So, most of you probably know that last October, Amazon broke the kindle store. I mean, keywording and search has been broken well before that, such that keywording would go cross-categories in places they didn’t want it to – so, for example, the same keywords that let a romance author slot her book in military romances would stick it in scifi-military- space marines, whether she wanted it there or not.
(I have for several years been tilting at windmills, and reminding people not to hate the romance authors for Amazon’s broken search showing things by number of sales per keyword, and therefore returning romances all over the places when searching for smaller genres. It’s the fault of the broken system, not the authors in it. Sadly, people are rationalizing creatures, not rational, and it’s easier to hate on the author you see out of place in your top 100 in subgenre than on the system that put her there.)
In October, Amazon pulled off a classic Sorcerer’s Apprentice move and instead of fixing keywords or search, they “fixed it” like a 5 year old with a cordless drill by limiting all books to showing up in the rankings in only 3 categories… and some of those are Amazon-assigned, completely unrequested and unwanted by the authors. This is how Raconteur Press’s anthology of flash fiction ended up getting an orange tag in… werewolf gaming?!?!?
The important question for authors – what does this do to discoverability and sales? Nothing good.
First, you can still be keyworded in a lot of categories, even though you’ll only show in your top 3. So, say your book shows up, wildly inappropriately, in Werewolf gaming, despite a distinct lack of werewolves or gaming in it. This means if your fourth highest rank is in, say, scifi anthologies, you’re not going to show up in the top 100 or the hot new releases of the category you actually wanted. All that discoverability, lost, like tears in the rain.
Second, we’re getting a lot more churn on the charts. As something comes down in rankings, it will slip off the high-competition charts and to the lower-competition charts, showing up briefly as it falls off chart #1 and onto chart #4, then falling off chart #2 and showing up on chart #5… but as we all know, most sales spikes taper off pretty quickly. The practical effect is that if readers go looking for “the blue cover they saw last week, with the cat”, it’s not there anymore to find.
Third, it’s also screwed over advertising, because the categorical confusion means we’re getting a much wider range of sponsored product ads showing on an item… that may have nothing in common with the item at all. Impressions and clickthrough has fallen off, and in the feedback loop of algorithms, the less engagement you get with your ads, the less Amazon wants to display them, until it’s hard to get Amazon to spend my money.
Fourth, it’s hit hard on some of the smaller genres. Breaking romance out has proved to be a mixed blessing, because it does make classics westerns, for example, possible to even find when you search for classic westerns (instead of wading through 5 pages of mail-order-bride and western romances)… but we also lost all the cross-over sales, where western romance readers were picking up westerns they saw when searching for their next book.
Well, it looks like Amazon is yet again trying to patch the patch instead of fixing the underlying problem. I was reading my way through Jan Stryvant’s Valen’s Heritage series, enjoying the Harem LitRPG brain candy, when a quiz popped up on my kindle app.
(If you want something that’s delightful brain candy, and you flinched at the words “harem LitRPG”, I strongly recommend his work under John Van Stry. Either way, his works are complex enough to keep all the thinking parts of me engaged, while infused with such a sense of fun and hope and adventure that they’re just a delight to read.)
So, anyway, this quiz? It’s put out by Amazon itself, and my logistical brain saw it, and said, “they never do anything without a reason. What’s the reason for this?”
That sure as heck looks like they’re trying to redo their categorization by crowdsourcing, doesn’t it?
Makes me wonder…
Mad Genius Club 
19 responses to “Odds and interesting ends”
The five year old with the cordless drill would do less damage, and maybe make the thing work better. (With a cordless Sawzall, all bets are off.)
Unless he’s in a government office. His odds of improving it approach certainty…. and blow past it at Mach 10.
Oh, man. I want to be sent this quiz.
My wife will want to see this. She rarely gets steamed at me (she’s married to me; the patience of a goddess was in the job description), but her opinions on the results of searches and recommendations by Kindle would go through neutronium……
For my part, I have no idea why their IT department can’t make the Kindle handle purchases via their OWN BLASTED SOFTWARE……
Who disables their own proprietary sales interface?????
In the case of the phone app, it’s because Google and Apple are demanding a cut of all sales through any sales app in their store. And if OTHER rumors are correct it’s a substantial one. Quite a few apps have stopped letting folk buy through the phone. It seems to have hit the casual games rather hard as well, since I’ve seen prices there double in a many of them. So it’s not a tech issue it’s a business issue.
Amazon has an apps store too; I’ve bought apps there and installed them on my Kindle and my phone. Amazon should ask Apple and Google if they want some pie from Amazon or NO pie.
That’s essentially what happened: Apple & Google demanded at 30% cut of gross revenue from each kindle. (They were getting a cut prior, but it was far less than that.)
So the response was… either negotiate, or get 30% of nothing. And that’s what they’re getting.
It’s probably not fair to the bulk of readers, but I see that quiz and promptly begin to wonder how it could be abused. One-star reviews because “I disagree with the author” or “the cover is icky” are bad enough. I can imagine how a group of determined anti-fans could game the quiz to bury books in totally inappropriate categories, leading to one-star “This isn’t the werewolf LitRPG mil-fantasy I was told it was!”
I’ve been watching more and more LitRPG “sponsored titles” getting stuck onto the Familiars listings. As you say, the busted algorithm is busted.
As in I specify F&SF category published in last 30 days and get Little Women, Tom Sawyer, War of the Worlds, The Great Gatsby, and 300 Great Soup Recipes? With one urban fantasy published recently and 2 titles published 3 years ago? And it has gotten worse in the last several months.
I search for a specific author and I get works from five others before the one I searched for. No, I don’t want works by other authors who write works like the one I named, I want works BY the author I named. Is that so hard to figure out?
They don’t care which one you buy.
What Amazon really needs is competition that punches at least near its league.
How do I find out how Amazon has my books categorized?
You can see the “ratings” of the books by reading the book’s entry and the ratings show how Amazon categorizes the books.
Both of your books are in the following three categories.
Alternative History
Alternate History Science Fiction (Books)
War Fiction (Kindle Store)
Thank you, sir.
Here:
https://www.bklnk.com/categories_2022.php
Thank you, ma’am. That looks like a very useful web site.
My recommendations have gotten better, lately, although in October they were not. Possibly because I read a lot of weird genres with fanatical readerships.
I have been getting those “categorize these books” quizzes for the last couple of months.
It has become very hard for me to find new books, as the recommendations on Kindle are almost useless and neither interesting nor relevant.
I have complained directly to Amazon several times, once about their programs demanding that I review all my purchases with written comments before being allowed to move on. Their response was to de-name me, so that my comments are now by “an Amazon user”.
On buying books from Kindle, I can’t use my regular Amazon or Kindle link. I have to search for Amazon.com and then search for the book, sorting through pages of other authors and books to find what I want.
With the prices that mass-published e-books are asking, I find that I have been buying more used books from Alibris instead, and for less money.