasiv yesterday and my books Lost Alpha Part 1, 2, 3 and Taken By The Wolf Part 1, 2, 3 had also boughts pointing towards them, but not many.
> 
> ...


Yeah, things are rocky right now for many authors, there's no doubt. The first couple weeks of this month were terrible for me (I'm assuming some kind of ramp-up to KU caused quirks and glitches that impacted sales) but I'm seeing things turn around again.

Give it more time before you freak out, guys! There's probably nothing to freak out over at the moment.


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## Gone To Croatan (Jun 24, 2011)

pauldude000 said:


> Amazon is the online version of Walmart.


I disagree. Amazon wants to be the Everything Store, where you can buy anything you want in one place. Walmart is the Cheap And Crap Store. You'll never buy a Ferrari or executive jet at Walmart, but I'm sure Amazon would sell them if the manufacturer was willing to give them a 30% cut. ('Only one left in stock. $15,000,000. Price has decreased by $3,600,000 since you added this item to your cart. Order by 3pm today for Christmas delivery with *free shipping*!').

We go to Walmart for prescriptions (presumably a loss-leader for them), Thai curry sauce, multi-region video players, and generic cheap crap. There's no point in driving twenty minutes each way there and back to save a few dollars over buying anything else at another store.

Online, there's less hassle in buying from two sites, but that still means two different deliveries which you might have to be in for. If people become accustomed to buying their ebooks from Not-Amazon.com, they're more likely to see that blowup anatomically-correct dinosaur in the 'also boughts' and buy it there rather than going to Amazon instead. Particularly if they're going to Not-Amazon.com specifically because Amazon refuses to sell the ebooks they want to buy, or hides them where they can't easily be found.


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

There's also another factor and that's just the sheer number of books published. I'm an author that moved from relative obscurity to a 4-figure royalty statement so far this month. My books are taking two spots in the Paid Rankings that before they were published, were held by another author/publisher. We can't ALL be at the top at the same time, it's just not possible.

I WILL say that having been an author for 3 years usually hanging out in the nosebleed sections, what ranking 20 sales in a 24 hour period got you back in 2011 takes 50+ in a 24 hour period now. This means the water level has definitely risen in the pool, more ebooks are selling overall. But it also means if you're an author from those early days (and I recognize some of you posting here as long time friends ::waves then the sales etc. from before aren't going to be enough to keep those high rankings. 

This month I am a super happy camper at Kamp KDP. I called help support and linked an ebook and a paperback instantly. I had a book debut on bestseller subgenre lists yesterday. I don't mean to rub anything in, I'm just saying that unfortunately, as some go up, some go down. I reallllllly wish I had been writing more the last 3 years... but now that I'm playing catch up, everything is doing very well.


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## gorvnice (Dec 29, 2010)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> ...what ranking 20 sales in a 24 hour period got you back in 2011 takes 50+ in a 24 hour period now. This means the water level has definitely risen in the pool, more ebooks are selling overall.


Yeah, it's absolutely true that you need to see far more sales to achieve the same rank as you might have in 2011.

But the other undeniable truth, from my experience, is that it's also nearly impossible to stay up as high on the mountain for as long as you could in 2011/2012. Not only is it nearly impossible, but for my newer releases I am seeing a major drop after a few days or a week or two.

This is the kind of rankings drop that used to take anywhere from a few months to nearly a year, and now my book drops that far in a few days&#8230;that's a pretty major difference.

What this means, I believe, is that although more people are selling books, and plenty of them are making money and rising up the ranks, STAYING up and making consistent money from one book is getting more and more difficult.

That means the treadmill just went up another few notches. Enjoy the ride


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

And that the last factor of competition we can beat trad pub on is speed of publishing. :/


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## Lynn McNamee (Jan 8, 2009)

LisaGraceBooks said:


> I think I was looking at the wrong list, down below, at the bottom of the page, is a list that scrolls "customers also bought"... and I must have had my screen on that list. But my also boughts continue to change rapidly, so I guess it's more "real time" than my sales are.


There are 2 Also-Bought lists on every book page.

The first one, located just under the book description, is a list of books purchased by the same customers who purchased your book.

The second one, at the very bottom of the page, is a list of books purchased by people with YOUR purchasing history. In other words, that one is for Amazon to recommend books to you _personally_ because of your history with them. So that one is different for every person, and I'm guessing that's where you're seeing Howey's books.


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## Debbie Bennett (Mar 25, 2011)

CraigInOregon said:


> Here's a handy place to check: http://www.yasiv.com/
> Enter your title and "Kindle Store" and it'll show you a cloud of also-boughts pointing to your book.


Why have I never seen this before? AMAZING!


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

LisaGraceBooks said:


> I've noticed for a while, but especially now as I have two major ad campaigns going, that most of my sales are held back (not real time) then dumped into my account in the middle of the night so my ranking gets better *when everyone is asleep*, then falls in the morning.


Don't forget about the other half of the world that is awake


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

Edward M. Grant said:


> I disagree. Amazon wants to be the Everything Store, where you can buy anything you want in one place. Walmart is the Cheap And Crap Store. You'll never buy a Ferrari or executive jet at Walmart, but I'm sure Amazon would sell them if the manufacturer was willing to give them a 30% cut. ('Only one left in stock. $15,000,000. Price has decreased by $3,600,000 since you added this item to your cart. Order by 3pm today for Christmas delivery with *free shipping*!').
> 
> We go to Walmart for prescriptions (presumably a loss-leader for them), Thai curry sauce, multi-region video players, and generic cheap crap. There's no point in driving twenty minutes each way there and back to save a few dollars over buying anything else at another store.
> 
> Online, there's less hassle in buying from two sites, but that still means two different deliveries which you might have to be in for. If people become accustomed to buying their ebooks from Not-Amazon.com, they're more likely to see that blowup anatomically-correct dinosaur in the 'also boughts' and buy it there rather than going to Amazon instead. Particularly if they're going to Not-Amazon.com specifically because Amazon refuses to sell the ebooks they want to buy, or hides them where they can't easily be found.


I understand, and we are all free to either agree or disagree on this. I find this conversation highly interesting though.

I would like to point out that people who buy online are used to the shipping issue. I buy quite a bit of stuff online myself. Amazon is more of a 'check to see if they have it, then compare prices and shipping elsewhere' store. Shipping is only free for prime members or for purchases over $20, if my memory serves me correctly. There is less of a hesitation online to search elsewhere while you shop as there is in a physical store, because the effort required is only a few keystrokes and doesn't include the cost, time, and effort of transportation to or from another store.

Using the scenario you posted, people might buy their erotica from Smashwords, their blow up dinosaur from China on Ebay, and the toilet paper and other necessities from Amazon using their prime membership for free shipping. As to the Ferrari example... if Amazon could, they probably would.

Amazon is one of the most aggressive retailers to hit the scene since Walmart. However, being customer-centric combined with a highly aggressive business stance does not make them friendly to retailers or sellers of any kind. It means you play ball using their rules or you get kicked out of the game or set on the bench.

Walmart... What defines Walmart... Walmart is an eclectic 'we have most anything you want or need and if we don't, that's tough' store that carries both good products and super-cheap junk, often right next to each other on the same shelf. It is like a mixture between Sears and your local Dollar store. They would be crushing Amazon if they didn't make a royal blunder in their online presence, which is a joke. The concept of an online store that only ships to their stores was, IMHO, inane to be polite, inept if I wasn't desiring to be polite. It doesn't matter anyway, as they still lead the retailer pack on the global market concerning yearly revenue.

Please understand that I neither like nor dislike either Amazon or Walmart. They are businesses. Amazon is an outlet for self publishing, and at this time appears to be making a major and aggressive business move to capture even more of the eBook market.

When you see the headlights of a bus coming, you react instead of standing in the middle of the road, hoping the bus will miss you. Most of us will have seen deer that made that mistake, as an example. Any major marketing move by a major player in any financial market is like a bus. Either it will carry you, it will pass you by, or it will run over you. That bus will not stop.

Kindle Unlimited is potentially a truly brilliant marketing move by Amazon, with equal potential as their Prime service. ScribD and the others like it had a great idea but were too small of players to make it work without a long enough time span. Amazon just took away a huge portion of their potential market. Smashwords should have come up with it first, yet from what I have seen they are not really innovators in the game.

(Sorry Mr. Coker if you read this, but you cannot play catch up and win the game at the same time. Change strategies and become an innovator and catching up will happen by itself. Smashwords could take the board if it wanted to.)


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

DebBennett said:


> Why have I never seen this before? AMAZING!


It's cool looking, but I've not found it to be accurate. Many others say the same.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Joliedupre said:


> I received a number of results with the tool Diane posted, but I'll try your suggestion now. Thanks!
> 
> P.S. - That should be *site:amazon.com*, and that was flippin' awesome! Thanks again.


Can you or someone else show the exact format of how to do that? I'd be grateful. 

P.S. I'm growing concerned that WC is starting to sound like "the conspiracy table" at any dining hall area.

A "conspiracy table" is where random people gather (sometimes in tinfoil hats) to talk about all their conspiracy theories, and none of them can ever be talked out of these theories by something as middling as, oh, evidence...  LOL j/k But seriously... all this kerfufel over a value-added feature from Amazon seems a bit over the top. Chicken Little, please report to the E.R. Dr. Little, your patient, Skye, needs you in the E.R. stat! She's falling and she can't get up.


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

go to google.com

in the search bar type

ASIN site:amazon.com

Put YOUR ASIN in for ASIN

So for my book, I put in B00LJK7LFC site:amazon.com
and got 238 results. 

The first results have you on the higher pages, while later results you might be on page 3 or 4 of the also boughts.


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Paul: It is $50 for free shipping without prime.  But some sellers ship free anyway.
Walmart will ship to your house for a shipping fee.  Which makes sense because they can't just put it on their truck.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

pauldude000 said:


> Kindle Unlimited is potentially a truly brilliant marketing move by Amazon, with equal potential as their Prime service. ScribD and the others like it had a great idea but were too small of players to make it work without a long enough time span. Amazon just took away a huge portion of their potential market. Smashwords should have come up with it first, yet from what I have seen they are not really innovators in the game.


Not until Amazon persuade Big Pub to sign on the dotted line - presently KU is somewhere to read KDP books plus a few specially bought in trad published books. In the meantime Scribd have the trad pub loving game to themselves for those who either don't have an iPad or don't live in the States (for them there is Oyster). While on geographic limitations of Scribd's rivals remember that KU is a US-only product.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> Sales dumping does happen and rank is delayed. In fact, sales rank peaking in the wee hours has been going on for at least 2 years that I know of. But that's a function of when batch processing happens in the late afternoon/early evening coupled with the normal rank delay. Sales aren't "held back," they just aren't processed into your spreadsheet report, which has never made claim to be real-time reporting.
> 
> Amazon is not a level playing field and never has been. I absolutely expect more downward pressure on books via the algos (and I think that's happening now, I just don't have the hard data yet to back it up) and a widening of the gap between the have's and the have not's.


My sales for July 22 were held back for an entire day. They were held in orders and not recorded until July 23. Of course, it hurt my author ranking. I've had a long history of problems with KDP. Sales on my books have plummeted this past week. Who knows what they're doing to the algorithms? You're right: Amazon isn't a level playing field.


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## Twizzlers (Feb 6, 2014)

It just makes me feel better that I'm not alone with sales plummeting.


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## Twizzlers (Feb 6, 2014)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> go to google.com
> 
> in the search bar type
> 
> ...


It just makes me feel better that I'm not alone with sales plummeting.

Yeah I did this with my Lost Alpha Part 1. It had a ton of also-boughts pointing towards it last week. Now it only pulled 21 results. Something screwy is up.


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

Mercia McMahon said:


> Not until Amazon persuade Big Pub to sign on the dotted line - presently KU is somewhere to read KDP books plus a few specially bought in trad published books. In the meantime Scribd have the trad pub loving game to themselves for those who either don't have an iPad or don;t live in the States (for them there is Oyster). While on geographic limitations of Scribd's rivals remember that KU is a US-only product.


True, it is only a US product... right now. You have to remember that this is the trial run of the product, the shake-down cruise so to speak. Prime used to be a US only product as well until it proved itself, but is now available overseas. KU is nothing new as a concept, just another subscription service. If KU takes off as they suspect (or they never would ave bothered with it), then it should become available overseas as well in a year or two, just like Prime subscriptions.


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## BBGriffith (Mar 13, 2012)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> go to google.com
> 
> in the search bar type
> 
> ...


You can also go to sort by images, which gives you a cool medley.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> go to google.com
> 
> in the search bar type
> 
> ...


I tried this, but I see no also-boughts. This is the same book where I got 150+ also-boughts in my cloud of also-boughts on YASIV.


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## A.A (Mar 30, 2012)

Joliedupre said:


> I received a number of results with the tool Diane posted, but I'll try your suggestion now. Thanks!
> 
> P.S. - That should be *site:amazon.com*, and that was flippin' awesome! Thanks again.


Sorry yes - I've fixed my post. That was the last thing I typed before nodding off to sleep last night and my brain got it back the front. 
I used to do SEO for people in a previous life, and google is fantastic for finding lots of things at any particular website when you do a search like that ("your search term" site:website.com)


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## A.A (Mar 30, 2012)

Craig, if you scroll through the also-boughts of those books listed in the results, do you not see your book anywhere?

Edit: I just had a look myself for your book, Nice Girl Like You, and yes, it's there in those other books also-boughts.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

A.A said:


> Craig, if you scroll through the also-boughts of those books listed in the results, do you not see your book anywhere?


Is that how it works?

Weird.

It gave me 17 results, and the first two are my own book, so they don't count. YASIV seemed to produce more.

I wasn't expecting the kind of read-out that produced, either, so my bad on that...


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## Rayven T. Hill (Jul 24, 2013)

Remember that Google doesn't crawl every page every day. The results can be up to a week old so there could be others that aren't listed and some of the listed ones may have fallen off. It's only a guideline.


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

Yasiv is not reliable. It's fun to look at it, but it does not provide useful info. 

No idea what you're saying about it being an Amazon Beta tool, Lisa.

There's a lot of good info in this thread if you listen to Phoenix and Courtney and a few others. Some of the rest? Not so much.


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## Silly Writer (Jul 15, 2013)

CraigInOregon said:


> I tried this, but I see no also-boughts. This is the same book where I got 150+ also-boughts in my cloud of also-boughts on YASIV.


But the cloud on Yasiv only has one of your own book's pointing *Back* to it. Can't compare that...those are outgoing also-Boughts. Not incoming, for that particular book.

That happened to me too, but google found a bunch more today. Yesterday it was 4.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

L.L. Akers said:


> But the cloud on Yasiv only has one of your own book's pointing *Back* to it.


Well, hey... at least my book is good for producing sales for others!


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## A.A (Mar 30, 2012)

L.L. Akers said:


> But the cloud on Yasiv only has one of your own book's pointing *Back* to it. Can't compare that...those are outgoing also-Boughts. Not incoming, for that particular book.
> 
> That happened to me too, but google found a bunch more today. Yesterday it was 4.


Craig, this ^
I just checked on yasiv, and the only book pointing to that particular book is another of yours - The Devohrah Initiative.
Which isn't accurate, as there are quite a few others that have your book in their also-boughts, as you've just seen


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## gorvnice (Dec 29, 2010)

A lot of folks seem confused about Also Boughts.  It takes time to see how the system works, and it's not always clear when or how they're affected.  But the Google search listed above works 100 percent better than Yasiv, from what I can tell and what others have stated.

There are a lot of other points being made that seem confused as well.  While there is tremendous fear-mongering and speculation going on, I do think that there is a tremendous shakeup happening.

I actually have felt for the last six or eight months that selling ebooks at Amazon has gotten progressively more difficult, more competitive, and that the algorithm "churn" was making it difficult for my best selling work to stay high up in the rankings.

What Amazon is trying to accomplish isn't completely clear.  I don't know what their endgame is.  For sure, some folks will absolutely benefit and ride the wave.  So far, I haven't been one of them.

Do I think it's a conspiracy against indies?  Not really.

But I do think that the algorithm churn being so fast is generally bad for my business.  I have to put out way more books to make the same amount of money, because once my book's sales slow down, the algorithms essentially open the trap door and the book is finished.  There used to be more of a roller coaster feel, with my book cycling up and down, then up again, then down, then up, and sometimes maintaining steady ranking for months on end.

Those days are over.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> Shelley, there are several thriller boxed sets I've been watching closely since April: a couple released before April, 2 in April, 2 in May and 1 in June. Each of those boxes have snuggled up in each other's alsobots - including the new releases - pretty much right on cue. A PNR box released on July 3 was quickly pointed back to from the boxes I expected it to be cozy with. I've seen delays before (notably last Christmas) but haven't noticed the latest issue being something that was prevalent before July. I mean, the alsobots that do appear are pointing _somewhere_. If you have evidence, though, about it being an older and ongoing issue, would you mind posting more about it in the alsobot thread: http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,190314.0.html


The evidence isn't my to data share, as it comes from a friend's friends, so to speak. But I haven't taken it on faith--I've paid attention, too. Speaking generally, for at least the last three months, there's a span of days during which books published on those days don't get incoming alsobots like they should. It has been discussed elsewhere in detail and documented to have happened in at least May, June and now July, though I think April was when people started noticing. This month's glitch was just more of the same. I'm sure it's expected to happen again in August if Amazon doesn't fix it. I expect it to, and will adjust my publishing schedule accordingly to avoid it.

Books published on dates outside the glitch window aren't affected. I think that window in July amounted to just over two weeks, longer than before. Books published in that window, whether on the first day or the last, all got their alsobots at once. Two weeks isn't out of the realm for a book that struggles to sell. Books that barely sell can have also-viewed for weeks, months or years, or end up with one or two alsobots instead of pages of them. But we're not talking about those kinds of books.

I'm going to make a careful study of this with several titles per day from tomorrow or so until this time next month. Hopefully it will be time wasted for nothing because the glitch is no more. And before someone suggests it, whether the books are indie, trade, Select or not, the glitch doesn't appear to discriminate. That's why it's probably a glitch and nothing more nefarious.

Also, Yasiv has never been accurate for me, ever. I wouldn't base anything on what it shows.


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## Courtney Milan (Feb 27, 2011)

LisaGraceBooks said:


> Every time you go online, Amazon tailors that experience for you, not dependent on you logging in, but on your ip address.


Except I'm at RWA right now, and I can go to the hotel computer--which has never been associated with me--and it will show me the exact same thing. Amazon only ever shows different things when they're A/B testing.



LisaGraceBooks said:


> Amazon has gotten very good at separating out lower tier from higher tier/or hybrids that have trade books represented too.


There is no evidence that Amazon is favoring hybrid authors in the algorithms. None. The only evidence is that Amazon is separating out authors on the basis of success.



LisaGraceBooks said:


> I'm not being doom and gloom. I think this is a fantastic time to be a self publisher, but what I'm trying to figure out, is how to get to--and maintain the sales to get to the next level, as algos are certainly dividing just about everything on the buy page including also boughts by the ip address viewing the page.


First, why on earth would Amazon do this? It doesn't sell more books. Are you telling me that Amazon is showing YOU different also-boughts for your book than it will show me, and it's doing that to me because I'm more successful as an indie? That makes literally no sense. It only makes sense for Amazon to tailor to me by my buying habits, not on the basis of my selling habits.

Second, can you please give a screenshot of this screen of yours that looks so different than mine? Because as far as I can tell, nobody is seeing it but you, and to the extent that your also-boughts differ, it is explainable by your past advertising.

Finally, if what you are saying is, "Amazon does not treat self-publishers or traditional publishers differently, but it does separate out authors on the basis of success"--then yes, you are right. I have never denied that. But Amazon does not care who you are. They're a big data operation, and the only grease the algorithm needs is how you sell.

If you sold the same number of books in the same way that I did, the algorithms would treat you precisely the same way they treat me. There is no evidence that I have seen that suggests that different accounts behave differently, that traditionally published books have also-boughts calculated on a different schedule or scale than self-pubbed accounts.

There are changes being made to the also-bought system that I have noticed, and those changes do penalize books that sell less. But those changes are happening across the board, regardless of publication method. It sucks for those who sell less, but I'm not surprised this is happening, and don't think that Amazon has any choice about it.

At some point, when I'm not at RWA, I'll write up what I think is actually happening with also-boughts--but right now, I think you're coming to the wrong conclusion on the basis of some extremely flimsy evidence.

Right now, my best guess is that Amazon is figuring out how to scale their also-bought algorithms over the number of books that they have. They can't keep crunching also-boughts the way they have--they don't have the computing power any longer. And when Amazon doesn't have the computing power, the computing power doesn't exist. That means the algorithms have to change.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Alsobots look the same to everyone. The only conceivable way they look different is if one person needs to clear her cache is and is getting old data.


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## gorvnice (Dec 29, 2010)

shelleyo1 said:


> The evidence isn't my to data share, as it comes from a friend's friends, so to speak. But I haven't taken it on faith--I've paid attention, too. Speaking generally, for at least the last three months, there's a span of days during which books published on those days don't get incoming alsobots like they should. June and now July, though I think April was when people started noticing. This month's glitch was just more of the same.
> Books published on dates outside the glitch window aren't affected. I think that window in July amounted to just over two weeks, longer than before. Books published in that window, whether on the first day or the last, all got their alsobots at once.


Wow, this was great information, thanks for posting it. Posts like yours and Phoenix's are why this board really is must-read for self-publishers, despite the fact that there is also a lot of misinformation floated. Thanks so much, hope you'll continue to update us with any new insights about this problem.

Edit: Also Courtney's post. I hope you really will write up what you think is going on with the Also Bought's, Courtney, and what your theories are as to how all of these necessary changes will affect publishers/authors.


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## MorganKegan (Jan 10, 2013)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> And that the last factor of competition we can beat trad pub on is speed of publishing. :/


Definitely. Here's an example. I love Molly Harper's Half-Moon Hollow series of books. Her publisher is S&S. Her latest book in the series is a Christmas tie-in short story. I bought the Audible audio version and loved it. The ebook version is currently on pre-order and won't be delivered until NEXT YEAR.


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## Jan Strnad (May 27, 2010)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> I looked at your alsobots for 15th Star. Maybe there's a browser difference, but I didn't see any of Howey's books rep'd there. What I did see was a lot of books that were within the past 60 days advertised on Free Kindle Books and Tips, where yours was advertised on June 10.


You frighten me. I don't even know this stuff about my own books, and you can just pop it up. Scary.

Also, just for the record, that woman I had lunch with last Thursday is a business associate. And I have never been to Duluth.


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Phoenix pops up regularly on Amazon's recommendations for me.  She is magic.


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## gorvnice (Dec 29, 2010)

MorganKegan said:


> Definitely. Here's an example. I love Molly Harper's Half-Moon Hollow series of books. Her publisher is S&S. Her latest book in the series is a Christmas tie-in short story. I bought the Audible audio version and loved it. The ebook version is currently on pre-order and won't be delivered until NEXT YEAR.


The thing is, this isn't a competition between indie's and traditional publishers. We're all in the same pot, swimming around together. So just because you can put out books faster than a trad author, there are still tons of books being released every day. Every single day more books flood the system.

Now, depending on how Amazon sets up the algo's, I might have an advantage if my book has been selling well for two or three weeks and the new books snapping at my heels haven't been selling well for as long.

But the way I see it, by Amazon upping the churn rate through their algorithms, they've essentially made it so that hour by hour my book is competing with every other book that's released. So if my sales start to drop off for a few hours or a day, I start to lose ground. And then this just hastens my demise, since my sales will slow a little more, hence my rankings drop even more precipitously, and then soon I'm in the dustbin.

You might say that this is how it always worked, but not in my experience. For whatever reason, and I'm sure there are many reasons, Amazon's algo's seem much more punitive now when sales slow. Even a slow couple of hours or half a day seems to have major impact. Whereas in the past, as I stated, many times I might have a lull and my ranking would drift down but then pop up and zoom all the higher. That seems not to happen anymore. Again, just my experience.

Whether or not trad writers publish fast or slow, the main impact comes from how the platform (in this case Amazon) weights its algo's and how they tend to churn new titles up through Also Boughts, lists, promotions, etc.

I think what we're seeing here is that Amazon is effectively sinking books that slow down in sales, and rewarding books that have an influx. However, if you're influx of sales is relatively short (like a promotion), you'll soon be penalized, as within hours your book will begin its descent (as soon as sales start to taper off).

The fact that trad publishers force their authors to slow their output makes little difference to the overall pot, which is still teeming with books and is constantly growing every day.


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## Jan Strnad (May 27, 2010)

> I actually have felt for the last six or eight months that selling ebooks at Amazon has gotten progressively more difficult, more competitive, and that the algorithm "churn" was making it difficult for my best selling work to stay high up in the rankings.


I agree that it's getting harder. But I expect that.

Look at it:

More people than ever are publishing books. Ebooks don't go out of print. If they were physical books, we'd be up to our eyeballs in them.

More books means more quick-and-dirty filtering by readers, means lower prices, means more churn at places like Amazon.

The natural tendency for a retailer would be to skim off the top, to feature the top sellers, to grab the easy fruit, just as it's easier for readers to do that. The gap between the haves and have-nots is only going to widen.

Our response to lower sales per book: Write more books. The law of diminishing returns kicks in. I have no idea how to break this cycle.


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## gorvnice (Dec 29, 2010)

Jan Strnad said:


> I agree that it's getting harder. But I expect that.
> 
> Our response to lower sales per book: Write more books. The law of diminishing returns kicks in. I have no idea how to break this cycle.


Agreed. And my concern is also that its not too much of a stretch for me to imagine a time when even insanely fast release schedules just won't cut it anymore. And that's scary, because that really is the one area that I've always been able to control.


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Jan,
Please explain quick and dirty cause I have many authors to get too.
Quick make the first 5% good and then get better.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Jan Strnad said:


> Our response to lower sales per book: Write more books. The law of diminishing returns kicks in. I have no idea how to break this cycle.


Write BETTER books. Be (one of) the best in your genre. More isn't good enough. More + top-notch quality is what'll make readers remember you.


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## Vaalingrade (Feb 19, 2013)

This is why I made sure my entire career wasn't dependent on having the most mercurial, opaque and drunkenly capricious sales channel as my sole business partner.

Amazon tells you nothing. Amazon discusses nothing. Amazon barely notices you exist until you do something 'wrong' where 'wrong' is defined by the aforementioned drunken capriciousness. I'll pay them 30% for shelf space, but I'll never put my trust in them.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

***********


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

Fwiw I agree with Phoenix. I literally kept waiting for my new releases to tank but The Trouble With Horses has bounced between #2500 and #3500 in paid kindle store for two weeks now. My experience with my book and other books I've promoted is you go up, you float down. It seems somehow I've magically made it to some "we like you" category for the algorithms. And as the book has been on more Also Boughts it goes right back up. I released another novella this week and that helped it bounce more. I feel lucky but I also have the backing of a decent reader group that helps me 100% of the way. No idea how long it will last but never,ever did I dream I could ever release a book and start of sub genre best seller lists and that's what both novellas have done. And today I penned 1800 on the next one. Who knows when the algorithm will change and I will be wondering what happened.


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## gorvnice (Dec 29, 2010)

Phoenix has been posting really excellent analysis of the situation, for which I'm grateful.  It's a competitive advantage and I wouldn't blame Phoenix one bit for choosing not to put that knowledge out there for those of us (like me) who haven't collected the data or figured out why these things are occurring.

I think it's great if we can get this sort of information out to parse, because my feeling is that this is just the beginning of a very rocky road.  Finding ways to alter my strategy is going to be key in maintaining success in the future.


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## Twizzlers (Feb 6, 2014)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> Fwiw I agree with Phoenix. I literally kept waiting for my new releases to tank but The Trouble With Horses has bounced between #2500 and #3500 in paid kindle store for two weeks now. My experience with my book and other books I've promoted is you go up, you float down. It seems somehow I've magically made it to some "we like you" category for the algorithms. And as the book has been on more Also Boughts it goes right back up. I released another novella this week and that helped it bounce more. I feel lucky but I also have the backing of a decent reader group that helps me 100% of the way. No idea how long it will last but never,ever did I dream I could ever release a book and start of sub genre best seller lists and that's what both novellas have done. And today I penned 1800 on the next one. Who knows when the algorithm will change and I will be wondering what happened.


My books have had higher rankings than that (and two still do) and have been top 100 all the way to top 10 in the sub categories and the algorithm is still kicking my butt and I'm vanishing from also bought lists like crazy. 
Guess I'm not in the "we like you" category. I need to figure out how to get there.


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## KaraKing (May 25, 2012)

On a separate note about categories&#8230;

I've recently noticed a big change in the way the books are appearing in my main category of Books > Self-Help > Relationships > Love & Romance. There are tons of books in the category that are not even listed in the category. 
Now I know some people can use keywords to get into sub categories, so that they appear in more than their two assigned categories... but we don't have a page of keywords on kdp for these categories. So, I don't understand how they're getting on there. And it's only happening in the two large categories of love and romance and interpersonal relations.

Also what's weird to me is that this is knocking books that are assigned to this category to the back of the list, making it hard for readers to find what they're looking for because they are seeing many of the same books show up in multiple categories. This is causing a lot of books to lose exposure, while allowing other books triple, quadruple, and even five times exposure! This is very unfair to some, while being very helpful to others. It was such a huge change that my rankings went from an average of 1300 - 3500 to 3500 - 8000. Such a drastic change I had to leave the category and abandon ship and go to the divorce category just to maintain the top 20 exposure. Of course, there could be other reasons for the decline. However, my kindle rankings remain steady. So, I'm not sure what to think.

I have listed a few examples of books where this is happening, along with links, at the end of this post. If you look at these examples, you will see on their pages, none of their categories are Books > Self-Help > Relationships > Love & Romance. However, if you go to the best sellers list in Books > Self-Help > Relationships > Love & Romance, all of these books are appearing in the category.

This is greatly affecting sales for me. It makes me wonder who else has been affected by this. Don't get me wrong this is great if you get picked up in multiple categories, but what if you don't? What if you just end up being one of the books that's pushed to the back of the list to make room for books to have quadruple exposure. I just don't see how this is fair to readers or authors. There are books in the category that don't truly belong there. Here's two examples...

Sex at Dawn (Currently showing up at #23 on Love and Romance, and not even listed in Love and Romance) 
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Dawn-Stray-Modern-Relationships/dp/0061707813/ref=zg_bs_4733_15

The Game
http://www.amazon.com/The-Game-Penetrating-Society-Artists/dp/0060554738/ref=zg_bs_4733_37


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

***********


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

J Ryan said:


> My books have had higher rankings than that (and two still do) and have been top 100 all the way to top 10 in the sub categories and the algorithm is still kicking my butt and I'm vanishing from also bought lists like crazy.
> Guess I'm not in the "we like you" category. I need to figure out how to get there.


It might be perspective, too.  I went from earning $10 every few months to the first month I've EVER seen a 4-digit royalty statement and I didn't do a free run or countdown or major advertising like Bookbub.


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

Wow. I'm really worried. I just spent hundreds of dollars on ads, hoping for a big break, when I run my first Kindle Countdown on my first YA novel starting this weekend. Now I wonder if the ship has already sailed for big breaks through Kindle Countdown Deals.


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## KaraKing (May 25, 2012)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> The Books list is different from the Kindle list. There isn't a category for Love and Romance on the Kindle side. It could well be the cats for the paperback cats are being chosen separately from the Kindle cats.
> 
> Here's what I see for *The Game*, Kindle Format:
> 
> ...


I'm strictly referring to paperbacks. Yes, they are all blended on that category. But, I am referring only to book versions. In fact, my kindle version has no problems ranking on that list and has remained where it's always been. It's my paperback that got the shaft.


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## ecg52 (Apr 29, 2013)

Face-palm! Sorry - was half-asleep last night when I wrote that (curled up in my warm bed on a coldddd winter night  )
[/quote]

Cold winter night? Can I come over? Pretty please? It was 116 here in Phoenix today. I could use a cold winter night.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Marilyn Peake said:


> Wow. I'm really worried. I just spent hundreds of dollars on ads, hoping for a big break, when I run my first Kindle Countdown on my first YA novel starting this weekend. Now I wonder if the ship has already sailed for big breaks through Kindle Countdown Deals.


I wouldn't worry too much. I just did extremely well with a Bookbub/Countdown promo. Not only did I make back substantially more than the step price of the promo, I got a substantial boost across all my HF.

People have a tendency to panic. 

ETA: What's more I have heard rumors from pretty credible sources that Amazon is planning some additional ... something for indies. Only rumors, but I wouldn't be surprised.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

***********


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

KBOARDS AFTER DARK​
Hey all, I just received this communication, garbled in transmission. Make of it what you will.


```
Amazon Private Communi...
TO: Big 5 Publi...
RE: The Plan

                         ...jor Kindle initiative to suppress ind...
          ..ck them over big tim....

And to our ally, Hache.....
                                  ...ally grateful. Furthermore, as to algo...
     ...vantages that will bury them fo...


...tler and Musso...
                             ..y comparison. In other news, our lat...
        ...hn Locke, penned by James Pa...
                           ..only the best! So be sure to dia...
       ..lic exec...

**beyond this point, transmission deteriorates**
```
So... have at it, all you eagle-eyed theorists!


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> Uh, my research says otherwise, Jan... Pictures posting tomorrow
> 
> Coupling *Shelley's* observations that the alsobot issue seems cyclical and may be becoming 1) more easy to spot and 2) predictable with *Courtney's *theory that the processing power needed is placing too much of a burden on the servers (that rely on load-balancing and batch-processing systems to distribute the workload), then it makes sense that crunch work is being divided up into more manageable bits.
> 
> ...


People can argue with me on this if they like, but Courtney was guessing. Worse, it was an unrealistic guess. The concept of server loading is a problem when you are talking downloading bandwidth in peak sales times. Sorting data on the measly scale of a few million items wouldn't load down much at all. No-one is using 486 computers any more. Your average gaming system could almost handle that load, since you are talking only books which have sold copies get ranked or also-boughts, let alone a bank of high end servers. It is not like they are performing the calculations with a laptop. They probably have every book published on their entire store loaded onto one twelve terabyte storage array considering that each file is generally less than five megabytes (2,000,000 X .005 gigabytes).

To consider what we are talking about here, each server probably uses thirty-two eight-core Intel iTanium processors per each server, with ten or more servers running in each bank. Most huge-traffic systems run several banks of servers. They can process data at a rate that the old cray supercomputers would choke to death on.

The fact that the turnover churn is getting faster, the new changes in algorithms are fairly constant, the Zon has started a whole new system, ranking is more complex, along with everything else that is happening only goes to prove my point. Their system is far from overloaded or they would have to actually make the system simpler and not more complex like they are doing. Every additional complex change on the overall system increases the necessary computation and throughput time.

I can see how people could make this mistake, as most people are not used to the concept of ultra-high bandwidth complex commercial server systems.


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

For the number crunchers...

Amazon gets 164,000,000 unique visitors every month.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/271450/monthly-unique-visitors-to-us-retail-websites/

In a thirty day month, that is approximately 5,466,667 unique (different individual) visitors per day...

Their systems are not overloaded by a few million books. Just the concept of how much information is passing through their system on daily page views alone is mind boggling. For that matter, the sheer volume of data computation on a minute by minute, or second by second basis is mind numbing.

WOW!


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

Marilyn Peake said:


> Wow. I'm really worried. I just spent hundreds of dollars on ads, hoping for a big break, when I run my first Kindle Countdown on my first YA novel starting this weekend. Now I wonder if the ship has already sailed for big breaks through Kindle Countdown Deals.


Don't forget to book a UK Countdown as we don't have a KU. Incidentally, Belgium does have a KU its their most prestigious university and shares a city with the brewers of Stella Atois beer, but they don't have an Amazon KU.


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## Hugh Howey (Feb 11, 2012)

My six cents (not a supersensory power, just my thoughts in three easy payments):

1. The advent of Amazon imprints has shifted promotional energies away from indies. I imagine this is less conspiratorial than it is both economics and internal business wrangling. They have advances and expenses to earn out. And A-Pub is separate from KDP in a way that I can imagine business meeting where two different divisions are fighting over the same promotional muscle. The people in each division still want to give primacy to their constituent authors, but whoever mediates between the two is having to ensure that both get their turn. That's a new drain on the limited pool of merchandising dollars and focus.

2. Self-published authors will never be thrown into a separate Amazon, the way Steven Zacharius would like to see it happen. It's simply not possible. Forget the philosophical debate and how this would run counter to everything Amazon has been about and has built, but look at the practical: Thousands of small publishers use KDP and CreateSpace for their publishing endeavors. They are a very good chunk of Amazon's publishing revenue. Not only would it be difficult to tease out the small presses from the self-published authors, but the latter can easily morph into the former and continue business as usual. Even if they have to form a non-profit collective to do so. Again: Amazon not only WON'T do this; they CAN'T do this.

3. Self-published authors are a non-trivial source of Amazon's publishing revenue. They make 30% on most titles, which is SIX TIMES what they make on most traditionally published titles due to having to discount their ebooks to reasonable levels. Also: POD is also a non-trivial portion of print sales, and Amazon makes a good margin here due to their vertigal integration with CreateSpace.

Something else to think about: Amazon currently sells 50% of print books, according to industry estimates. Look at any category bestseller list in the overall Amazon store, and see how far down you have to go to find the first print book. When I checked Mystery/Thriller/Suspense, the first print book was at position #40. There was an audiobook at #24. All estimates of ebook penetration are way low. Amazon has this data. They can see the future. And they know KDP plays a big part in that future.



Jan Strnad said:


> Also, just for the record, that woman I had lunch with last Thursday is a business associate. And I have never been to Duluth.


LMAO!!!


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Thanks, Hugh. 

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## valeriec80 (Feb 24, 2011)

I too think that also-boughts changing probably has very little to do with the capacity of Amazon's servers. 

I think it's probably more likely that we're looking at it incorrectly. Instead of not getting incoming also-boughts, what's probably happening is that Amazon has decided not to change also-boughts very often (which might mean it takes longer for a new release to show up in incoming also-boughts). I've actually noticed this with my own books. I'd run promos and wait for the also-boughts to change, and they wouldn't. Or they'd be slow.

But now that I think about it, that makes sense.

If Amazon is, indeed, trying to create a playing field in which books that sell on their own merits are rewarded by the algos and books that sell primarily because of promotions aren't, then they might realize that shifting also-boughts frequently increases the likelihood of promo-ed books sticking around at higher ranks, and thus they're trying to combat it.

I truly think the real loser here, though, is new releases and organic spikes. Several times this year, I've run random $.99 sales on certain titles, and many of them would have nice spikes just on their own, with no promo, selling a hundred books in a day or something. In the past, Amazon would have rewarded that spike. But now, Amazon doesn't, and after the spike, my book gets knocked down. I don't think this is Amazon's intention. But since a new release or an organic spike behaves just the same as promotion, from a numbers perspective, they're getting lost in the shuffle.

If you're angry with Amazon for wanting to shove down the visibility of promoted titles, think of it from a reader's perspective. If you're hunting for a book, do you want the lists you search and the also-boughts you hunt through to be filled with the people who paid for a sales spike, or do you want it to be full of books that other people just like you liked enough to buy them? Amazon, contrary to some claims on this thread, I think, wants to have a website that is driven primarily by customer tastes and preferences. (And not because they're egalitarian or high minded, but because that's what gives them their edge over the competition. I do think it's fairly obvious that Amazon wants to crush everyone else in town. That's been their primary goal, and they've done a lot of crazy things, like operating on razor-thin profit margins and selling new kindle fires at a huge loss to maintain their edge. So, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Amazon is warm fuzzies. But I don't think Amazon is incomprehensible either.)

And nothing against promos. We all have to use them right now, because there's not a lot of other ways to get visibility. (What we want for our own books and what we might want as readers is not always the same thing.)

But it is kind of ironic, in a way, because I think our reliance on promotions has triggered these changes, which has caused other sources of visibility to be even more limited. Which in turn drives more people to promotions. 'Course, it's not as if this can change. Can't put the genie back in the bottle. Just a little chuckle worthy, I think.


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Marilyn Peake said:


> Wow. I'm really worried. I just spent hundreds of dollars on ads, hoping for a big break, when I run my first Kindle Countdown on my first YA novel starting this weekend. Now I wonder if the ship has already sailed for big breaks through Kindle Countdown Deals.


Please post to let us know how your promos go. Good luck!!!


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## Courtney Milan (Feb 27, 2011)

pauldude000 said:


> People can argue with me on this if they like, but Courtney was guessing. Worse, it was an unrealistic guess. The concept of server loading is a problem when you are talking downloading bandwidth in peak sales times. Sorting data on the measly scale of a few million items wouldn't load down much at all. No-one is using 486 computers any more. Your average gaming system could almost handle that load, since you are talking only books which have sold copies get ranked or also-boughts, let alone a bank of high end servers. It is not like they are performing the calculations with a laptop. They probably have every book published on their entire store loaded onto one twelve terabyte storage array considering that each file is generally less than five megabytes (2,000,000 X .005 gigabytes).
> 
> To consider what we are talking about here, each server probably uses thirty-two eight-core Intel iTanium processors per each server, with ten or more servers running in each bank. Most huge-traffic systems run several banks of servers. They can process data at a rate that the old cray supercomputers would choke to death on.
> 
> ...


I wasn't talking about data loading, and I have some idea of modern computational abilities. I was talking about the also-bought algorithm in particular.

Here is what I know to be a fact:

There is no question to me that Amazon is no longer including all books in also-bought recrunches--I have direct evidence of that. I can point to books that went up on Amazon at the same time as other books, where I know that there were purchases of both books on the order of 5-10 on one, and many more on the other, within a day of their first appearing. The book that had 5-10 sales did not get also-boughts for 15 days. The book that had more sales got also-boughts within a day. Both books where indie published; the book that did not get also-boughts was published about 12 hours before the other book.

Before we started seeing things like this, we watched the also-bought calculations go from calculating them a few times a day (way back when) to calculating them once every day to calculating them once every few days. Add in that there are some times when Amazon is clearly using more processing power on some things--in the last year, there have been times when also-boughts lag behind publishing by up to 10-11 days. We watched rank updates go from immediate, and on the hour, to delayed by 6-12 hours, and only every 2-4 hours.

Also-boughts changed faster on my better-selling books than my worse-selling books.

Here is what I am inferring from those facts:

* Amazon for whatever reason does not have the computing power to do things that it used to do when there were fewer books and fewer sales.

* Amazon has implemented a scaling algorithm that crunches also-boughts on a limited basis, depending on some rudimentary metric of book sales.

* The computation of bestseller rank is now taking Amazon long enough that they're no longer doing it on the hour of the basis of the last hour's sales, and the bestseller rank calculation is almost certainly linear in the number of sales.

*The construction of the also-bought index is almost certainly more computationally complex than the construction of the bestseller rank.

My conclusions:

You can argue all you want that there is no real computational drain for these activities, but neither of us know the Amazon algorithms for computation. The evidence we have before us suggests that those activities have taken more and more time as Amazon has grown in size (both sales & number of books).

Whether this is based on an actual lack of computational power, Amazon projecting into the future and recognizing future computational limitations and solving them now, or just Amazon deciding that the value they get from that compu, is an open question--b

The evidence we have also suggests that if you separate out books on the basis of sales, some books are getting also-boughts faster than others.

If you want to explain the facts that I set forward above as something other than indication of Amazon implementing a scaling algorithm, I'm happy to hear your reasoning. But I am not basing my inferences on pure wild-ass guessing.

(I also suspect--and I have only the barest evidence for this conclusion--that until you get your first string of also-boughts, you won't be included in regular also-bought updates, so whatever index they're using for determining when your also-boughts gets crunched is not bestseller rank.)


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Courtney, when it comes to matters legal, you get my full attention most of the time.

When it comes to something like this, forgive me if I trust Hugh a bit more than thou.


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## Twizzlers (Feb 6, 2014)

Elizabeth Ann West said:


> It might be perspective, too.  I went from earning $10 every few months to the first month I've EVER seen a 4-digit royalty statement and I didn't do a free run or countdown or major advertising like Bookbub.


Well this is my second month earning 4 figures after earning $900 the previous month and $30 at most each of the previous three months. I fear going back to $30 a month because of this. My sales have dropped in an unexplainable way.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

KaraKing said:


> Now I know some people can use keywords to get into sub categories, so that they appear in more than their two assigned categories... but we don't have a page of keywords on kdp for these categories. So, I don't understand how they're getting on there. And it's only happening in the two large categories of love and romance and interpersonal relations.


Before we had the Page O' Keywords in historical fiction (do we even have it? I have to admit I've never looked, because I figured out how to get the keywords before Page of Keywords existed!) we had to learn the trick on our own. 

Here's how you do it:

First determine which upper category is the "umbrella" over the subcategories you need keywords to get into. Then choose that broader category as one of your book's two categories.

For example, in historical fiction, I wanted to get into Historical Fiction -> Middle East, Historical Fiction -> Africa, and Historical Fiction -> Biographical. So I chose historical fiction as my book's main category.

Then set your keywords to the name of the category you want to be in, including the name of the "umbrella category." So my keywords are historical fiction middle east, historical fiction africa, historical fiction biographical.

That does the trick! Presumably this same pattern can be applied to any keyword-specific category.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

cinisajoy said:


> Hello folks. Few little things this morning.
> I can say from looking at my personal recommendations that Amazon is hiding the trads from me. As of two days ago, my total # of orders was over 8000 items. I get 99% Indies recs.
> Lisa, your also bots showed you, Marti and someone named Sarah that I didn't know.
> Paul, some places Walmart is about the only choice unless you want to spend 3 prices, so they cannot be compared to Amazon. Amazon is a choose to shop there. So Amazon can lose more customers than Walmart.
> ...


I confess I have never paid attention to the also boughts, but I'm not sure it works the way everyone is saying. If I look at a book and don't buy it, sooner or later, it will pop up in Amazon's advertisements, either on their site or some other one.

When Cindy said - "Lisa, your also bots showed you, Marti and someone named Sarah that I didn't know" - it made me wonder if I am right. You and I have talked lately and you probably looked at one of my books, right? If you did, Amazon is just showing you a book you looked at and didn't buy, hoping you will change your mind, If that's true, then also boughts are a whole different ball game than what is being discussed here.

Marti


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

valeriec80 said:


> Amazon, contrary to some claims on this thread, I think, wants to have a website that is driven primarily by customer tastes and preferences. (And not because they're egalitarian or high minded, but because that's what gives them their edge over the competition. I do think it's fairly obvious that Amazon wants to crush everyone else in town. That's been their primary goal, and they've done a lot of crazy things, like operating on razor-thin profit margins and selling new kindle fires at a huge loss to maintain their edge. So, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Amazon is warm fuzzies. But I don't think Amazon is incomprehensible either.)


I 100% agree with this! Well said, Valerie.



> But it is kind of ironic, in a way, because I think our reliance on promotions has triggered these changes, which has caused other sources of visibility to be even more limited. Which in turn drives more people to promotions. 'Course, it's not as if this can change. Can't put the genie back in the bottle. Just a little chuckle worthy, I think.


Heh heh...true.


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

Courtney Milan said:


> I wasn't talking about data loading, and I have some idea of modern computational abilities. I was talking about the also-bought algorithm in particular.
> 
> Here is what I know to be a fact:
> 
> ...


Courtney, I agree that Amazon has changed the also bought algorithms. Your logical application is sound, but there is a flaw. Where I disagree, is that I think it was a calculated change due to Amazon's desires for their system instead of a computational issue.

Let me illustrate this in a different way:

Google ranks over one BILLION websites with every search that is performed on its system. This is computationally no different than the couple of million books on Amazon which pales by comparison. A person could rightly argue that Google is larger than Amazon, and they would be right. Google is in the number one spot of daily unique visitors.

Amazon is number three... They are smaller, but not much. Their server system has to be somewhat comparable to Google, and Google using their famously complex algorithms has no problem ranking, sorting, categorizing, and displaying over a billion sites (multiple billions of individual pages) with each and every search performed by each visitor.

A couple of million books is literally nothing in comparison. Occam's Razor states that all things being considered equal, the simplest explanation is invariably true.


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Martitalbott said:


> I confess I have never paid attention to the also boughts, but I'm not sure it works the way everyone is saying. If I look at a book and don't buy it, sooner or later, it will pop up in Amazon's advertisements, either on their site or some other one.
> 
> When Cindy said - "Lisa, your also bots showed you, Marti and someone named Sarah that I didn't know" - it made me wonder if I am right. You and I have talked lately and you probably looked at one of my books, right? If you did, Amazon is just showing you a book you looked at and didn't buy, hoping you will change your mind, If that's true, then also boughts are a whole different ball game than what is being discussed here.
> 
> Marti


Marti,
Good news it was in also bought not also viewed. So it seems there are a few people that like both you and Lisa. Since I don't think one person having both of you on her Kindle would trigger it.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

ElHawk said:


> Write BETTER books. Be (one of) the best in your genre. More isn't good enough. More + top-notch quality is what'll make readers remember you.


This. They have to be emotionally invested in your characters, and or/the plot has to be heart pounding or riveting. The best books have both. Books are a drug. There has to be a payoff of endorphines downloading, or you are toast no matter how many books, shorts, you write.


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## Courtney Milan (Feb 27, 2011)

pauldude000 said:


> Courtney, I agree that Amazon has changed the also bought algorithms. Your logical application is sound, but there is a flaw. Where I disagree, is that I think it was a calculated change due to Amazon's desires for their system instead of a computational issue.
> 
> Let me illustrate this in a different way:
> 
> ...


I don't insist that it's an absolute computational bar, or that we are talking about physical impossibilities--nobody talks, but I think Amazon may have more computational power than Google, although they rent more of it out--but it could be as simple as, "We're only willing to give up rent for using the server time when we expect to get $X from the update, and so long as people are willing to pay us $Y for our computer time, we'll delay the updates." I also point out that search is mission critical for Google and also-bought recrunches are mission gravy for Amazon, and so they will make different corporate choices about resource investment.

But the comparison with Google strikes me as inapt for a more fundamental reason: Search is of a different algorithmic complexity than also-boughts. Google Search works by creating an index and then accessing that index. Google has special handshakes they perform with the index, but accessing the search index is little more than a lookup.

Creating the search index is about as complex computationally as Amazon's searching capabilities (which are also run on an index, which isn't updated regularly), and its bestseller lists. Amazon certainly has a smaller number of items, so you're right--those are not things I'd expect to be computationally slowed.

But the creation of the also-boughts is more computationally difficult than a construction of a simple index. Here's a rudimentary algorithm:

1. Take each book.
2. Find all transactions that include that book.
3. Find all transactions by those people and identify those books.
4. Count up who bought the most of them.

In other words, you're creating an index on each book. You care about the interaction between books, not the straight calculation of things about the books themselves. You're looking at the force that every book exerts on all other books, and that's a more complicated thing than just calculating the weight of each book and ranking them in order.

(There may be a better explanation for that computationally; that's what I'd call it scientifically, and alas, all my vocabulary for this is stuck in scientific computation land). In other words, my terrible algorithm would effectively build an index for every book in your database based on the number of transactions--so if the creation of the index is O(N^x), my terrible also bought system would be O(N^2x).

I suspect that Amazon is not using a terrible algorithm--I could probably come up with a better one if I took time, and their engineers are many and more experienced--and so they would be able to get that number down from O(N^2x). I also suspect that it is bigger than O(N^x)--and it will be bigger, and will run into problems, until they break it down into pieces. Which is what they appear to be doing now.

Amazon almost certainly has a smarter algorithm than that--but once we get out of simple O(N), this stops being comparable to building or searching on an index.

Again, I am happy to be wrong about this. My background is in scientific computation and so I see everything through that lens. If you can explain to me how also-bought calculations are algorithmically equivalent to simple indexing, I'd love to hear it, and will retire the theory.

But right now, I think this view is supported by the evidence: Also-boughts have never been crunched on the same timescale as bestseller rank, and while bestseller rank recrunches have slowed from hourly to every 2-3 hours, also-bought recrunches have slowed from once or twice daily to once or twice a week, and sometimes longer, until the most recent change in the algorithms. That supports my suggested view of algorithmic complexity.

That prior slowing in calculations is not something that your theory explains. Why would Amazon not continue also-bought recrunching on a regular rate? Why would they sometimes be delayed by 10+ days, and other times come in every 3 days? I don't think "Amazon slowed down the rate of also-bought calculation on a sporadic schedule, until very recently, when it started dividing up also-bought calculation so that better selling books get more frequent recrunches, because it wanted to" is a satisfactory explanation from Occam's perspective. I cannot figure out how slowing down also-boughts for two years would make them more money, and then changing better selling books to get more frequent recrunches would also make them more money.

Occam's razor only applies to two theories with equal explanatory power.


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## KaraKing (May 25, 2012)

ElHawk said:


> Before we had the Page O' Keywords in historical fiction (do we even have it? I have to admit I've never looked, because I figured out how to get the keywords before Page of Keywords existed!) we had to learn the trick on our own.
> 
> Here's how you do it:
> 
> ...


Ahhhh&#8230;thank you so much! I've played around with the keywords, I've read articles, and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked and I've never been able to rank in any category but my chosen two. I've never done it like that, I will give this a try.

And I just realized I was talking about paperbacks, I don't know why I mentioned the kdp keywords page. Totally irrelevant. Must be the pregnancy brain! lol

Do you think this will work for paperbacks as well?


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## KaraKing (May 25, 2012)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> Then I'm even more confused. It seems quite obvious to me that category WAS chosen for the paperback versions of the two examples you gave. How are they not supposed to be there, and so are shafting yours? I don't see it. Or perhaps the publisher recently changed the categories for the books if they weren't there before?


Okay, forgive me, I'm pregnant and I've been really flaky lately. Maybe, I'm not explaining myself clearly or maybe I'm not getting something. Let me try again&#8230;

So, If you follow the links I provided it takes you to the paperback version of that book. If you scroll down to look at the categories that they're ranking in (their chosen categories), they're not love and romance. However, if you go to the best sellers list of love and romance, you will find these books on that list. I don't get why they're allowed to appear in their chosen categories AND love and romance. Thus knocking books like mine, which were categorized under love and romance to get knocked off the top 20. (My book is no longer in the category, I had to move it to a smaller category to maintain exposure. I use to rank consistently in the top 15 of love and romance since I published in June of 2012, when this change happened... I fell into the abyss.)

I'm sorry I mentioned the kdp keywords page, that was a pregnancy brain fart and was totally irrelevant since I'm referring to paperbacks only.

As far as I remember, you choose your three categories (for example, now I'm in divorce, mate seeking, and dating) and that's where you showed up. Now the most popular books are crossing over into multiple categories. Some books are in 5 or 6! Again, this is just paperbacks. I've had no changes to my kindle's rankings or exposure. But, my paperback has taken a huge hit. This is the only thing I've been able to attribute it to.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Martitalbott said:


> I confess I have never paid attention to the also boughts, but I'm not sure it works the way everyone is saying. If I look at a book and don't buy it, sooner or later, it will pop up in Amazon's advertisements, either on their site or some other one.
> 
> When Cindy said - "Lisa, your also bots showed you, Marti and someone named Sarah that I didn't know" - it made me wonder if I am right. You and I have talked lately and you probably looked at one of my books, right? If you did, Amazon is just showing you a book you looked at and didn't buy, hoping you will change your mind, If that's true, then also boughts are a whole different ball game than what is being discussed here.
> 
> Marti


This too. Everyone is leaving this out of the equation but it's HUGE.

If someone clicks on your book and doesn't buy it, you will wind up in their recs. This can be a huge marketing tool if you target articles to people who "might" be interested in your books.

Also, Elhawk is correct. There are ways to broaden your reach into other keyword searches/categories.


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## CfaE (Jul 25, 2014)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> And I fully agree with *gorvnice* that there has been an algo change helping to apply downward pressure by favoring longer and higher sales and punishing short-term pulses.


Thanks for the posts, Phoenix. They've been really helpful to me because I've never understood why a release will flop the way it does. It sounds as if Amazon is aiming for 'sustainable sales' from its bestsellers, which makes sense. If you're driving a regular amount of readers to their store, then you are an asset to Amazon, and their profit margin benefits from regular sales, as do you. It makes sense that they'd promote the books that bring in new customers on a regular basis over the ones that bring in nothing or short burst sales.

It could also mean the death of the traditional book release, where trying to sell as many books in a short time period as you can becomes an out-of date-concept. So for authors, that means looking at forms of sustainable marketing, which in my experience comes from places like Google organic search or your own website. Newsletters may become a little less relevant compared to a static page on your site since a Newsletter will only work for a release, but a static page with constant visitors will constantly drive in new readers to your book on Amazon.

So the next quest is to find a sustainable source of readers, one that delivers readers on a constant basis. In theory, the answer is constant promotion or long term sustainable promotion. The only place I can think of that provides that is Google organic search or Adwords, but in all my testing so far, they're both a bit of a suckfest.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

***********


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

***********


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

One word being bantered around these days is absolutely hilarious... Conspiracy.

A conspiracy is a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.

Not one person on this forum has put forth any 'conspiracy theories' concerning Amazon. It seems to me that wordsmiths should know this fact. Amazon could choose to do anything it wishes within the legal boundaries which constrain it and it has not conspired to do anything. Amazon could choose to sideline indies completely and it is within its legal rights to do so. It is not legally required to publish any of our books.

Saying it is a corporation is a statement of fact. Saying that it will act like a corporation is an extrapolation of demonstrable evidence. Extrapolation of what it might do based upon what it is doing and what it has done in the past is application of logical thought.

Calling something a conspiracy theory solely to marginalize the viewpoint being presented is illogical and irrational. It is in fact a mixture of informal logical fallacies; an argumentum ad hominem combined with an appeal to ridicule. Both attack the speaker in an attempt to remove credibility instead of logically address the argument being made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies <-- For those that do not know what I am talking about.

It is a technique that many people commonly use these days without even realizing that it is an intellectually dishonest attempt to derail a position based on subterfuge instead of logical reasoning.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

1) Yes, we can always be assured the algorithms are always changing on Amazon. Amazon is always refining who might be interested in product X to who actually bought product Y.
2) Since there are at least 2k books a day being uploaded to Amazon (has anybody figured if that number is higher yet?) except for your top 100 books, number of sales on the rest will fall faster. (Less visibility to make room for the hits, and the new releases).
3) Also boughts are being refined and fine tuned. Example: two lists now. 
4) Certain individual self publishers do get perks others don't. And this is okay, because Amazon is a business.
5) Trying to figure out how to make our books visible to potential readers through Amazon's tools (keywords, etc.) will be of interest to most selfies.


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Ok Lisa this leads to a very serious question.
I have bought all kinds of e-books this week, from weight loss to mysteries to cookbooks to erotic (I think) to children's books.  I also bought a charger cord for a flashlight, CSI:NY (2 seasons) a puppy playpen and a coffee maker in the last 2 weeks.  What are they gonna recommend for me?
Or yall can just blame me for totally screwing up the algos.


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

cinisajoy said:


> Ok Lisa this leads to a very serious question.
> I have bought all kinds of e-books this week, from weight loss to mysteries to cookbooks to erotic (I think) to children's books. I also bought a charger cord for a flashlight, CSI:NY (2 seasons) a puppy playpen and a coffee maker in the last 2 weeks. What are they gonna recommend for me?
> Or yall can just blame me for totally screwing up the algos.


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## KaraKing (May 25, 2012)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> OK, I think I understand where the confusion is. For paperbacks, there's no way to know for sure what categories were specifically chosen the way there is for ebooks. For ebooks, anyone can scroll to the end of the ebook's product page and see every category and subcategory that ebook is associated with. We don't have that for the paperbacks so we have to infer. The Game's Kindle edition clearly shows it's in Love & Romance, so we can pretty confidently infer the same cats were chosen for the paperback.
> 
> The Bestseller rankings that you see on the product page will ONLY display the Top 3 best-ranked subcats the book is in.
> 
> ...


Yes, thank you. I always assumed we were only allowed to show up in our three chosen categories. I didn't know we crossed over. How can I know where else I'm showing up? I guess I just need to scroll through all relative categories? Maybe I would feel better if I saw myself in more than my three cats.

So why do you think my paperback did so well for so long, consistently ranking in the top 20 of love and romance and then it plummeted to the back of the top 100? I know you're not a psychic, and there's so many reasons why it could happen, but did something change around April/May? Or is it just attributed to summer slump time? It didn't do this last summer. I felt better, thinking I had a reason and now that reason is gone. lol And how can I get l listed in multiple categories? Is it just automatic in the system? Would I use the same method that the previous poster mentioned about kindle categories?

I was doing so well for so long, I thought I knew a little about how it all worked, now I'm just lost and confused. I'm making less money with two books out this year, than I did with one book in the past. I just don't get it, and it's mostly my loss of paperback sales on part one. I've been trying to figure this out for months, and now I'm at a loss.

Thanks for your help and clarification.


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

JRTomlin said:


> I wouldn't worry too much. I just did extremely well with a Bookbub/Countdown promo. Not only did I make back substantially more than the step price of the promo, I got a substantial boost across all my HF.
> 
> People have a tendency to panic.
> 
> ETA: What's more I have heard rumors from pretty credible sources that Amazon is planning some additional ... something for indies. Only rumors, but I wouldn't be surprised.


Thanks so much for the encouragement! And congratulations on having such fantastic results from your BookBub/Countdown promo! I'm running a Kindle Countdown beginning tomorrow. I was turned down by BookBub, but was accepted by a lot of other ad sites that have been highly recommended here on KBoards. I'm really crossing my fingers I get some sales.  And I really hope the rumors you heard about Amazon planning something special for indies is true!


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

Mercia McMahon said:


> Don't forget to book a UK Countdown as we don't have a KU. Incidentally, Belgium does have a KU its their most prestigious university and shares a city with the brewers of Stella Atois beer, but they don't have an Amazon KU.


I've run UK Kindle Countdowns and plan to continue doing so. That's rather awesome that Belgium's most prestigious university is also KU and shares a city with the brewers of Stella Atois beer.


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

Marian said:


> Please post to let us know how your promos go. Good luck!!!


Thanks, Marian. I'm planning to do this. My sales are practically zero now, so if the ads along with a Kindle Countdown lead to sales, that will be a relief and information that others might find helpful. If I don't see an increase in sales, I'm sure that information will also be helpful to others, although not too much of a relief for me.


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## grheliz (Oct 29, 2013)

Good luck, Marilyn!


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

grheliz said:


> Good luck, Marilyn!


Thank you so much!


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

cinisajoy said:


> Ok Lisa this leads to a very serious question.
> I have bought all kinds of e-books this week, from weight loss to mysteries to cookbooks to erotic (I think) to children's books. I also bought a charger cord for a flashlight, CSI:NY (2 seasons) a puppy playpen and a coffee maker in the last 2 weeks. What are they gonna recommend for me?
> Or yall can just blame me for totally screwing up the algos.


It's obvious. Fifty Shades of Grey.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

pauldude000 said:


> One word being bantered around these days is absolutely hilarious... *Conspiracy*.
> 
> A *conspiracy *is a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
> 
> ...


Dear wordsmith,

See what you did (put in bold to help you),

Signed,

Word Wizard


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

Courtney Milan said:


> But the comparison with Google strikes me as inapt for a more fundamental reason: Search is of a different algorithmic complexity than also-boughts. Google Search works by creating an index and then accessing that index. Google has special handshakes they perform with the index, but accessing the search index is little more than a lookup.


Ahh, I understand where you are coming from now, and your thoughts are logical. It sounds like you have done some programming as well.

The problem I see with your conclusion is that Amazon has more than one index that it would need to have to complete such a search, and that the system is already in place for every item on Amazon, not just eBooks. If you look at a bag of gummy worms, or a hammer, there is a list of also-boughts. Their system only has to update this list for any particular item in the record if there is a change to a particular ASIN, and not with every page-view of that ASIN.

What they would need:

1. Item Index (ASIN, ranking number, amount sold (day) , amount sold (month), and seller id)
2. Customer Purchase Index (customer id and ASIN bought, date bought)
4. Also-bought text file for each title or an also-bought Index (Where amazon stores the also-bought data on each product in inventory ASIN, List of also-bought ASIN's)

It would seem to make things more complex, but it really makes it easier. The algorithm merely has to:

1. Scan the Item Index for next ASIN
2. No change: Go to next ASIN
3. Yes change: search customer index for ASINs within date range for target ASIN.
4. Make a temp file and store customer ID's for ASIN, and other ASINs in same date range.
5. Compare, tabulate and calculate 
6. Replace entry in Also-bought index/file with new list of ASIN's
7. Check for next ASIN: if no then end routine
8. Index to next ASIN and return to step 1

The real process would be a little more complex, but this should demonstrate the point.

This process would not take as long as it appears. The majority of ASINs would not have sales while others would have some sales, and the very few popular ASINs on the system would have a lot of sales. The popular ASINs would take up most of the processing time, while the vast majority of ASINs on the system would automatically skip over, or would require very little processing time. The system would only have to adjust for changes due to sales within a range of dates (probably every day or every couple of days).

Basically, the system would only need to make a few million changes per cycle even though the system contains hundreds of millions of ASINs. Scanning for a flag is fast, and your laptop could cycle through such a list in a few minutes. Your laptop could make all of the changes within a few hours. The servers could perform the calculations in minutes. (Up to 256 ASINs at any point in time if the software is set up right for 32 8-core processors, or a total of 256 CPU's per server. Each core is an individual processor. 8-core means 8 processors on one chip. Your laptop, if modern, is probably dual core or two processors on one chip, meaning your computer has two processors.)

If it were me, I would choose assembly language for sheer speed; yet for the sake of their programmers they may use C or C#, or some other high level language.

The concept of a couple of million or even ten million entries seems huge. Programmers would use flag entries (simple 0 or 1 for no or yes) to indicate a change in a record. If there is no change in a record, then the system would already have the information and proceed to the next record. There is no sense in recalculating an unchanged ASIN record. The time it takes to calculate a changed record is going to be proportional to the volume of change within that record. Most records will have little change so need very little recalculation. Every index will have flags to indicate such change, so in essence each index requires little checking.

Hopefully I didn't just lose anyone... If I did, I am sorry.


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## PhoenixS (Apr 5, 2011)

*********


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

Phoenix Sullivan said:


> The problem I see with your conclusion is that you are vastly over-simplifying. What you've described is more old-school indexing. The alsobots per book include several more process filters: by genre, by price (including flagging and de-flagging freebies, and including/excluding titles from the results as they go on/off free), by type (it distinguishes boxed sets from single titles, for instance), by rank and by sales numbers, and possibly more filters than these easy-to-identify ones.
> 
> It then ranks those alsobots by relevancy, including weightings for each filter, and assigns tracking links to the resultant displays based on placement in each book's list (note the unique identifiers appended by placement in each link).
> 
> Relational database processing always requires more time and computing power than simple indexing.


That is true, and is why I said the process I gave was simplified just to show where I was coming from in my last statement. There might be twenty or more attributes which get indexed. However, the relationships do not have to be modifed until the system flags for a reference show change, and then not all of the attributes will need to be modified depending upon actual change of relationships, and each of these would have yes/no flags to simplify the system. I seriously doubt that Amazon would have real-time checking on also-boughts. They probably would on such simple things as ranking. We are both guessing at this point though, because the also-bought could be tied directly to ranking as the flag for change. If the ranking changes, that would be a great flag in itself.

Don't get me wrong, as there are ten million ways a programmer could go at this problem and we are both probably wrong in how they are doing it. However, I enjoy the mental exercise of contemplation and problem-solving.

However, I have to stick with my original analysis, in that they would have to be going about the algorithm in a back ___ method to seriously slow down their system. Even if the programmers have made a clunky, go around the barn just to get to the front gate type of inefficient algorithm, it would still only take a few hours for the system to process. They would have at least one, but probably more, dedicated servers to handle the task. Each server adds 256 more processors to the task, geometrically reducing processing time.


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## amyates (Feb 17, 2014)

CraigInOregon said:


> Here's a handy place to check: http://www.yasiv.com/
> 
> Enter your title and "Kindle Store" and it'll show you a cloud of also-boughts pointing to your book..


Wow! I'm not sure what to do with this information, other than add a bunch of the books to my to-read list.  But still, very cool tool. Thanks!


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Pauldude,
Have you ever done any databasing or inventory control?
Your ideas are way too simple for even a small store.
I have created numerous databases and my first job was analog (pencil and cards) inventory control specialist.


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## pauldude000 (May 22, 2013)

cinisajoy said:


> Pauldude,
> Have you ever done any databasing or inventory control?
> Your ideas are way too simple for even a small store.
> I have created numerous databases and my first job was analog (pencil and cards) inventory control specialist.


Hey cinisajoy, good to hear from you.

Yes, I did simplify the concept, but for a specific reason. An index is only a minimal type database, it is not like a full inventory... An old card catalog at a public library is a close approximation to the purpose of an index. An index is one file containing basic information about items, with each item listing containing some relative data and a pointer to the items location in a database, or to the item itself in storage. A good software example is the index of files on your hard drive that is used by the file managing software of your operating system. This index includes the name of the file, the type, the size, who wrote the software (sometimes), where on the drive it is stored, and various flags used only by the operating system that you usually do not see, such as hidden, system, read-only, etc. An index is a data file that is designed as simple and compact as is practically possible so that it can be quickly searched by the OS.

Full sized databases would be a hindrance in this application. Amazon probably has full sized databases that their site uses to load the information for any given page, but the item index would only point to a specific entry in a specific database. All tabulation and calculations that we are discussing would be done by programs on servers using a tailored algorithm (special formula) built for the purpose. This part is completely done by computer.

I know the system is complex. It is, in fact, very, very complex. It has to be to deal with the sheer volume of their inventory as well as the volume of purchases, combined with the functions and bandwidth of a full sized smart search engine.

Truthfully, they may well be using a hybrid mainframe-server/client system, which would explain a lot. IBM's Z series is mind numbing in what it can accomplish, and how fast it can do it. With two or three IBM Z series mainframes, Amazon could be doing all of the computations in real-time and never close any of the databases. I know that even some of the older IBM machines could calculate and completely process billions of transactions a week, and the newer stuff will have a huge amount of oomph in comparison. Servers are not as good at this as mainframes. Each system has their strengths and weaknesses.


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## jamielakenovels (Jan 14, 2014)

I love Amazon, I do, but this is even more of a reason why I think that indie authors should consider focusing on building their own mailing lists. If the rug is ever pulled out from under them, they'll always have their fanbase who'll purchase where the author directs them to purchase.  You may not get the algorithms, but it's a start.


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