Amazon's Algorithm For Select

Full of math, you can  read about it here Edward Robertson.

There is also what James Lewis experienced here James Lewis.

I'm summarize what they both said.  It ain't working anymore.

Giving away books used to work but it doesn't really impact sales now.  What did I say months ago?  The GIMME CAP STRATEGY.  Only give away stuff that isn't valuable to you.  Like the buttercup book.  If you think that momentary burst of visibility will help you, then go with Select.  It's a gamble.  Repeat.  It's a gamble. 

If you just want people to see what you do, Select is great.  Ish.  It's a good place to experiment or do something different just for your satisfaction.

I'm sure, no really I am, that it is super for some people and they'll tout its glory.  Those writers are now outliers.  You can't make a gameplan based on outliers.  You're already an outlier and you have to come up with your plan specific to your work.  Note that I didn't say book.  A book is too small of a concept at this juncture in publishing.  You have to think big/long-haul/career.

I don't know what else to say.  Write something super commercial.  People will find you.  Or write what you want to write but tradpub was a roadblock and hope people find you.

Freebie Mania

I don't think Amazon is in a plot to devalue books. Right at this moment I don't care about them.  They have their business plan, it's not particularly helping me. 

We can see that people love free books.

What I don't know is the correlation between downloading free books and sales.  Are free books the BEST way to promo a new-to-the-public author?  I don't know.

This 5 free days thing out of 90 is all that Amazon offers.  I think it's pitiful.  Amazon could have a page that changed every day where indie authors were featured, picked at random by computer.  Or they could allow advertising.  I'm sure they can figure out a lot of ways.  They're just not doing it.  That's fine.  It is what it is.  It's a venue we didn't have 4 years ago.  Is it perfect?  It's perfect for some.  I'm trying to address the potential pitfalls.

If you have the freebie and the sales after, good for you.  It's not worth it for me.

Here's this month's freebie.  Before the freebie began a week ago, I had 1 sale.  And you can see 1 return.  There was 1 review from a verified purchaser.

Let me restate.  There have been no sales since the free offering.  1 sale is the total.  I made no money on this book.  (The book that Amazon accused me of not writing and all the agitation that created.)

My best selling book is not on Kindle Select nor will it ever be.  Does Kindle Select bump me into greater recognition and sales?  No, it doesn't. There is no detectable increase in sales of anything on Kindle Select or that there's been a spill-over effect to books not in the program.

This is my experience of it.  YMMV.

It's All IMO

Who cares about the humble part, right?

I'm not crazy about Kindle Select.  It looks like it gives authors a small chance to rise out of what's a throng now.  If you want to try it--go ahead.  I don't advise putting on anything you really care about.  Read the Gimme Cap post.  It works for other people but it hasn't worked for me.

What I don't like about it is the free part.  If Amazon really wanted to help indie authors they would come up with a way to feature authors/books that doesn't devalue the work for both the author and the reader.  An atmosphere of entitlement is being created. 

Everything I'm thinking is vulgar.  And I don't like doing that.

So I'll tell you about a horrid landlord I once had.  He had no people skills at all but he was apparently a great great businessman.  He had lived in another country and worked for a famous company and kited $29,000,000 from them.  What's kiting?  It's when someone uses the money from a company they work for for their own purposes/investments and replaces the money after they've turned a profit.  He did this.  The company found out.  And the fired him.  And he sued them for unlawful dismissal and won $3,000,000 which he used to come to America and buy an estate.  Everything he touched turned to gold.  He made money at everything.

What was his philosophy?  "I will not be undersold."  He knew that he was selling the same/duplicate gumballs (it wasn't gumballs) as his competition, but if he priced them higher, there would be the illusion of greater value to his customers.  He wasn't making gumballs, he was buying them from a wholesaler and having his label put on them.  There was no quality control, or that he had input at the gum manufacturing plant.  He was just buying gumballs and  pricing them so that the people who wanted the finest gumballs bought his.

The lesson to be learned is that you can market to the freebie crowd or you can price your book for readers.  The freebie crowd will treat you like dirt because you already said your book has no value.  You're desperate.
Desperation is a terrible thing.

If it works for you, if it doesn't make you feel demoralized, then you don't know what I'm talking about.  Good.

Free Falling

I love this song.  I stayed for a while in Reseda.  It's just all houses, there's no discernible town center.  It's off of Ventura Blvd.

I'm not falling at the moment.  Bad Apple is having a free day and doing quite nicely.

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,158 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Children's Fiction > Arts & Music
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > Arts & Music > Music
  • #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Children's Fiction > People & Places > Social Issues

I hope this time readers will connect with it and go on to the other 2 books.

I didn't work on my new YA today instead I took my own Gimme Cap advice and created a booklette called Map of a Heart.  This is exactly what should be free.  A small...oh, perfect phrase for it!  Oh geez, it's French, I better not use it around any drunk trolls or they'll turn me in to the Kindle Spelling Police.

A freebie is an amuse bouche.  It's like a starter, a tidbit to whet your appetite.  You don't serve them the meal, you offer them a tidbit, an amuse bouche.  That's what this booklette is.  I had some vintage postcards and found some more in public domain and used Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese "How do I love thee, let me count the ways...".  I used one line per page, 1 image per page.  It came to about 14 pages.

It'll be free the day after Amazon gets around to publishing it.  I hope they don't wonder if I wrote this one.

How does this have anything to do with anything else I've written?  Well....um, I have a list of my "romance" novels at the end.  It's publicity.  It's about getting your name out there.  It's about getting noticed.

Now I have something of a conundrum.  I had Schtupid Cupid scheduled for a free day on the 14th.  I wrote Sweets For Your Sweet for Valentine's Day.  It's overkill.

Update:  I don't have to worry about it.  Amazon has this new book in review just like Sweets For Your Sweet and that took almost a week to get out of KDP jail, so I just threw away about 6 hours of work trying to finish something for Valentine's Day for Kindle Select.

And Joe Konrath keeps telling us how much Amazon loves authors.

Literary Gimme Caps

A gimme cap is a freebie businesses give away with their logo on them.  John Deere Tractors.

You get a promo pen all over the place, right?  If you're lucky because you're always losing pens anyway.

And from stupid politicians in an election year, they'd rather give you a button than give you their honesty.

Promo.  These are publicity items.  A car dealer doesn't give you a free tune-up, he gives you a memo magnet with his phone number on it.

Kindle Select.  The Alibaba of the bookselling world.  (What's Alibaba?  I don't know, some importer of cheap crap that turns up in my google searches every once in a while.)

Do not fall into the Amazon trap of giving anything valuable away!  Let me repeat that.  DO NOT GIVE ANYTHING VALUABLE AWAY.

This is the Jacob Javitts Center Trade Show.  This is a souk full of carpet sellers.  Haggling.  Grabbing.  Free is King! 

Do Not Give Anything Valuable Away.

What's valuable?  Uh, your whole book that took you months to write and you hold close to your heart like the treasure it is.

What's not "valuable"?  A short story you wrote specifically AS A PROMOTIONAL ITEM.

Promotional items only are free!  Do I need to repeat it?  No.  You're smart, you'll remember.

I can't make it more plain than this.

Of course this means rethinking the game plan you didn't have.  You will have to create "business cards" in order to play Kindle Select Lotto.  That means writing something specifically you will not make money on.

Don't listen to the people who say stuff like "My book was downloaded 10,000 times an hour and then sales skyrocketed".  They hit the lottery.  We don't care about them because we can't reproduce whatever they did.  We can only have our own strategy to maximize our efforts.

Maybe you don't agree with me.  Okay.  Lots of stuff works.  Lots of stuff doesn't.  I'm saying this issue has become really clear over the past two weeks.  I started to ask myself "What do I want from these cheesy 5 days?"  5 days a MONTH, Jeff, if you really wanted to help, but out of 90?  Grinchly.  So how to maximize these.  What do I expect from them.  Skip the great sales.  What do you want.  I want people to be exposed to my name so they will go to my books.

Okay.  If I already gave them my books, there's no point in going to BUY my books.  Ah, yes, that's not a feature in the system, it's a bug and it's not in my favor.  Then I can't give away my books.  And I can't give away cool memo magnets.  Or can I?  If I put up promotional items, it's like a billboard going down the highway.  Burma Shave.  Eat At McDonald's.  Yeah I need a shave.  Some fries would be good.  Where's the exit ramp?

You need to flood the Kindle Select system with your memo magnets.  If you had (don't make me do the math!) 5 promo/throwaway items on Select that's 25 days.  It's also 25 weeks.  You pick 1 day a week to run your "advertisement".  ME!  Here I am!  Great Invisible Storyteller.  Make me Visible!

Every week for your entire 90 day lockdown, you get to rise up out of the muck of a million other writers clammoring for attention.  You give the reader the sizzle not the steak.  You give them a taste of how good you are but you don't waste your best product on them.  You don't throw pearls before swine.  I'm only partially calling all those people in a feeding frenzy to get free books free books free books hahahahahaha like the guy in Frankenstein swine.  Some will prove themselves to be drunk trolls.  Shouldn't you at least get paid for it?

I'll probably say more later, but there you have the strategy and the reality.

Yeah that means you have to stop what you're doing and write some short pieces whatever they are.  Sorry.  So do I.

Mr. Mitnick's Harem or

Something overcame me yesterday, unfortunately, and I decided to revamp Mr. Mitnick's Harem.  Not rewrite it but change the title and cover and reformat.  So instead of doing the YA novella all day, I wound up struggling with the cover.  This is not to put you off of doing your own cover.  I want to do my own and want you to be able to do a good job on yours.

The set piece in Act 3 is a fiesta at the mission.  I thought okay cool, I'll quick get a photo of a fiesta.  No.  Okay, festival then.  No.  Okay, carnival?  No.  Okay.  Flamenco dancers.  No.  Are you kidding me????  I'm good at finding stuff, I can find anything.  Maybe I didn't look hard enough.  But I was looking at places I could pay for the image, not liberate it.

So kind of unfortunately I wound up exactly where I started--with an image of the mission.  Then I couldn't find a photo of the mission at night.  WHAT?  Fine.  I'll Photoshop it to night.  Then I couldn't get enough sky.  Sheesh.  It was overcast all day and I didn't want to search all my images from that delete incident a couple months back.  Finally the clouds move around a little, I rush outside and point the camera to the sky.  Solved.

I spend most of the afternoon turning day into night and trying to put lights on the mission--I'm sure Photoshop has a different/better way of doing it, but again, I couldn't find it even with a Google search.  I lift the mission off the original image and place it on the new sky background.  I'm going for dark, grim, foreboding and I start to realize, wait, this is a cozy.  This is a humorous, I hope, book.  I send it to Chris, the comedy writer.  He goes Yikes!  You have to lighten this up, put another element in it.  I write back "What, a clown?"

This cover is destined to be changed again.

What we would also like to determine is what, if any, effect there has been from the freebie weekend.  And surprisingly, there have been a few sales of Schtupid Cupid and Verrines.  I can't honestly say if SC lead to the sales of Not Low Maintenance.  It certainly wouldn't have lead to the sales of the Flashes but I sure was happy to see anything happening there.  Maybe Bad Apple1 probably did lead to the sales for BA2, so I am hopeful that's a trend.  Dream Horse is still going strong while the kids are home.  It's selling about 60 copies a day which I think I great for a middle reader book.  And got this terrific review on the Verrine book, thanks Serene.

5.0 out of 5 stars I can't wait to start making Verrines, January 2, 2012

By 

Serene (Marina, CA, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Verrines: Sweet and Savory Parfaits Made Easy (Kindle Edition)

I picked this one up as a kindle freebie, and I really had no idea what a Verrine was- however this book soon educated me! And what an education! Verrines are actually tiny parfaits which can be made in a glass, and which contain different discernable layers. They can be sweet (such as chocolate and fruit), or savory such as salad. The writer did a great job of educating the reader, and including recipes that were both practical and easy to make.

Recipes look and sound good... And I really liked the inclusion of pastry cream which is something everyone is going to want to make.

This is hands down one of the better kindle books out there. Sample and see for yourself.

Freebie Weekend and What I Make of It

Nothing. 

The human mind does search for explanations.  Maybe it's a safety feature and not a bug.  If you don't understand how dangerous wooley mammoths are, you'll keep getting devoured by them.

Schtupid Cupid did well (for me) download numbers wise and rankings in some categories, I think the whole Jewish aspect narrows the audience.  Bad Apple1--wonderful book no vampires, not a lot of life-threatening suspense being played out.  If you want to be scared and thrilled and taken on a wild ride, this is not it.  Verrines-- super narrow and I was thrilled at how many were downloaded.  Cupid actually had more downloaded in the UK yesterday than US.  I thought that was lovely.

A woman who wrote a historical mystery had 8000 copies downloaded.  So all mine put together were about 10% of her number.

My pal Chris (no, I have a point, stay with me) published a couple of his books and had bigger things on his mind so ignored them.  Until a couple days ago when he saw he had sold 18 copies.   He had done nothing not even rewrite the description as I begged him to.  (He says he will now.)

People will--repeat WILL--find you.  Amazon makes it easy to navigate around and drill down.  Yes, you're going to do better if your book is for the widest audience possible.  But if not, you can still be found and read and gets some numbers going for you.  It's your job to make them glad they did find you.

Happy New Year's & Free Amazon Weekend

All this moves pretty fast but as of 0 dark of morning, Schtupid Cupid
US-

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #710 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > World Literature > Jewish
  • #63 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Contemporary

UK-

• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #536 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #30 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Romance > Contemporary

Verrines--

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #894 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Cooking, Food & Wine > Meals > Appetizers
  • #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Cooking, Food & Wine > Baking > Desserts

Bad Apple 1 is not on the radar yet but while I was watching about 10 copies were downloaded.  The same activity is true at Amazon UK but less.

What lesson do we extract from this?  That there is substantial visibility possible at Amazon.  I can't say more than that.  We don't know if freebies lead to sales of the same book when they're no longer free and we don't know if they lead to any sales of other books you've written.  That's why it's an experiment.

Why did I take Bad Apple 1 off of BN?  Two reasons.  An intellectual one and an emotional one.  The emotional one first.  I was in a snit.  I went there to check the sales and the site was down.  I can't remember when that ever happened at Amazon.  Amazon has a support staff.  For about 8 months there was no one home at BN.  I'm trying to conduct business and I can't get help and I can't see my numbers.  Yes it's true there were more sales of BA1 at BN in Dec. than Amazon, but when you're talking under 10 copies for both sites, it's really not something to seriously consider.  I want that series to be found.  It's been out a year and languishing.  I had to do something.  Sorry BN, you weren't helping me.

Amazon Freebie Weekend

I put Schtupid Cupid on Kindle Select because it wasn't selling on BN anyway.  It had always been linked to Not Low Maintenance and Unspeakably Desirable because Lis is Viva and Bel's cousin, they're in the book/novella and Viva is doing her shadchan (Yiddish for matchmaker) thing.  It was always heavy on the cross-promoing and when I decided to leave it as a novella, if I could have made it free forever as a gateway/intro to the other 2 books, that would have been fine.

The Verrine book was always about using the D7k for a food photography experiment.  Sure I had to invent the recipes and go through the whole process legitimately but since I was assured cookbooks don't sell, and this is a pretty narrow topic, I didn't hold out much hope.  After all, the Ice Cream Parlor has always been dead in the water.  I saw it as a vacation from fiction and enjoyed doing it.

Not much thought was given to putting either of them up as free, except Cupid on Valentine's Day.  I figured everyone would use the time between Christmas and New Year's to put their books up for free and mine would be lost but I decided to do a free weekend and use up 2 of my 5 free days.  (Kinda stingy on that part, Amazon.)

I don't know if they're lost or not compared to others but the response has been excellent so far and it's just getting light here.  I don't know how people are awake enough to be downloading books.

Do I want to put the Miller sister books on Kindle Select and remove them from BN?  No, I don't want to but I could see that I might.  The numbers are that I sell 3X more books at Amazon than BN but also the reality is also that the reviews are nicer at BN.

Quandary.

This is another effort at HDR photography.  Nothing dramatic, I'm experimenting for the cookbook I may do next year.  (That would be tomorrow.)

Me and food photography.  Everyone else is just content to put down some discolored utensils and old linens and be done with it.  I have to make an orange scream "I am not simply citrus fruit, I'm an orange" and all the lemons are groaning "just shut up".

Gives me an idea for what I'll do this afternoon instead of working on the novella.