Phagocytosis (a.k.a. Amazon, Son of Blob)--veinglory

One of my replacements for Amazon.com, at least for locating out of print books, has been Abe Books. The boycott by myself and a few others is not exactly being felt at Amazon head office. In fact Amazon's profits are up 41% on the same time last year.

While the economy is generally staggering along its downward spiral, Amazon is expanding. Now they have acquired Abe Books (the news from CNET, via Dear Author). The implications for Abe Books are not really clear at this time. But Alibris is starting to look like a better alternative. (Please don't tell me if it is owned by Nazis, or even worse, Donald Trump)

And if you aren't familiar with phagocytosis its what this big blobby neutrophil is doing to the little wiggling bacteria below.

Reasons not to like Amazon--veinglory

It took me a long time to finally stop supporting Amazon as a customer and it is still a tentative process. I fully support that everyone makes their own choices and I certainly don't object to some my publishers making my books available through Amazon, although I would equally support them if the chose not to. But the pattern of behavior at this retailer seems to me to be increasingly grandiose and objectionable.

* The suppression of reviewer Reba Belle. Reviews critical of a new age healer who makes false claims to be a "Quero Apache ceremonial elder" have also reportedly been suppressed. Their review system in general is manipulated to allow authors to review their own books anonymously and suppress review they don't like through a 'clickies' campaign voting them unhelpful until and automatic system deletes them.

* The attempt to make POD publishers use their in house printer, Booksurge.

* Their ridiculous attempt to patent one click purchasing.

* Their lawsuit against the feminist "Amazon Bookstore" despite the fact they had been using that name since 1970.

* The fact they do not list their toll free customer service number on their site, and do not even have a toll free number of their associates program but require you to make a toll call.

* Their sale of arguably illegal animal fighting videos. Note, the amazon system is so automated they don't seem to notice the use if the tag 'boycott amazon' to identify these materials. Personally I think speech should be protected even in this area, but video material and pictorial magazines directly depict contemporary criminal acts and seem to allow people carrying them out to profit from them.

Amazon FYI--Pepper

Just in case somebody hasn't seen it, here's Amazon's Response/Explanation of the POD stuff.

ETA: Also, I've seen some mention that Whiskey Creek Press will be one of the publishers affected by this change. This is from the publisher, posted on the WCP Business Loop:

I really need to clarify my statement. The Bru-ha-ha affects those
people who have their books with Amazon Advantage. Very few of our
books are listed with the Advantage program! I pay a monthly fee to
keep us in Amazon Marketplace. There has never been a 'buy now' button
on most of our books. We list our books at Retail to cover the costs
of the % and fees that Amazon takes from the book price. When you go
to your book listing the site tells the customer that the books are
available through PawPrints at a specific price. It has always been
that way and will never change. We, really, are not involved in this
controversy.

There are a few that do have some of their books available through the
Amazon Advantage program. Amazon has left those alone for the time
being but even if they shut off their button, the Marketplace
offerings will still be available. As it is, we don't get very many
Amazon Advantage sells since we have to ask such an exorbitant price
for the books to cover the 55% of sale that Amazon Advantage demands.

Through Marketplace, we get the on-line exposure we need and, no,
people can't use the shipping options that Amazon offers as an
incentive but we still make good sales through Amazon Marketplace.
Customers have commented that they save enough buying from PawPrints
at the retail price to more than cover the shipping prices they have
to pay rather than the very high price of the Amazon Advantage prices
we list for those books to cover their 55% .

My book was a number 1 bestseller on Amazon! (and why it doesn't mean anything real) -- Jules

My book was a number 1 bestseller on Amazon earlier this week. Yes, really, it was. But before you rush to congratulate me, I'm not posting this to fish for compliments. This is a lesson in how an author could honestly tell you that they're an Amazon bestseller, on sales numbers that wouldn't pay enough royalties to buy a cup of tea on British Rail.

As it happens, this particular book has done reasonably but not outstandingly well by small press standards, and has sold nearly 1300 copies if you look at the combined ebook and print figures. But it's been out for some years, and is now well down the long tail when it comes to copies shifted each month. In fact, it hadn't sold any copies at all on Amazon UK for over a month before this particular sales bonanza. Want to guess how many copies it had to sell to push it to #1 on a bestseller list?

Two.

That's right, two copies sold put my book at #1 on an Amazon bestseller list. On two such lists, in fact, and #4 on another. And that's the key to how this works. Amazon doesn't just have one bestseller list. It has lots of them. It has the books bestseller list, but it also has a bestseller list for each of the many, many categories it puts books into. So the book was #1 on

Any Category > Books > Fiction > Gay > Lesbian > Erotica > Gay

and #1 on
Any Category > Books > Fiction > Gay & Lesbian > Fiction General > Gay

and #4 on
Any Category > Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature

Amazon's ranking is based in part on both how many copies the book has sold recently, and how fast it sold them. So if a book sells two copies within an hour, that can push it well up the rankings on the chart for a sub-category where even the top sellers don't sell that many copies a day. It may even get to #1. It won't stay there for very long, of course (mine stayed there for about ten hours, helped by a third copy selling a couple of hours later), unless it keeps on selling copies. But the author or publisher will be able to say that it was a #1 seller on Amazon.

The other thing feeding into this is that there are multiple Amazons, and some of them have very slow sales compared with the US one. The UK one sells books briskly enough, but nowhere near the volume of Amazon US, so it takes fewer sales to achieve chart-topping status on Amazon UK.

I didn't game this at all. What happened was that I was talking to friends on irc, and one of them said that it was time they read something of mine. I gave the url to the page on my website with the blurb and links to free sample chapters, and someone else said, "I like the look of that, I'm buying it." I checked the book's page on Amazon a little later, and in fact two of them had bought it. I know this because the book happens to be low on stock at the moment, so the page had the thing with "only X copies in stock, more on order". I have a morbid fascination with how Amazon rankings fluctuate with time, so I checked later to see when the sales fed through into the ranking (it usually takes about an hour), and was surprised to find that book's page now reporting that it was on three of the bestseller charts, as detailed above.

Now, this was pure accident -- I didn't encourage anyone to buy the book, and the only deliberate aspect of this was that I knew that someone had just bought a book, so I looked at the chart at the right time to catch a very short-term blip in ranking. Imagine how easy it is for someone to deliberately manipulate the system. In fact, people do. There are groups dedicated to helping to push each others' books to #1 on some Amazon chart for publicity purposes. A lot of the time it's possible for the dedicated to do this on even the "all books" chart. If they time it for a day when overall sales on Amazon are slow, and are well co-ordinated, it may not cost an awful lot in terms of money spent on books.

Remember this the next time you see someone pushing a vanity publishing scheme with the proud boast that they had a #1 bestseller on Amazon. Ask the questions, "Which Amazon chart, and how long was it there for?" Because the answers may reveal the sad truth that "Amazon bestseller" isn't always equivalent to "big sales". If someone can say that the book has consistently stayed in the top 25 books out of hundreds for weeks on end, that's a *lot* more indicative of true interest in the book than a brief dash to #1 from the bottom depths of the chart.

I Sold a Book, Maybe--veinglory

A few days a ago I saw my book had reached an Amazon sales rank of 50,000. Somebody had once told me that presses consider respectable sales to begin at about this rank.

So, knowing that the real meaning of the rank is vague, I plotted out four of the more authoritative estimates of the relation between Amazon rank and book sales per week. The graph below shows these with rank on the x axis and sales per week on the y (note the scale is not linear). A rank of 50,000 is shown by the dotted line and the bottom value on the y-axis is one sale per week.

To cut a long story short, a sales rank of 50,000 suggests one may have sold a book that week.

[/excitement]

Amazon and Mobipocket Get Hard (Hardware, that is)

Just as I find my first novel on Amazon, I am reminded why Amazon annoys me so much. It started with the great and largely unremarked upon 'vanishing' when all non-Mobi ebooks were removed from Amazon in many cases without advance warning. In fact when I asked several small publisher about their thoughts on this several assured me their ebooks were still available on Amazon (they were not).

This was clearly a first move to allow Amazon and their acquisition, Mobipocket, to try and capture the growing ebook market. After all, they make a double profit from Mobi and Mobi-formatted (for a fee) books. Now they are rubbing it in by releasing a new ebook reader that can read only Mobiformatted books.

"instead of using the open e-book standard backed by Adobe it will use proprietary "Mobipocket" software. This means that the e-books to be available as downloads on Amazon.com will only work on their reader."

IMHO this all makes about as much sense as a company trying to trademark and control paper. Except that it seems to be working. Amazon has a tight grip on me as both a producer and consumer--in terms of print books. But I hope the ebook market continues to elude their grasp. I truly think that if epublishing is to remain a haven for niche and small press books the first ebook reader to really take off needs to use interchangeable formats such as pdf.

Edited to add-- And Createspace, Amazon's answer to Lulu.com, only allows sales through Amazon and doesn't seem to include an ebook option at all?

Amazon, ebooks and antitrust

Like a bizarre re-enactment of the hunting of the snark, all the ebooks on Amazon quietly vanished away--and nobody noticed. Or at least google doesn't suggest any great outcry. I guess that puts us ebook writers in our place?

And I quote (from googlecache, amazon.com message now missing): "As of July 12, 2006, Microsoft and Adobe format e-books are no longer available on Amazon.com. As part of our commitment to provide the best customer experience possible, we are now supporting the Mobipocket format. We remain committed to e-books and encourage customers to visit www.mobipocket.com where they can purchase and download tens of thousands of the most popular titles."

And from Amazon support:: "...As part of our commitment to provide the best customer experience possible, we are now supporting the Mobipocket format. We remain committed to e-books and encourage you to visit www.mobipocket.com where you can purchase and download tens of thousands of the most popular titles."

The best customer experience is produced by trashing almost every ebook currently on sale? OMG. All the ebooks gone due to a sweetheart deal with the company (mobipocket) that they just bought--trashing the most publically accepted ebook formats including pdf and html.

Shall I suggest just in what manner I think the "customers" are being "serviced"?