Don’t you hate when you put something in a place, knowing where it is, exactly right for itself… and then someone, without telling you, moves it? They had a good reason, and what they did made sense for them, but… arrgh!

Have you looked at your backlist’s categories lately?

Amazon has, in the last year, channeled the sorcerer’s apprentice and put algorithmic fixes into the cross-category keyword problem, and into the AI books by bot farms problem.

The original problem, for those of you reading this four years from now and wondering, was that keywords were identical for completely different genres, so a romance-scifi with a  “dude, where’s my shirt?” cover was getting cross-categorized as scifi-space marines. Since the hot new releases, the bestsellers, and the general search returns prioritize by top sellers, this meant that all of the above were returning pages of Men Without Shirts when readers were looking for Earth-shattering kabooms. See also, westerns, and fantasy, and historical books, and… yeah, romance *is* the billion-dollar elephant in the room.

Of the many ways Amazon could have fixed it, what they chose to do was… restrict you to appearing in the top 3 categories you rank in. Which seems like a good idea, right until you realize that part of the fix’s implementation stripped and reassigned categories as the algorithm saw fit. Even freshly uploaded books now, the categories you assign in KDP may not be the categories you get. 

Which is how friends got an anthology that was #1 in it’s category! …the category of… werewolf gaming? But there are no werewolves in this book, and it’s not a game?

*sinal salute*

Between Peter’s and my own series, we found that sales were dropping more than expected with a long tail, and part of the problem is that the algorithm put books 1 and 2 in one set of categories, 3 and 4 in another, but 5, oh, that was special. So discovery has dropped like a rock.

How do you fix it? By looking at your keywords and categories, making sure your keywords reinforce the categories to try to entice the algorithm to give you what you want on upload, and republish.

Ah, but here’s yet another little wrinkle.

You’ve probably heard the hysteria about AI-generated books uploading on Amazon. I say hysteria, because a lot of it, if you’re old enough in this industry, is pretty much a copy/paste with a find and replace on terms from when indies started publishing en masse on KDP. I keep waiting for some idiot reporter or author to use the term “tsunami of swill!” again.

By the way, this isn’t the first time someone’s come up with “upload absolutely terrible books and hope that with enough out there, enough readers will be fooled into reading them that you can make a pretty penny.” There’s a reason Amazon pays on percent read now, and it’s because this has been done before. Also, this is why you can’t have your TOC at the back, because people were doing that deliberately, so readers would go look up the TOC and the book would count as “read.” Nor are you allowed to say “There’s a very important message from the author! Please go to the last page to see it!” in your front matter, because, again, that was used by the unscrupulous to try to get all the page reads.

The latest variation isn’t hoping that normal readers will be fooled. No, it’s linked to the Chinese and North Korean bot farms. They’ve run variations on this for years: it was an open secret when I was playing EverQuest, even before World of Warcraft, that the terrible-at-English guys who were camping rare spawn so they could sell the loot, and selling gold to other players through shady websites, were North Korean slaves bringing hard currency in the country around the sanctions, as well as Chinese and the odd Vietnamese. With the advent of KDP, they have graduated to selling ratings/reviews (authors aren’t the primary target for this. You’ve seen yourself, a cheap Chinesium knock-off product that’s been out on the market for a week, and has 1,000 reviews, almost all alike.)

Then they graduated to also going for the KU pool. All they have to do is sell page reads. This is why I have strongly warned people away from any marketing site that *guarantees* downloads/reads/reviews. You’re not getting actual readers, you’re getting some poor slave in North Korea running up and down the racks of ipads/iphones all wired in, running his finger over each screen to turn it to the next page. Or a bot programmed to do the same.

And it is a hallmark of criminals that, when caught and foiled, they do not go “Oh, I guess I had better follow the rules now.” No, they start immediately looking for a new way to get around the rules. My Calmer Half has noted that as a prison chaplain, he’s met plenty of people who had enough drive and intelligence to be CEO’s of major companies… but they were completely devoted to finding a way to lie, cheat, and steal. They’d spend far, far more time and effort to do so, often for far less reward, than if they’d just punched a time clock and worked.

Well, if they can generate a book with a punch of a button, they don’t have to wait for some sucker to pay them $50 for “500 guaranteed sales!” They can just upload it themselves, and rack up the KU reads, and get the money to their publisher account. They’ve done this with scraping websites, and public domain, and now they’re doing it with AI.

Amazon’s current fix limits book uploads to 3 per day.

For those of you who laughed at the idea of having three new books written to upload in a day… remember that changing your categories and keywords requires republishing your book, too.

So, we have 29 books in Sedgefield Press’s catalog. Soon to be 30! Final formatting finished! Yaaaaaaaay!!!!

Ahem. Where was I? Oh, yes. 29 books to check / change categories and keywords on… that’s no longer one day of getting my workflow set up, and then working my way through, that’s now at least 10 days that I have to allot time to republishing. If nothing goes wrong.

And every time I want to update covers, blurbs, backmatter, or fix typos, the same throttling kicks in.

Plan your schedule accordingly.