Speaking of Reader Reviews

Earlier this week I talked about what I'm calling the Reader Blurb (I literally talked about it -- with my own voice!), and now here there's this:

Would you buy a book if it was like other books you bought and you knew others who bought what you liked to buy bought that book, too?

The answer to that convoluted question is one of the open secrets of Amazon’s success in the e-tail business: Once you’ve sold products to consumers at low prices and shipped them at little cost, suggest they buy another product – but not just any product, a product selected just for them by a complicated algorithm based on what they’ve searched, bought and otherwise shown interest in.

Consumers love it.

Of course, these consumers are fairly skeptical about some things, which they very well should be:

Consumers aren’t so much worried about whether Amazon rigs its own system; they’re worried about a different kind of foul play – by authors.

“I used to trust book recommendations until I saw how authors and self-help gurus were using the ratings system to boost their sales,” said Nicole Guillaume, 32, the owner of a dog-training company in Corona, Calif.

According to Guillaume, a well-known self-help expert emailed her asking for “help” on Amazon in the form of a book review on the day her book came out. Hundreds of people immediately responded with five-star reviews, despite the unlikelihood of them actually owning the book since it just came out that day. A few weeks later, another author tried the same thing with Guillaume and had similar, positive results.

“I am disgusted with such ploys,” said Guillaume. “I understand that these experts and authors want to increase their sales, but the rating system was created so that real people could create real reviews. Having people create reviews of books they’ve never read totally defeats the purpose.”

This is, of course, a very serious problem. So what can we do about it? Who knows. As a writer, I obviously would like as many positive reviews as possible. I even encourage readers to leave reviews -- honest reviews. If they really liked the book, great. If they didn't, well, hopefully they'll like the next one. Many readers, I think, understand the importance of reviews, so if they don't care for a particular book, they just won't review it.

You have to take the book reviews “with a grain of salt,” said Jay Buerck, 29, from St. Louis and the chief operating officer for an online reputation management company.

“If the book only has a few reviews and all of the reviews are five stars and overly positive testimonials about how great the book is, I tend to discount the reviews,” he said.

A friend of mine has said he would actually prefer to get four-star reviews over five-star reviews, and I think that makes sense. I'm a cynical person by nature, so if I stumble across a book with a ton of five-star reviews, a red flag immediately shoots up (note: that doesn't mean I would prefer four-star reviews over five-star reviews, because obviously I would prefer the five-star, but you see what I mean, right?).

Again, reader reviews are great for helping potential readers decide whether or not to check out the book, but they also play a major role in Amazon's algorithm. It could be completely coincidental, but in the past few days, since that one-star review, I've seen my sales start to slip for my novella Spooky Nook. Again, it could be coincidental, but I don't think so. I also don't think readers are totally turned away by that one-star review. Instead, potential readers aren't being recommended the book as much as before that review entered the system and changed the algorithm. Scary thought, huh? Well, yes and no. The thing is, there's really nothing you can do about it. You can't predict sales. Even without that one-star review, sales might eventually start slipping. After all, what goes up must come down. It's completely out of my control. The only thing I can do is work hard on the next book. That, my friends, is very much in my control.

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Now, on a completely different note, I'm including this YouTube clip. It's pretty longish but worth watching (or at least listening to). While a large number of teachers are underpaid and overworked and still do a great job, there are others who are completely disgusting in how they deal with students -- especially those students with special needs. So check out the video. Just be warned, it will piss you off.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfkscHt96R0]

The Reader Blurb

I'm doing something different on the blog today. Dabbling my toes in the podcast waters, if you will. So if you're brave, click and listen to me ramble for about ten minutes. I talk about VERY IMPORTANT STUFF. [audio http://www.robertswartwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Reader-Blurb.mp3]

These two images will come in handy ...

From The Calling:

From 77 Shadow Street:

Let me know what you think ...

I Can Finally Now Add www.briankeene.com To My CV

Ever since I was a little boy, my lifelong dream was to write a guest blog post for Brian Keene. And, well, that day has finally arrived, which means it's time I can retire from all this writing nonsense. Or ... on second thought, I guess I might as well keep doing this writing nonsense after all, as it seems to be going well.

Many thanks to Brian for giving me a platform to ramble about ebooks and such. Regular readers of this blog probably won't find anything new there, but go check it out anyway. There are obviously many more things you can do in regards to ebooks -- many of which I talked about this weekend at the GSHW meeting, in fact -- but these are the important basics.

By the way, I somehow ended up with an extra copy of Needle, so if you're interested in winning a free copy, check out the details here. But hurry -- the deadline is midnight, EST.

Now What?

So in case you've been living under a rock, you probably heard about the Department of Justice filing "an antitrust lawsuit against Apple Inc. (AAPL), Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York district court, claiming collusion over eBook pricing.” For those not familiar with the case, here's a good rundown. On the one hand, this is great for consumers. I mean, who wouldn't want lower prices? Sure, I don't mind paying $9.99 for an ebook, though I am hesitant when it comes to ebooks priced at $14.99. After all, you aren't really owning the ebooks to begin with. Then again, on the same level you aren't owning a movie when you go to the theater, or even a play. You're paying for a few hours of enjoyment. So it boggles my mind when readers complain at paying 99 cents for a short story that takes them maybe a half hour to an hour to read.

Anyway, of course many of the publishers are upset about this latest ruling, which is to be expected. They've been making a shit load of money this past year. As for the writers? Well, sure, they've been making money, but not as much with that standard 25% digital royalty. Take, for instance, the novel Run by Douglas E. Winter, which was published in hardcover by Knopf back in 2000, then later reprinted as a mass market paperback in 2001. Despite being a great novel, it went out of print years ago. However, I recently found it was brought back digitally for the bargain price of -- drum roll, please -- $13.99.

That price is just beyond absurd if you ask me, especially considering that the book isn't even available in print anymore. And if it was still in print, it would be a mass market paperback, which would mean it would be priced at the most at $9.99.

Scott Turow, the president of the Authors' Guild, is none too pleased with what has happened, but you have to keep in mind Turow is a mouthpiece for major publishing. He's looking out for the publishers' interests, and not the interests of, well, authors.

My concern right now is for the authors such as myself who have been benefitting greatly from the agency pricing model. Sure, as a consumer I prefer lower ebook prices, but as a businessman I want the publishers to price them as ridiculously high as possible. After all, the higher the cost, the more likely readers will try newer authors, such as yours truly.

So it will be interesting to see what happens once everything gets worked out and prices begin to change. Will readers buy fewer self-published titles? Probably not. Will this eventually hurt publishers and their authors? Doubtful. I mean, yes, publishers won't be raking in quite as much as before, but maybe they'll sell more books at the lower costs, which will make up for it. Nobody really knows. But this is bound to get really interesting ...

Returns

The Hint Fiction anthology came out in November of 2010. It got some really great reviews and sold very well. In fact, it quickly earned out its advance, which should be noted because not many books actually earn out their advances, or if they do it can take many, many years. In many ways, it was a great novelty gift, and with Christmas right around the corner, the book would make a wonderful stocking stuffer. Unfortunately, a second printing could not make it into the market fast enough, and I remember there being a shortage of copies at Amazon of all places come Christmastime. How many potential sales were lost from that, I haven't a clue, but it seemed when the extra copies became available it was way after the fact. Anyway, when the whole project first came about, it was important to me that the contributors were paid, and if possible paid well for their time and effort. It still seems to be an ongoing trend in the "literary" community that exposure is payment enough for work appearing in journals, but that's because it seems the majority of those in the "literary" community are trying to build their CV for when they go on teaching jobs, and the more writing credits, the better. For the rest of us schlubs, money is so much sweeter.

My agent was able to negotiate a nice advance, though the majority of it went to the authors. Typically in a project like this, an editor receives an advance and splits it 50/50 with the contributors (the editor keeps the 50, then metes out the other 50 among the contributors). From there, if there are any royalties, the editor does the same thing -- retains their 50%, and metes out whatever 50% is left.

I knew from the start that this book was going to have a lot of contributors, and while it wouldn't have hundreds and hundreds like the SMITH six-word essay anthologies (which, from what I understand, only offered a contributor's copy), it would have at least one hundred. Which meant that, if I wanted to do the typical royalty thing, every two years (assuming the anthology even earned out), I would waste a day or two sending out tiny royalty checks to over one hundred people all over the world.

While that sounded like a lot of fun, I decided instead to pay the contributors a lot of money up front as a one-time fee. This way if the book earned out, cool for me. If the book didn't earn out, oh well. The payment worked out to a dollar a word (or more if the tiny story was very short), which is how much The New Yorker pays, baby. It wasn't a lot, but it was something, and nobody seemed to complain. And then, so, the book came out and, like I said, earned out pretty quickly. In fact, from my first statement from the publisher (which went from October 1, 2010 to March 31, 2011, and which I received in September of 2011 -- publishing works slow, in case you didn't know), the anthology sold just over 12,500 copies, with only 780 copies being returned, and 441 digital sales.

Ain't too shabby, though you have to remember that I don't earn any royalties until the advance is earned back.

Now here's the important part: bookstore shelf life is finite. Every week more books are being released, which means the bookstores need to return the old for the new. This is, of course, the publishing business model.

So let's fast-forward another six months to March of 2012. I receive another statement from my agent (who was sent it from the publisher). This statement goes from April 1, 2011 to September 30, 2011. By this time the anthology has been released for practically a year.

And in that time, how many copies did it sell?

About 900.

Sweet!

But wait -- remember how I said shelf life is finite, and the bookstores need to return the old for the new? Well, here's how many returns there were during that six-month period:

Almost 3,000.

So do the math -- if 900 copies were sold, and 3,000 copies were returned, that puts us in the red for 2,100 copies.

Which means even though the anthology had previously earned out its advance and sold 900 additional copies, I get nothing.

But wait again -- there were some ebook sales, too. Not a lot, mind you. This isn't really a book that translates well to digital, and besides, the ebook price is pretty high considering there isn't much wordage in the book. Still, how many digital copies were sold in that six-month period?

121.

And guess what -- no returns.

Which means I actually receive a royalty on those sales!

Except, well, I don't receive that much, since the royalty for digital is only 25%, but still it's something.

And in another six months, how sales will there be then? Even if there are more sales of the print edition, remember how many returns there had been previously. That means it'll be a long time before I start making anything on the print. But the digital, with infinite shelf life and no worry of returns? Sure, I'll keep making some money off that, though it will very minimal.

Or let me put this in a different perspective: the royalty I received off those 121 digital copies in a six-month period?

I made about the same amount yesterday alone on my own.