Last month I was listening to a Sterling & Stone audio
sales pitch for their most recent author training. It was a pretty generous
offer and they said they were being so generous because it was the last time
they would do such a thing. Now, I know people always say that in sales stuff,
but the guys gave their reasons why.
They love what they do. They love the independence it gives
them and the quality of life they get from being a full time writer. They won’t
do anything to jeopardise that because that would affect their income and thus
their families. And in current America with no guarantee of Health care and
education, money matters and none of
them (even Dave) want to go back to working full time for somebody else.
They do the sums. They rely mostly on Amazon for income and
over the years they have learnt how Amazon works and how to use it to sell more
of their books. That’s what the course was about. The tag was ‘make $3k a
month’ or they’d give you your money back. **
But… and here’s the big but… Amazon is run on algorithms.
When you buy something it tries to work out what else you might be interested in. The key to success is for your
works to appear as recommendations to people when they are already buying
stuff. These suggestions are referred to as ‘also-boughts’ because that’s
literally what the screen says: people
who bought this title also bought... Amazon also uses your ranking to pick
recommendations to email out to readers. This is why some people cheat and put
their book in the wrong genre, one with less titles usually, to get a higher
ranking.*!
Sterling & Stone have worked out that teaching other
people how to write messes up their
sales.
Let’s say I buy one of their books on writing. My
‘also-boughts’ will be an erratic mix of romance, historical romance, erotica
and non-fiction writing. Another person’s ‘also-boughts’ might be hard core
sci-fi, military fiction, non-fiction war history and non-fiction writing.
With those kinds of stats Amazon does not offer Sterling
& Stone’s works to other people browsing the site because it can’t guess
what people would like it. Everyone’s mixed up buying history confuses it.
Sterling & Stone know this because they have literally
written a book and marketed it to a select email list of people who like that
exact genre. It did better than their other works because it had clean
‘also-boughts’.
So, as a result, they will no longer write books on how to
help other authors.
And that is obviously something that other people are going
to realise as well. Not many of them will invest this much time and money into
a solution.
Although I did hear Rachael Herron say her ‘also-boughts’
were pretty clean, so maybe Amazon is neatening the process up? %%
I hope so because a lot of peoples’ livelihoods depend on
it. $$
Links:
**the proviso was that you had a series in mind. That you
completed the first book in six months and they would give you a $500 cover.
Also no erotica. Amazon sends all erotica writers to an algorithm ‘dungeon’.
Sighs…
*! Please report people who do this or who stuff multiple
works in until the actual book is a tiny percentage of the whole. Samples are
fine, I love samples.
%% she was talking to J Thorn on the Petal to the Metalpodcast
$$ not mine obvs… dammit AM, finish your shit.
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