Amazon slashes space for book reviews

America's newspapers are cutting space for book reviews to control costs, and who can blame them? Book reviews suck up space, and they're one of the least popular features of newspapers.

Is it a coincidence that Amazon.com is cutting space for customer book reviews by 50 percent on its site? WTF? Unlike newspapers, book reviews are Amazon's most popular feature, and cost them nothing to display!

The change does away with Amazon's familiar one-column display of six reviews. Now just three reviews will be displayed in their entirety, followed by a link to other reviews. The new display, to be rolled out to Amazon's entire customer base in July, looks like this (click to enlarge):

Another unpopular change: The new design is dominated by the three reviews voted "most helpful" by other shoppers. Traditionally, the most recent reviews were displayed first, along with a pair of "Spotlight" reviews. But with the new design, only snippets of some recent reviews will appear in a sidebar on the right.

Many of Amazon's most active book reviewers are outraged, complaining that most shoppers won't click through to read the newer reviews, reducing their chance of attracting votes.

"This new design is a terrible disincentive to all reviewers, especially newer ones," said frequent reviewer Daniel Jolley. "It's just a fact that most users simply do not go beyond the first page of whatever they are pulling up online. You're effectively banning most reviewers from ever being on the main item page, even temporarily."

Jim Robinson, an Amazon employee who is guiding the update, defended the new design and said it was unlikely to discourage readership of recent reviews. "While designing the new review display, we gave this possible drawback a significant amount of consideration," Robinson said on this Amazon-sponsored reviewer discussion board. "Many aspects of the design, some visible, others less-so, are meant to keep this from happening. We will watch closely to make sure it does not become a problem."

It's clear that Amazon is trying to reduce clutter on its book detail pages. Shoppers must wade through dozens of features competing for their attention, such as author blogs, related books and advertisements. It seems another feature or two is piled on every year. Amazon recently reduced the amount of space devoted to its wiki and "customer discussion" features, which appear near the bottom of detail pages and are seldom used.

Amazon is also adding a chart at the top of book reviews indicating the number of reviews awarded at each star rating of one to five.

Let's hope that Amazon remembers that its customer reviews are one of the most popular features on its site, if not the entire Web. Those reviews help sell a ton of books every day of the year. If Amazon reduces their visibility to the average shopper, it seems obvious that sales would suffer.

Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

Q&A: How can I sell my e-book on Amazon?

QUESTION: I can't find a traditional publisher for my book. But I believe people would buy it because it has valuable information for readers, and I can price it affordably. Is there any way an unknown author like me to put his eBook up for sale on Amazon.com?

ANSWER: Yes, any unknown author can put his eBook up for sale on Amazon.com who meets three basic requirements:

1. You own the rights to the book (your question implies that you do, and have not sold the rights to another entity).

2. You must supply an ISBN (International Standard Book Number). You can purchase an ISBN for $125 by printing and mailing this application form. Or, you can get a discount by purchasing a block of 10 or more ISBNs through Bowker, the U.S. ISBN agency.

3. You must open an account with Amazon's eBook subsidiary, MobiPocket, and use their software to convert your file into their proprietary format.

It goes without saying that if you're publishing a book, you're operating a business -- and you need to report income from that business to the IRS and pay the required taxes.

I'll provide more background on getting started with MobiPocket below. But first, let me ask this: Why are you limiting yourself to an eBook? Your question implies that you want to get your book to market quickly and/or limit your cost and risk. However, you can simultaneously publish a paperback edition of your book for modest setup costs and time investment.

The vast majority of book buyers still prefer physical books, so if you produce only an eBook edition, you're limiting your sales unnecessarily. For setup costs of around $200, you can also offer a paperback edition of your book on Amazon using print-on-demand technology, and Amazon will handle the shipping and customer service. I'd estimate that your paperback sales would outnumber your eBook sales by at least 20 to 1.

To get your paperback on the market, I would suggest that you open an account with Lightning Source Inc., which will print your book and supply copies to Amazon and other online retailers as the orders come in. And, if demand for your book proves strong, your book will also be available for stocking at brick and mortar chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble through Lightning Source. If sales of your book really take off, you can lower your printing costs by switching from print-on-demand technology to offset printing.

I would also suggest that you read my book Plug Your Book!: Online Book Marketing for Authors to get more details on self-publishing and Internet promotion strategies.

Now, some additional detail on MobiPocket:

In 2006 Amazon stopped selling Microsoft Reader and Adobe-format books to focus on selling e-books through its wholly owned subsidiary, MobiPocket. The free MobiPocket Reader software allows users of PDA handheld computers to view e-books in the Mobipocket format.

MobiPocket books will also be sold through other online retailers. The promise, especially for self-published authors, is the potential to reach millions more readers at low cost.

To join MobiPocket, register at its publisher portal, eBookBase, and follow the instructions:
www.Mobipocket.com/eBookBase/en/homepage/apply.asp?Type=Publisher

After Amazon receives your signed publisher agreement, the Mobipocket team will notify you via e-mail of your account activation. Then you can log into eBookBase to start uploading and selling your e-books.

To convert your books to the Mobipocket format, you can download a free copy of the necessary software, Mobipocket Creator, Publisher Edition. You’ll be able to upload directly from the Mobipocket Creator software or using the eBookBase Web interface.

For more information, join the mailing list of Amazon’s Digital Text Team by sending an e-mail to DigitalBooks@Amazon.com.

Lastly, one caveat: Amazon is still in the process of switching over to MobiPocket. So it may be a while before your eBook is actually available for purchase on Amazon.

In addition to MobiPocket, Amazon offers another eBook option to its customers: "Amazon Upgrade" provides buyers with immediate online access and searching of physical books they’ve already purchased. There is no downloadable file, but users can print a certain number of pages. To upgrade their books, readers pay about 10 percent to 20 percent of the book’s original price, and Amazon splits the revenue with publishers.

Amazon Upgrade is designed to appeal to buyers who want to receive a physical copy of the book, but are also willing to pay a bit extra for immediate online access and searching. Buyers view the book online through the Amazon Reader, the same interface used for Search Inside the Book. Amazon users can view which previous purchases are available for Upgrade by browsing here.

Amazon hopes Upgrade will appeal to publishers concerned that online access to books might cannibalize sales of physical books, cutting publisher revenue. With Upgrade, any purchases result in added revenue for publishers, since readers have already purchased the hard copy.

To be eligible to purchase upgrades, readers must buy the book directly from Amazon. Upgrades aren’t available for books bought used or new from third-party Amazon vendors.

2007 Blooker prize winners announced

Lulu announced the winners of its second annual Blooker Prize. Each entrant was originally written serially on a blog and later repackaged as a book.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq, by Colby Buzzell, has topped 110 entries from 15 countries to win the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize. It is the frank account of post-invasion Iraq as blogged directly from the war zone. Winning the Fiction category is The Doorbells of Florence by British blogger Andrew Losowsky. This book of short stories based on photographs was self-published through Lulu.com. Rounding out the awards is Comics category winner Mom's Cancer by Brian Fies. Originally an Eisner Award-winning webcomic, it is the true-life account of his mother's struggle with metastatic lung cancer.

Q&A: Should I sell my own book on Amazon Marketplace?

QUESTION: I would rather not give Amazon a 55 percent discount to participate in Amazon Advantage. Instead, my idea is to sell my book on Amazon myself using a Marketplace selling account. That way, I pay Amazon a commission of only 15 percent.

Why do I hear so little about this option?

ANSWER: There are some serious drawbacks with your strategy. For one, many Amazon buyers are uncomfortable buying from a third-party seller. So you can assume some buyers will eliminate your book from consideration if Amazon doesn't sell it directly to consumers.

Then there's the matter of fulfillment. Do you really want to be in the business of filling orders for individual customers and handling the resulting customer service issues?

Even more important: Without distribution, you're locking yourself out of Amazon's recommendation system. Recommendations are the second-largest driver of sales on Amazon after keyword searches.

I'll give an example from my own observation. I know of a niche book that Amazon sells about 350 copies of each month. Another publisher has a directly competing title, but this publisher sells the book himself, using a Marketplace account. The competing title sells only about 10 copies a month.

Why does the second publisher sell only one-tenth as many books? There are many factors involved, but most important for our discussion is recommendations.

If the second publisher had distribution through Amazon, his book would appear in the Amazon shopping cart when a buyer purchased a copy of the faster-selling title. Amazon would display his book, along with two others, with the heading "Customers who bought (book X) also bought...: I know the book would appear in the cart because there are only a few titles that sell in this niche. But Amazon does not give this sort of placement to books unless the title is sold directly by Amazon.

I estimate that at least 30 percent of shoppers would buy the slower-selling competing book -- if they were exposed to it this way.

And you'll be giving up your chance at this type of exposure on Amazon if you decide to be the sole seller of your book.

A chuckle about vanishing book reviews

A lot of talk lately about the vanishing "art" of book reviewing.

Well, finally someone is taking it seriously: Steve Colbert on Comedy Central. On his show Salman Rushdie says, "I'd hate to be a young writer starting out now, when there's nobody paying attention to your book out there. And if you're a reader going into a bookstore, you've got no idea what to pick up."



Of course the other side of the story is this: Today's young, hungry writer has hardly a snowball's chance in hell of getting their book reviewed through traditional review channels. Rushdie's next book will be reviewed everywhere, even if it stinks. And that's one reason why newspaper book-review sections are going by the wayside.

Printed page is obsolete, Gates says

Microsoft's Bill Gates is a pretty smart guy, but a lousy fortune-teller. He's predicting that the printed page will be toast in five years.

Why? For one thing, the advertising is better online, Gates says.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog quotes Gates as saying:

Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It's up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant.

Is Gates predicting the demise of physical books too? It seems his comments were directed at newspapers and magazines, and he didn't address "e-books." But he did say "reading is going to go completely online."

That didn't sit very well with most of the people who commented on the blog. Here's a sample from Monty McCoy:

While no one can argue about the right calls Mr. Gates has made in the past, his technology calls recently have been more than suspect. "Reading is going to go completely online. We believe..." Who is this "We"? The same "We" who predicted that the Zune would give the iPod a run for their money? The January 2004 call of his that "Two years from now, spam will be solved" leads this reader to be highly skeptical of his biased, pro-MS approach.

A dangerously good blog tour

Want to see a blog tour for a bestseller in progress?

The Dangerous Book for Boys reached No. 3 on Amazon today fresh from its first appearance at Parent Hacks. Nineteen more stops are on the schedule, all the way down the long tail of parenting blogs.

And while I'm impressed with the quality of the blogs, some of their Alexa rankings aren't very impressive. Some of them are ranked at 5 million-plus, which probably translates to somewhere around a dozen visitors a day. That's probably why the blogs are running book reviews, not a full-fledged interactive appearance by the author.

Of course it will be impossible to trace any of this book's success to its blog tour because the title has a huge presence already. It was a monster bestseller in the UK last year. Check out the slick video on its Amazon page.

The blog tour was arranged by MotherTalk, which specializes in promoting parenting books online.

Plug your book with a podcast

It's official: Big publishers are aboard the podcasting bandwagon. Today's New York Times gives another example of the speed of sound. Author Mignon Fogarty, host of the Grammar Girl podcast, took just a few days to crank out an audio file of her upcoming Holt book and rushed it onto Audible.com right before an appearance on Oprah. The hour-long $4.95 audio went to No. 1 on iTunes, and she cashed in on the Oprah publicity even though the book wasn't on the street -- in fact it's not even written yet.

Other publishers also are experimenting with such changes, including Hachette Audio ... which in 2005 released the audio version of Jon Stewart’s “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction” on Audible and iTunes several weeks before the book.

“Publishers always want to hit the best-seller list at No. 1, and there had been some concern that releasing an audio version first would drain away sales from the hardcover,” said Beth Anderson, senior vice president of Audible, which, along with iTunes, had brisk download sales before Mr. Stewart’s book and a CD-format audiobook were simultaneously released. “But the publisher told us releasing the audio helped to sell the print version, because having the audio out there really helped to build the buzz for the book.”

An obituary for newspaper book reviews?

There's considerable hand-wringing about the shrinking book-review sections in newspapers. Several large papers have recently scaled back or eliminated their book coverage, prompting the National Book Critics Circle to launch a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing.

The NBCC is even circulating a petition protesting the Atlanta Journal Constitution's elimination of its book editor position.

Oh, puleeze.

I think Motoko Rich nailed this topic today in today's New York Times:

... [N]ewspapers can pique the interest of a general reader, said Oscar Villalon, books editor at The San Francisco Chronicle. Blogs, he said, are “not mass media.” The Chronicle, for example, he said, has a circulation of nearly 500,000, a number not many blogs can achieve.

On the other hand, committed readers who take the time to find a literary blog may be more likely than a casual reader of the Sunday newspaper to buy a book. “I know that everyone who comes to my site is interested in books,” said Mark Sarvas, editor of The Elegant Variation, a literary blog that publishes lengthy reviews.

And newspaper book reviews, which are often accused of hewing too closely to “safe choices,” could learn something from the more freewheeling approach of some of the book blogs, said David L. Ulin, who edits the book review at The Los Angeles Times.

“One of the troubles with mainstream print criticism is that people can be too polite,” Mr. Ulin said. “I feel like an aspect of the gloves-off nature of blogs is something that we could all learn from, not in an irresponsible way, but in a wear-your-likes-and-dislikes-on-your-sleeves kind of way.”

Amazon customer reviews are another nail in the coffin of print book reviews. Sure, there are millions of clueless book reviews on Amazon. But a quick scan of the top few Amazon reviews helps readers make buying decisions, something that print reviews seldom do. All too often, newspaper reviews are merely recycled publisher-generated publicity, which doesn't help anyone.

"Somehow the passion and excitement of books and opinion is cropping up not on traditional book review pages but in the dreaded lowbrow customer comments sections of retail websites," admits Pat Holt, former San Francisco Chronicle book editor.

I detest the homogenization and dumbing-down of traditional media as much as anyone. But in the case of book reviews, it seems that the market is saying something important: Online communities do a better job with book criticism.

Pining for the days of voluminous, serious book coverage in newspapers makes about as much sense as wishing we could return to the days of reading books by candlelight. It's a new day.

What do you think?