An author whom I’ve never read, Ursula Le Guin, had a blog post at the Book View Café Blog. Titled “Up the Amazon with the BS Machine”, the title is an obvious play on words, BS in this case not meaning what everyone would first think, but rather “bestseller.” The post is interesting to read, and not terribly long. The gist of it: She doesn’t like the way bestseller lists are developed, thinks the books that make it on the bestseller list are garbage, and blames Amazon for the situation while at the same time exonerating the publishers.

She seems to forget that Amazon is primarily a bookstore, not a publisher. Sure, they do some publishing functions, such as Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace for self-publishing, and they have a couple of publishing imprints that currently are small. Le Guin doesn’t like any of it. Read the article and you’ll leave thinking she says “bring back the good old days.”

There must be a logical fallacy in this. A behaves. Environmental conditions change and A behaves differently. B doesn’t like A’s new behavior, and blames C for it—C being not the environmental conditions but another entity who is also behaving based on changing environmental conditions but who has no effect on A’s behavior.

I suspect Le Guin is having trouble selling books. I’ve never read anything she’s written, and don’t know what she writes. I’ve heard her name, but her books haven’t popped up on my radar. I take it she’s fairly popular. She’s probably been on bestseller lists multiple times.

So what’s her beef? It’s that the books that make the bestseller lists aren’t of very good quality. Yet these books make the list, not because people want to read them, but because Amazon is pushing them, and because of this push they get even more sales and climb even higher on the bestseller list. Meanwhile, books of better quality (which I presume includes her books, though she doesn’t say that) languish farther down the lists or don’t appear at all.

This push that she bemoans is what the Big 5 publishers do all the time. They call it “velocity,” and woe to the book that doesn’t have it.  They buy “co-op” from bookstores to get a couple of titles on featured displays at the front of bookstores. They buy ads to push the books they think will sell best. They sponsor links on search engines, links that masquerade as search results and fool people. Thus, the publishers, in cahoots with bookstores, are manufacturing bestseller lists by pushing books to create velocity. Personally, I don’t know there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a business practice, not a conspiracy.

So the evil she bemoans really isn’t Amazon. It’s the very publishers she champions. Just another example of top-tier authors not liking the changes in bookselling, and blaming Amazon instead of the party that is really at fault. The madness continues, madness that has been called Amazon Derangement Syndrome.

I had this post ready to go yesterday, my scheduled day for this blog, but forgot about it. Here it is a day late.

Author Central is an Amazon website that provides information to authors. Actually, it may also provide info to readers about authors. Despite being registered there for three years I haven’t explored it much. The main reasons I go there is to check book sales and author rank. In fact, normally I just check author rank. If my rank hasn’t budged from the previous day, or if it just continues to drop, I know I have no sales.

The figure above was my author rank at about 7:30 a.m. on November 11, 2014. That means I was the 502,648th most popular author on Amazon, considering both print books and e-books. So 502,647 authors who have their books listed on Amazon were, as of that moment, more successful at selling books than I was. I’ve spent my life as a second-stringer, but this is ridiculous.

The reason I bring this up is because I have sunk to new depths. Here’s a graph of my ranking since Amazon instituted this service.

As you can see from that, my rank has occasionally topped 100,000, but not often. And, my rank as of Nov 11th had hit a new low. It was the first time I was below 500,000. The rank listed for each day, except for the current day, is where you were at the end of the day, probably Pacific Time. You can see the effect a single book sale will have on an author ranking as low as mine.

I’m not doing any promotion right now, since life gives me no time to write I’m not going to carve out time to promote. Not to mention that I hate promotion of myself. Also, the print books I buy from them to sell personally don’t count. I have another 40 or so of those that would have helped my ranking.

So, we’ll see what the future brings. For right now I drag along the bottom. I know there are others lower ranked than I am, but I can only account for me.

For most unpublished authors, obtaining a contract with a trade (a.k.a. traditional, royalty paying) publisher is the dream, the goal, the end of a lengthy and frustrating pursuit. Many chase that dream for years. I did. For eight years to be exact. Some days I still think that I’d like that, have a book trade published.

Then I wake up, and realize chasing that dream didn’t make much sense. I still follow a couple of agent blogs, which keeps me up on the news and mindset of that industry.  On one of those blogs, I had the following exchange earlier this week.

[The Agent] …Quotes from a significant endorser or a phrase from a fabulous review will appear on the cover of the print version, but they wouldn’t be visible digitally.  Quotes or a “burst” that announces the book has won has award, must be handled differently online. Ask the marketing staff at your publishing house to have that cover quote start out the book’s online description. Having that quote in bold or a larger font and separated from the rest of the description will help to convey its importance….

[Me] “Ask the marketing staff at your publishing house to have that cover quote start out the book’s online description.” You mean a publisher’s professional and experienced marketing staff won’t know enough to do this on their own?

[Another commenter; call her “Jane”] Not a lot of publishers like that. I know a couple I work with that won’t even put quotes or tagline on the front cover. Every PH has their own style and preferences. Besides, they have a lot more going on to get a single book out that to worry about marketing details. Most marketing is up to the author, these days to cut expenses.

[The Agent] “Jane” is correct, David, in that the publisher’s marketing department is working on providing marketing for so many titles at one time that taking an endorsement or mention of an award from the cover and highlighting it in the book’s online description isn’t a thought that is likely to occur to them. Authors will probably have to offer the marketer a prompt.

A trade publisher pays royalties in the range of 8 to 15 percent of the book price.  Maybe that’s of the net the publisher receives, which would make it about half that amount, but let’s just leave those as the range. A bestselling author might get the 15, a debut author will probably get the 8, with close to no advance. So essentially the author is paying the publisher 85 to 92 percent of the revenue of each book for services the publisher is providing, and for providing these services the publisher retains a portion of that 85 to 92 percent as profit.

But what does the author receive for paying this? One thing they don’t seem to get is marketing or promotion. “Jane” said what I suggested should be done by the marketing staff would be unusual, not the norm. So it seems the author is not getting any work done by an experienced, professional marketing staff, other than an entry in a catalog, and a very deficient entry at that.

More and more I’m glad I made the decision to self-publish. Sure, I don’t get many sales. But if I had continued to pursue trade publishing I’d probably still be out in the cold, chasing a dream, never waking up.

My post will be brief today, as much is going on in my world. The last couple of days have been very emotional, in a good way. Things have happened, things that I might someday discuss on my other blog.

But for now I’ll just report August 2014 book sales. I sold 12 books, near as I can tell. I don’t understand how Amazon counted the pre-sales for my novels Headshots. The sales report says two were pre-ordered, and that they would post to the novel sales on the day of release. However, only one posted on that day, August 28. I contacted Amazon about it, and they said I only had one preorder and that was the sale that posted on the 28th. I’m about to respond to them, “Then why did my pre-order report show two pre-orders?” For now, I’m just counting it as one sale. Given that’s the only sale I had of it, you could say my novel release, including going for pre-orders, was a huge flop. “It’s a long tail game” I keep telling myself.

Here’s the sales table.  I’ll insert s smaller one later for display at Absolute Write.

Here are the tables. I’ll come back later and edit in some commentary.

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on at Smashwords. This is the site where I publish my books to for distribution on to Barne & Noble, Kobo, Apple, etc. I have 15 of my 16 books there. Smashwords doesn’t allow publishing of public domain books, so I can’t put my Thomas Carlyle book there. If I want it for Nook, etc. I’ll have to go to the individual site.

One of the things Smashwords does that Amazon doesn’t do is track the number of times your book is sampled at the Smashwords sale site. Samples aren’t sales, of course, but samples are evidence of interest. I would hope that more sample downloads would eventually result in more sales.

I began tracking my sample downloads in April. Monday morning, around 7:30 a.m. my time, I record, in a spreadsheet, how many times each book has been sampled. I have the spreadsheet calculate the change from the week before, and track this change as well as the total downloads. On April 2 (a Wednesday; then I standardized on Mondays), my books had been sampled 722 times. Since then, here are the samples week by week.

• April 2 – 722
• April 7 – 726, so 4 downloads
• April 14 – 738, so 12 downloads
• April 21 – 741, so 3 downloads
• April 28 – 745, so 4 downloads
• May 5 – 761, so 16 downloads
• May 12 – 783, so 22 downloads
• May 19 – 786, so 3 downloads
• May 26 – 787, so 1 download
• June 2 – 792, so 5 downloads
• June 9 – 804, so 12 downloads (new short story added)
• June 16 – 819, so 15 downloads
• June 23 – 842, so 23 downloads
• June 30 – 878, so 36 downloads (new short story added)
• July 6 – 896, so 18 downloads
• July 13 – 906, so 10 downloads
• July 20 – 927, so 21 downloads

As you can see, the trend is generally upwards, helped out quite a lot when I published those two new short stories in June. Now, if I add this week, as of today, which is almost three days short of a full week, I have:

• July 25 – 977, so 50 downloads

Wow! That’s a big increase from my previous high week, long before the week is over, and with no new book to stimulate downloads. If downloads continue proportionately for the rest of the seven days, I should have 60 or more by Monday morning.

What can I attribute this increase to? Could it possibly be a summer thing? People are looking for a summer read, and so are downloading more samples, trying to figure out what to buy? Is it a volume thing? I’m up to 15 items available on Smashwords. People who see my page think “Oh, this is a serious author; let me sample some of his stuff.” Is it just the law of averages? Some weeks you’re over average, some below, some right on average, and occasionally way over average?

Obviously I don’t know. I may never know. So far this hasn’t translated to higher sales on Smashwords or any of the places it distributes to. I think, however, that more downloads has to be good news. That means more interest, more exposure. Someday the sales will come.