Your Chance to win a brand new Kindle paperwhite

Seven days only... your chance to win a brand new Kindle reader from Amazon, valued at $ 120

This is a promotion for my novel Fish from the Sky. Purchase of the book is not mandatory but would be greatly appreciated. Minimum requirement for participation is to watch the promotional book video. 

The winner will be picked randomly by Amazon after the end of this promotion on July 31, 2017. The device will be shipped to US addresses only.

ENTER HERE

How to make an Amazon # 1 bestseller with one click and a credit card

If you are prepared to enter the murky waters of paid promotion there is no shortage of sharks that promise to float you to the top. Some undoubtedly deliver but is it really worth it?

Please don’t try this at home!

If you hire an outfit with access to a click farm or mass email delivery you can easily buy a number one spot. Just make your book available for 99 cents or less and let the click farm buy a thousand books or more.  It’s been done time and again and Amazon seems to be unable to stop the practice, despite constant complaints from many fellow writers.

I lodged such a claim last week when Tim I Gurung  bought himself a number one spot for THE BROKEN PEOPLE FROM GOD'S LAND  and boasted about his success on Books go Social. Neither the administrator of the site nor Amazon answered my complaint.

Again, is it really worth it? I doubt very much. In fact, it could backfire and in this instance it actually did because the dubbed readers fought back with a phalanx of one star feedback.  If we can kick Amazon awake they might actually intervene and stop the click farming once and for all. Not only is it against Amazon rules to engage in such tactics, it’s also unfair to every honest author.

PS: 22/7/17 I'm pleased to report that Amazon yesterday took down the ratings of that particular book. It looks like all our combined protests finally were heard. One small battle won, many more to fight.
PPS: 23/7/17 a lot less happy to see the book re-instated after one day - alas without ranking. Amazon will have to get their house in order or risk losing scores of quality writers who don't want to waste their time competing with the frauds on Kindle KDP.

If you’re interested in the subject, here is a superb piece from somebody who is even more frustrated than me.

https://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/scammers-break-the-kindle-store/

Bestseller that wasn't

THE BROKEN PEOPLE FROM GOD'S LAND   

by Tim Gurung, Amazon  Kindle

                                                                   

I bought this book because the author posted on social media that it had just scored an overall Amazon 1 ranking, literally out of the blue with just 5 feedbacks. I had to read this. I had to find out how an average Indie author managed to ace it with such ease. I’m sorry to say that it is bad news on all fronts.

The story sets out describing an idyllic place in a valley by a river with cute little houses “the areas such as kitchen, living and sleeping areas were delineated by a simple curtain hanged on a single string” and “goats provided the necessary intake of milk.....”

“Some young girls were washing clothes at the riverbank, the occasional sounds of domestic dog, cat, and rooster were heard here and there, and the gust of wind walloping down from the great mountain was the only disturbance that the place had to endure for now.”

Then out of nowhere, a group of five appears “their attires were heavy, showing no differences between men and women’s clothing, which radiated sophistication and hence respect.”

Ever so slowly the intruders take over until “The hierarchical position at God’s lands had been reversed, the original masters were dethroned by the outsiders and it was at their mercy the former masters had to live now.”

I tuned out soon after. This book sounds like a bible story for children, translated by a pedantic accountant. To be brutally honest: by whatever mysterious constellation of the Amazon star rankings – this book never, ever merited bestseller status – even if it was for just one day. I will follow up with a deeper look into how it is possible that books like this one can sneak their way into the Amazon No 1 bestseller list.

 

Fake Bestsellers in the Amazon Jungle

If I told you my new book just hit ranking two on Amazon (see picture) I would not by lying – technically speaking.  If I was honest I would have said my book ranked 103,000^th on that very day at that very moment. One hundred thousand books did better than mine at that moment;  two or three million others did worse.

There is a great lack of honesty amongst the eBook writing folks. Most of it hinges around Amazon rankings and what they actually mean. If somebody tells you about their "bestseller" on Amazon go and check the overall rankings and compare! But beware where you go looking! Overall rankings on the Australian, UK or Canadian Amazon sites mean little because they are based on just a fraction of the action. If you want to know how a book is doing you'll have to go to the US site.

Here is why: There are two different Amazon rankings. Just about all authors who use the #1 Amazon ranking in their blurb talk about the category ranking i.e. the genre, sub genre etc. their book is listed in. Hardly anybody ever mentions the other ranking which is the overall ranking of all books in all categories based on all daily sales.

Here are some real numbers, based on my own sales. Note that the rankings will fluctuate a lot, depending on what day the actual sales are recorded. Also note that print books need more sales to match the ebook rankings. The figures therefore are only averages - the daily totals can jump as much as 100,000 with a single sale!!

You rank 300,000 in the overall rankings if you sell in the order of 10 eBooks per month. Your category ranking will be a lot lower, depending on the sub genre you are listed in. 

15 sold books per month deliver an overall ranking of under 200,000.

One sale per day or 30 per month puts you in the under 100,000 ratings overall and you might crack the under 10 rating in some genres.

Two sales per day will get you in the under 50,000 rankings and # 1-10 in some niche genres.

Three per day 40,000 , four per day around 30,000 ..... fifty per day will put you in the under 4,000 rankings and an almost certain 1 in the niche genres and almost certain under 100 in the more crowded genres

To hit the 100 top sellers overall you'll need to sell several hundred copies per day.

These rankings are not just straight sales of Kindle ebooks. They also include page reads from subscribers. Amazon has a huge subscriber base - probably twice as big as the paid Kindle base. Amazon pays the authors around half a cent per page – which usually is a lot less than they would get selling the ebook.

Margot Honecker The Purple Witch of the East

Post aus Chile  ISBN 978-3-360-51041-9

Schumann, Frank; Honecker, Margot. edition ost. Kindle Edition.

I bought this book as part of a background research for a planned Cold War novel and as a follow-up to Erich Honecker’s biography. I was really excited by the prospect of finding a glimpse of the real Mr stony-faced Honecker, a wisp of humanity and humility in the memoirs of his wife Margot, mellowed maybe by all the years in Chilean exile? I didn’t hope for much. A sideline maybe, a small sign to show me that there actually were a man and a women under that impenetrable ideological crust. No su I bought this book as part of a background research for a planned Cold War novel and as a follow-up to Erich Honecker’s biography. I was really excited by the prospect of finding a glimpse of the real Mr stony-faced Honecker, a wisp of humanity and humility in the memoirs of his wife Margot, mellowed maybe by all the years in Chilean exile? I didn’t hope for much. A sideline maybe, a small sign of redemption to show me that there actually were two humans under that impenetrable ideological crust. No such luck! This exchange between Frank Schumann and Margot Honecker is nothing but an embarrassing whitewash attempt for an utterly rotten and failed state, its architects and hangers-on; the tedious correspondence between two old hard-line Marxist/Leninists, counting the mourners at the funerals of their ever dwindling numbers, looking for an angle to present their long lost cause to another publisher. Schumann at least can see the irony in it. As for Margot, she went down fighting windmills to the end. “Wir haben von unseren Gegnern kein Entgegenkommen zu erwarten.” We can’t expect any favours from our enemies. Sadly, she gave none and got none back. Margot Honecker was sometimes called the purple witch because of her tinted hair. She died May 6, 2016 in Santiago. She never accepted any blame for her or her husband's part in the East German state sponsored killings of "escapees" or the Stasi inflicted torment of families separated by the wall.

The Wartime Notebooks of Marguerite Duras

I had to read Duras for High School French. I remember thinking what a cool chick she must have been, long before such a phrase even made sense. Born to French parents in Vietnam, she left her (reportedly abusive) family after a never fully explained affair with a Chinese man at the age of 17 to study in Paris. She joined the Communist Party and worked for the Vichy government as well as the French Resistance during the war. Her first husband was interned in Buchenwald. He survived the war but they divorced soon after. Marguerite Donnadieu chose the pen name Duras for her first publication towards the end of the war and stuck with it for life. She didn’t have to invent much. Her own life already was a novel, full of contradictions, affairs of the heart and substance abuse. She survived alcohol but the smokes got here in the end. She died of throat cancer in 1996, aged 81.

I never went back to her writing after High School. I guess she was the “it” girl in French literature by the time our French teacher made us read her. I missed the point of the hype then. I could gladly have finished my days without ever hearing her name again. But the other week I went to the local flea market and there she was on the cover of a secondhand book, posing in front of a typewriter, a few pages of a manuscript and a packet of Gauloises cigarettes next to it .

When I began to read the English translation of her wartime notebooks it came back why I remembered her from the French lessons from forty years ago: Duras is easy to read, even in a foreign language. I don’t pretend to like all her stories and I could never stand her films  but I love her simple and straightforward style of writing. This becomes even more poignant in the telegram style of her rough drafts. I’m glad I found Duras again. I won’t be going back to her novels but I urge every aspiring writer to get a copy of “Wartime Notebooks” as a reminder that it doesn’t take big words to tell a story – just the right ones.  

Kindle - The Incredible Shrinking Book

When is a book a book? Actually, if it’s bound with a cover, a spine and a back. A Kindle is not a book. It’s a manuscript on a screen.  It might have 300 pages but it’s simply formatted that way. An average print novel has around 85,000 words. The average eBook on Smashwords comes in at 35,565 words, trending downwards.

Ebooks are getting shorter fast. Why? Because e-publishing platforms encourage authors to write more. If one sells, write two more.  If none of them sell just keep pumping out more until one catches on and you’ll make a killing with your back catalogue.  (Insert laughter here)

Never mind the subject; hacking out five 85,000-word books a year is beyond all but a handful of freaks. The solution is simple: write five instead of one!

And so they do. I followed one particular Amazon author who had amassed 25 titles in 4 years. Insane! Amazon doesn’t publish word counts, in line with everything else they don’t want us to know. The page count Amazon lists is meaningless because pages can be any size. The writer in question formatted her work into a 300 page ebook with sixty chapters that amounted to around one page in an average print book. I calculated the word count to be around 18,000 per book. In other words, around 5 of her ebooks equate to one average sized print novel and her output in 4 years is equivalent to 5 average print books. It made me feel a lot less inadequate.

If a print book takes off, the author invariably suffers a bad case of verbal diarrhea and no editor will be game enough to rein in the flood. Fair enough, the poor author probably spent half a lifetime trying to bend his/her writing into editor-conform prose just to get accepted. Now let them see what damage I can really do!

Ebooks don’t follow that pattern. If they take off, they get shorter. An Indie author has a huge advantage over the trad pubs: he/she can fire off the follow-up book immediately instead of going through the extended traditional production process.  No more testing the water with a “pilot” – just hit Amazon with the complete, yet to be written, series.  Some fire up, some flame out – the process of finding readers has not changed, only the method of delivery.

As a relatively new convert to Indie publishing I have to admit that there is something to be said for the incredible shrinking book, just as there was a case to be made for the incredible shrinking newspaper in the 80s. I was part of the team that set up USA Today in Europe. Grabline boxes, graphics, colour, Tweets before there was such a word - nothing was really new about the five or so second rule to grab a reader’s attention. The method of delivery via satellite, the multiple print sites and thus the improved distribution were new. Sounds familiar? Yep, Amazon is USA Today, only much further reaching than anybody could have envisaged.

So what if Amazon serves up fast food made up of garbage and gems all mixed into a big fat stew? Most trad pubs are there with their bestsellers – so is everybody else with a Word document. Financial success is still the exception but some Indie authors do extremely well without ever selling a single print book.  Editors, agents and assorted literary glamouristas will just have to accept the fact that they are no longer in sole charge of the Holy Grail.