Amazon kills fast-shipping offer for niche paperbacks

Amazon today dropped its decade-long practice of offering overnight shipping on most niche paperbacks. In a new warning displayed on its Web site, the online bookseller is warning shoppers that most of these titles will take an extra day or two of "processing" time.

The warning applies to the vast majority of paperbacks manufactured via Print on Demand (POD). Starting today, Amazon began displaying the warning in two places on book detail pages. First, in small, black type at the top of the page:

This item is not immediately available to ship. (In stock but may require an extra 1-2 days to process.)

And again, in large green type, directly under the retail price:

Price:$17.05 & eligible for free shipping with Amazon Prime
In stock but may require an extra 1-2 days to process.

Until now, Amazon had offered one-day shipping on POD titles. The vast majority of those titles were printed by Lightning Source, a unit of Ingram. Usually the books were shipped from Lightning Source in an Amazon box, making it appear the book was shipped from Amazon's warehouse.

With POD, paperbacks are printed only after a customer orders and pays for the book. Amazon still offers overnight shipping on a relatively few POD titles -- those that sell so briskly that Amazon stocks copies in its warehouses. Here is one example of a POD title that sells more than 200 copies per week on Amazon, yet is not stocked at the company's warehouses and is subject to the delay.

UPDATE FROM AUTHOR: This afternoon, Amazon removed the two messages regarding delayed shipping from the affected POD titles. As an experiment, I signed into Amazon with a non-Prime account and purchased one copy of the title mentioned above, eBay 101, and paid $17.98 for overnight shipping. However, when I view the tracking for this order on Amazon's Web site, the estimated delivery date is July 3, about three days from now. I hope Amazon will give me a break on the $17.98 if delivery actually takes three days.

Ironically, Amazon has been urging publishers to switch to its in-house POD services, BookSurge and CreateSpace. A policy statement on Amazon's Web site suggests that requiring publishers to use Amazon printing services would enable the company to prepare shipments within two hours. But the warning about shipping delays appears with most BookSurge and CreateSpace titles.

POD expert Morris Rosenthal speculates that the warning about shipment delays might be Amazon's response to complaints about long shipment times for POD books. Subscribers to the company's Prime shipping deal are offered overnight shipping for only $3.99.

Publishers have increasingly turned to POD. According to Bowker Inc., POD titles exceeded the number of offset-printed titles for the first time this year.
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Steve Weber is author of ePublish: Self-Publish Fast and Profitably for Kindle, iPhone, CreateSpace and Print on Demand

and Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

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Amazon's BookSurge increases author royalties

Amazon's self-publishing unit, BookSurge, announced Monday it would increase author "royalties" from 25 percent to 35 percent. The announcement came in an afternoon e-mail to the company's customers and prospects:

As a company focused on providing customers with the best possible publishing experience, we are pleased to announce that we are passing on cost savings to our customers in the form of increased royalties! Effective February 1, BookSurge increased the royalty rates authors receive on sales of trade paperback books through all retail channels from 25% to 35%; this includes sales coming through from Amazon.com, Alibris.com, Abebooks.com and the BookSurge online bookstore.

We are committed to helping you achieve your publishing goals; giving you a larger share of your book's sales is just one way we can help you succeed as an author. We hope you'll give us an opportunity to show you the BookSurge difference on your next publishing project. Don't hesitate to contact your publishing consultant if we can answer any questions or be of further assistance.

Happy Publishing!

David Symonds
General Manager
BookSurge

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

Amazon book reviews can be tough love

Asking a lot of people to review your book on Amazon is a double-edged sword. Don't even try it unless you've got a darned good book, or you'll get slammed.

But having a crummy book isn't the only reason you might get nasty reviews. People might just hate your guts.

I've studied many thousands of books on Amazon, but I've never seen one with a larger proportion of negative reviews than this one.

Twenty-four of out 52 reviews are just one star. The lead review, voted "most helpful" by other shoppers, puts it succinctly:

Boring.

I'm not sure why Mr. Shaughnessy thought people would be interested in this story. It is quite simply the most boring book I've read in the last five years. Pure and total garbage.

But the story doesn't end there. Irked by the negative reviews, the author's daughter launched an e-mail campaign to recruit positive reviews on Amazon. The text of the e-mail was reprinted on this sports blog.

... As pathetic as it is, these people actually take the time out of their day to go to Amazon.com and write a negative customer review for a book they have not even read, just to spite Dan Shaughnessy. So, I am writing to ask a small favor. If you can, please take the time to go to Amazon.com and write a customer review of your own, letting people know what you --someone who actually read it-- thought of the book...

It was a well-written e-mail, and it resulted in lots more reviews. Mostly bad.

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Tags vs. Categories: Which Amazon feature is more useful?

Which Amazon features are the most effective in encouraging consumers to buy books? Many people say it's book reviews and Search Inside the Book.

In a recent discussion, one publisher asserted that Search Inside is obviously Amazon's most effective feature. It allows browsers to mimick the same thing they enjoy doing at a real bookstore -- thumbing through pages.

What's the proof? Just look at Amazon's book detail pages, the publisher said:

Amazon has chosen to position Search Inside the Book at perhaps the single most prominent position on the book detail page, the top left corner. If it didn't help sales significantly, it wouldn't have that real estate.

You should think of Amazon's detail page as a huge, peer-reviewed, massively data-tested experiment in what content elements do the most to help book sales online. The evolution of the content and layout of the detail page reflects their learnings over time.

I think this gives Amazon far too much credit. I'm also a fan of Search Inside, but as far as I can tell, there is no rigorous testing of consumer behavior before the company rolls out new features or prioritizes existing features.

Take this one example: Tags and Categories. The Tags feature appears prominently on Amazon book detail pages, three levels above Amazon's most popular feature, book reviews.

I'd bet far less than a half of one percent of Amazon customers know what a Tag is, and fewer have ever used the feature. Many consumers who have used Tags on Amazon have done it in a counterproductive way (such as tagging a book "Grandma's Xmas present). The most prolific users of tags on Amazon are authors, who spam the feature with redundant or inappropriate tags. In my opinion, this feature's utility for consumers is practically zero.

On the other hand, Categories are familiar to everyone who's ever walked into a library or bookstore. But on Amazon this feature languishes near the bottom of detail pages, with many (perhaps most) books categorized incorrectly or incompletely.

Where are the Categories, such as Books > Fiction > Mystery? Scroll way, way, down near the bottom, past several advertisements and half-baked, unused features like Amapedia wikis and "Customer Discussions" and you'll find Categories.

I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, and I'd probably buy a lot more if Amazon invested more in classifying products into browsable categories so I could find what I want.

The Amazon employee who is in charge of the Tags feature would probably assert that customers will do a better job of classifying books using Tags than Amazon employees can by working in its catalog department. But at the rate it's going, this could take 50 years.

Q&A: Do online book reviews really help publicize my book?

QUESTION: I read your guide to getting reviews by the top Amazon reviewers. I immediately contacted the top 30 reviewers who I thought might have an interest in my book. A Top 10 and a Top 20 reviewer each requested a copy, which I find very encouraging.

My question: How do reviews from top Amazon Top Reviewers translate into book sales if book readers are unaware of the existence of the book?

ANSWER: I think of this as an art, not a science. The primary benefit of having good online book reviews is it builds credibility for your book. Reviews from Top Reviewers tend to be well-written and influential and they're often chosen by Amazon for the Spotlight position.

Amazon shoppers aren't going to discover your book from perusing book reviews written by Top Reviewers or anyone else. Online reviews don't generate awareness of a book. But once the buyer is looking, reviews help the buyer make his or her decision.

Credible reviews will give some of those browsers a compelling reason to buy your book. If those reviews convert just a small portion of browsers into buyers, you'll rack up healthy sales over time.

But you're absolutely right, people have to become aware of the book, otherwise there's nobody visiting the page and nobody to convert. So in that sense, this is a technique that's most effective if you already have a successful marketing campaign that's resulting in exposure for your book.

Amazon reviews are just one part of a multi-pronged approach. One or two book-marketing techniques probably won't do much for you. Work on a dozen techniques simulataneously, and you'll start getting somewhere.

Q&A: What's the difference between Amazon Advantage and regular seller accounts?

QUESTION: I'm an independent publisher. What's the difference between Amazon's Advantage program and selling books on Marketplace using a Pro-Merchant account? I know that with the Advantage program, Amazon lists publishers' books for free and charges 55 percent commission. Pro-Merchant sellers pay only 15 percent commission plus a $39.99 monthly fee. Why, then, would anyone choose the Advantage program?

ANSWER: If you're a third-party seller on Amazon, then you're responsible for fulfilling the orders, of course. With Amazon Advantage, Amazon handles fulfillment and all customer service.

The major advantage of Amazon's Pro-Merchant subscription ($39.99 monthly) is that Amazon waives a 99-cent "closing fee" on each transaction. So if you sell more than 40 books per month, the subscription pays for itself.

As a Marketplace seller, it's tough to compete against Amazon on sales of new books. Most customers prefer buying directly from Amazon because those orders are eligible for Super Saver Shipping and Prime Shipping. So you need to undercut Amazon by a few dollars to get significant sales. Still, Marketplace is a good venue for selling returns and hurts.

Publishers with certain types of books like to have access to buyer information, to be able to cross-sell and upsell additional products. If you sell the book yourself on Marketplace, you'll have access to buyer names, addresses and e-mails. If Amazon is handling the fulfillment, you won't know who is buying your book.

Q&A: How effective is Amazon's ClickRiver for marketing books?

QUESTION: What's your take on ClickRiver, Amazon's new pay-per-click advertising network? Will this be a viable method for advertising books?

ANSWER: I opened a ClickRiver beta account a couple of weeks ago and have been diddling with it. First, the good news:

• It's much easier to use than Google Adwords. The interface is clean and it reponds fast. If you ask for a keyword, you'll start getting impressions within a few minutes. It's also relatively cheap -- you can buy impressions on practically any keyword(s) for 10 cents per click. But that's probably because not many people are competing for the keywords, at least not yet.

• ClickRiver does a great job of suggesting additional keywords. For example, let's imagine you're advertising a book on "orchids." Once ClickRiver knows you're targeting orchids, it will suggest every book title and author name in the orchid space -- at least those that have good sales. It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many good keywords will be suggested that you didn't think of. One thing I found odd, though: ClickRiver didn't suggest any titles newer than two years. I guess this is a glitch.

The bad news:

• Clickthroughs are very, very sparse. I have thousands of impressions so far, and not one single click. If this was an Adword ad, Google would have shut it off already for low clickthrough. So on the one hand, ClickRiver hasn't cost me a cent, but on the other hand it's been a complete waste of time.
  

I'm sure the reason for the low clickthrough is that ClickRiver ads just aren't that visible on Amazon's detail pages. For example, here are some ClickRiver ads that appear on the detail page for a Garfield book, they appear far down the page and are uncompelling by design:


Visibility will probably always be a tension for this program -- For Amazon to make serious money with this, they're going to have to raise the profile of the ads. But the more they do this, the more likely buyers will be distracted from buying the Amazon product they're looking at.

I've always suspected that pay-per-click is an ineffective way to market consumer books. There's simply not enough profit margin in the typical book to pay $10, $15 or more in advertising for each sale. PPC is supposedly a revolutionary way of targeting people, but I believe it gets the same crummy response as most direct mail 2 percent to 5 percent.

It's a different story if you have a high-margin book or a club or service where acquiring a customer is worth hundreds of dollars over the lifetime of the customer. But I think the main user of ClickRiver ads will turn out to be people who are selling high-priced, high-margin products and services outside Amazon.

Authors shun BookSense affiliate links in favor of Amazon

Here's an honest look at why so many authors and booksellers feature Amazon Associate links on their book's Web page, rather than promoting independent bookstores via BookSense. (And this holds true for authors who detest Amazon and would prefer to champion local stores, given a good option.)

It all boils down to economics, writes Kate Whouley in a Shelf Awareness item, Online Alliances: Deal With the Devil or Pact for Profits?

The operator of one book Web site reported "making more in a month from Amazon than they made in three years from a previous BookSense link."

Further, Amazon makes it dead easy, and that's why many diehard indie customers often buy from Amazon. When Whouley looked into the BookSense.com option for her own site, she discovered it required a series of extra steps for her visitors. They had to search for a local bookseller, who might not even stock her book. If BookSense were hard-wired to fulfillment system like Amazon, customers could buy books with ease, and the independents could be giving Amazon a run for its money.

eBay takes a page from Amazon -- Recommendations

The No. 1 driver of book sales on Amazon is keyword searches -- buyers looking for a title or author name.

But Amazon's crown jewel is recommendations. It's the No. 2 driver of book sales, and it can literally create demand for a book where none existed.

Right behind Amazon's recommendations is its customer review feature, where amateurs compete for "positive" votes from the community.

eBay, in a bid to spur more growth, is now trying to outdo Amazon on all these features. eBay is even paying people to write product reviews.

There's no doubt that good recommendations prompt sales. Look at Netflix. But will recommendations work on eBay? The software engineer who developed a recommendation system for Amazon's auction platform in the early 1990s, Greg Linden, has his doubts. As he recalls, Amazon quickly pulled the plug on auction recommendations because:

[I]t generated complaints from sellers who did not like competitors' items shown next to theirs.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. eBay's biggest vulnerability is it knows a lot about its sellers, but very little about the buyers.

Amazon relaunches ProductWikis as Amapedia

In mid-2006, Amazon added a Wikipedia-like feature to many of its product detail pages. Much like the famous online encyclopedia, Amazon's ProductWiki feature allowed anyone to create or edit content related to products being sold on Amazon.

Now Amazon has quietly relaunched the wiki feature, establishing its own domain and a new name, Amapedia. The change was phased in a couple of weeks ago with very little fanfare. There's still less than a dozen "Amapedia" references on Google.

Meanwhile Amazon has beefed up its guidelines for wiki content, and is warning authors not to spam the feature without at least disclosing the conflict of interest:

Disclose if you are affiliated with the product, such as being the author of a book (or the spouse or close friend of the author)

Three things worth noting:

• Amazon may have changed the name after complaints from an existing company using the ProductWiki name.

• With establishment of the new domain, Amazon has offloaded much of the wiki content from product detail pages, helping to reduce the bloat. That's a good thing -- those pages were getting as long as a country mile.
  

• Amazon is increasingly emphasizing its "community" features. Perhaps the plan is to build an active site at Amapedia that will organize and inject fresh traffic onto Amazon. The wiki feature certainly hadn't gotten much attention stuffed at the bottom of the .com product detail pages.

In the meantime, Amazon's help page on ProductWikis remains unchanged. Interestingly, Amapedia seems to have been the brainchild of an Amazon intern who worked on the coding during 2005. (Thanks, TechDirt.)

Here's my take: Amazon already has critical mass with "customer reviews." This feature is Amazon's "killer app" -- people understand it and value it. To me, it means user-generated book reviews, which are usually a heck of a lot more useful than "professional" book reviews. Amazon's amateur book reviews are a better example of the power of user-generated content than Wikipedia, if you ask me.

Perhaps Amazon should consider augmenting the customer-review feature with more community capabilities. Obviously, most users don't understand or see any added value in product wikis. Trust me, most Amazon users don't want to think about "collaborative structured tagging."

Q&A: How long will Amazon take to add my title to Search Inside the Book?

QUESTION: Amazon approved my self-published book for its Search Inside the Book program six weeks ago. They received the package containing my book more than a month ago, according to the tracking. How long does it normally take for Amazon to add a new title to its Search Inside program?

ANSWER: It usually takes about a month. However, in my experience, Amazon sometimes drags its feet on including self-published books into the Search Inside the Book program. I suppose the reason is that the program is costly, and self-published books are the last priority. The folks at Amazon ought to know better, but there is prejudice against self-published books, no matter how good an individual book might be.

And honestly, self-published books sell very poorly on average. Perhaps that's why many people have speculated that Amazon may begin charging a fee for including books in Search Inside the Book.

For the time being, the best way to ensure your book is included is for you to become a very squeaky wheel. That's how I got my first self-published book added to Search Inside. After my book had been approved, I waited patiently for about six months. Then, when I didn't get a satisfactory answer from the Search Inside staff as to why my book hadn't appeared, I wrote to Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos. My book was promptly added to Search Inside the Book.

For now, I think it would be sufficient for you to inquire by replying to the e-mail you received from Amazon approving your title for Search Inside.

You're right to be concerned about this, I think Search Inside is a powerful sales tool, especially for nonfiction books. After all, if you walked into a brick-and-mortar bookstore and all the books were shrink-wrapped shut, would you spend much time shopping? Probably not.

Search Inside enables full-text searching and gives people millions more ways to find your book. For example, when a buyer searches for Eleanor Rigby, the top three results are books containing “Eleanor Rigby” in the title. Then comes the 600-odd other books that mention “Eleanor Rigby” somewhere on one of their pages.

Like nearly every Amazon innovation, Search Inside was resisted at first by many publishers, who insisted it would hurt book sales. Why, they argued, would someone buy a cookbook or travel guide if the pages could be viewed free? But after Amazon reported sales boosts of 9 per-cent for participating books, most publishers enrolled.

Search Inside the Book doesn’t convert everyone into a buyer. People use it as a research tool without buying, but these folks weren’t likely buyers anyway. But it's much easier to sell your book on Amazon if shoppers can browse your table of contents, introduction, and some sample pages.

Allowing the full display of text gives some publishers pause, but I think most agree the benefits far outweigh the risks. Amazon builds safeguards into Search Inside to prevent customers from reading large portions of a book without buying it. Users must register with a credit card first, and can view no more than 20 percent of any particular book. The text displayed on the screen is a low-resolution image, and can’t be copied into a word processor.

Search Inside also provides authors with an opportunity to hook Amazon browsers with the first sentence of a book. Because Amazon displays your initial sentence hyperlinked, buyers can click right through to your introduction.

Here's where to enroll in Search Inside the Book. Participation must be initiated by the publisher.

Amazon's negative book reviews and how to counter them

Almost as soon as it began selling books, Amazon decided to allow negative reviews on its site, a policy that infuriated publishers. Chief executive Jeff Bezos recalls:

"We had publishers writing to us, saying "Why in the world would you allow negative reviews? Maybe you don't understand your business--you make money when you sell things. Get rid of the negative reviews, and leave the positive ones."

Yes, negative reviews can hurt sales in the short term, but over the long term, allowing criticism builds credibility. Having negative reviews along with positive ones helps buyers decide, says Bezos: "We don't make money when we sell things, we make money when we help people make purchase decisions."

One of the best ways to counter negative reviews is to ask more people to review your book. The more reviews, the less likely that a minority view can dominate attention, and buyers will have a clearer idea of your book's quality.

Traditional book marketing strategies call for mailing hundreds of review copies to reviewers at magazines and newspapers. For a new author or an unknown with a niche book, chasing print reviews is more of a distraction than a strategy. A better way to launch your campaign is by finding 300 to 500 readers in your target audience and giving them your book. Ask them to post an honest critique on Amazon. This costs nothing more than mailing review copies to traditional book reviewers, but will have a bigger impact and nearly immediate results. Here's where to find review candidates:

-- Amazon users who have reviewed earlier books complementary to yours or by authors with similar writing styles.

-- From Amazon's list of Top Reviewers who regularly post reviews of books similar to yours.

-- Friends and acquaintances interested in your book's topic.

-- Participants in Internet discussion boards, forums, and mailing lists relevant to your book.

-- Registered visitors of your Web site or readers of your blog.

You can find more prospective reviewers by posting a message on Amazon's discussion board dedicated to customer book reviews.

Will giving away several dozen copies of your book to its likely audience hurt sales? It won't make a dent, unless your potential audience is very, very tiny. And these initial readers who enjoy your book will gladly recommend it to friends, and those new readers will recommend it to more. That's what book promotion is all about.

The growing importance of amateur book reviews

Successful books have lots of positive reviews on Amazon, and it’s no coincidence. It’s another point in the positive feedback loop: Good books garner good reviews, which encourages more sales. Good reviews on Amazon are particularly crucial for books by new authors and niche books.

Good reviews on Amazon boost your book sales not only on Amazon, but everywhere people are buying books. What percentage of buyers at brick-and-mortar bookstores make their choice by reading a review on Amazon? It’s hard to say, and the only way we will ever find out is if someone like Barnes & Noble begins asking the question at their cash registers, and send us a report. Don’t hold your breath.

One of the reasons Amazon’s reviews are so effective is that they’re written by people who are passionate about a book and its topic. They’re seen as objective advice from someone with no ax to grind. In the case of a niche book, an amateur reviewer with the right expertise in the topic can provide a better critique than any professional reviewer.

You should encourage enthusiastic readers of your book to write a review on Amazon. Each time you see a new positive review for your title, "vote" on it by checking the "Yes" box under each review in response to the question, "Was this review helpful to you?"

But don’t ask for book reviews from people who haven’t actually read your book, not even your mother. The result will be an unconvincing review that will detract from your book’s credibility rather than bolster it.

Negative reviews

As much as good online reviews can help your book, negative reviews can hurt your book even more, according to a study published by the Yale School of Management. Multiple glowing reviews for a book can be dismissed by shoppers as "hype" generated by the author or publisher. But online book buyers pay close attention to negative reviews, because they tend to believe it’s honest criticism by a disappointed reader, the study found.

Buyers understand that no book pleases everyone, and that any book with lots of reviews will have its share of bad ones. Negative reviews hurt some types of books worse than others. Buyers often overlook occasional negative reviews of fiction, religious and political works, assuming that personal taste was involved. However, a detailed negative review of a nonfiction how-to book on Amazon can devastate its sales.

The study, The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews examined random titles from Global Books in Print and bestsellers from Publishers Weekly. The study found that Amazon tends to have many more reviews than Barnes & Noble’s Web site. Read the study in its entirety here.

Amazon takes cue from eBay, asks customers directly for book reviews

One of the biggest strengths of Amazon over its biggest e-commerce rivals like, eBay and BN.com, has always been its automated book recommendations, the vast amount of product information it displays, and customer reviews.

Realizing this gap, eBay this year has begun paying people to write book reviews on its site.

It looks like Amazon wants to stay in the lead. Twice in the past week I've gotten e-mails asking me to write a customer review, the first time Amazon has ever prompted me to write a book review:

From: "Amazon.com"
Subject: Review your recent purchases at Amazon.com!

Thank you for your recent purchases from Amazon.com.

We invite you to submit a review for the products you purchased. Your input will help other customers choose the best products and help Amazon.com continually improve the customer experience.

It's easy to submit a review--just click the Review this product button next to the product.

The Making of a Bestseller: Success Stories from Authors and the Editors, Agents, and Booksellers Behind Them (Purchased on 08/31/2006)

Lumiscope 204-008 Dual Head Stethoscope (Purchased on 08/14/2006)

Increasing your book sales using Amazon's book publicity network

The more your book sells on Amazon, the more frequently it's shown and recommended to more customers. Books that sell well on Amazon appear higher in search results and category lists.

Let's imagine your book How to Grow Organic Strawberries outsells a competing title, Idiot's Guide to Growing Organic Strawberries. When Amazon customers search for the keyword "strawberries," your book will appear on top -- customers will see it first, and notice it before competing books.

More benefits result from your Amazon sales: Your book will move up in category lists, providing another way for potential readers to discover it. For example, your title on organic strawberries would appear in this Amazon subcategory:

Home & Garden > Gardening & Horticulture >
Techniques > Organic

Because your book is on top, readers browsing this subcategory list will find your book faster. It's a bestseller list for your niche. Thirty-five top-level categories (like Arts & Photography; Business & Investing) are each divided into dozens more subcategories on Amazon. Unlike general bestseller lists like USA Today's bestseller list, Amazon's category lists show what people are interested in at the niche level, where passions run deepest.

Amazon's subcategories are discrete enough that, with modest sales, your title can be at or near the top, providing more exposure. In our example, the subcategory of Home & Garden > … Organic, your book could claim one of the top three spots with only two or three sales per week on Amazon.

Once you've bubbled up to the top of your subcategory, it becomes a positive feedback loop. Amazon acts as a huge filter, funneling thousands of readers toward your book.
If your book continues selling for six months or so, Amazon can assign it to more categories, making it even more likely browsers will find you. Books that sell moderately well eventually can be assigned to 10 or 12 categories, the same as if your book were shelved in a dozen sections of a brick-and-mortar bookstore simultaneously.

To see your book’s current subcategories assignments on Amazon, find the section on your book’s product page called "Look for similar items by category." Clicking on those links takes you to a list of the subcategory’s bestsellers.

Sometimes persistent publishers can talk the folks at Amazon into assigning their books to additional categories. Research other books in your niche, and see which categories they’re displayed in. Narrow a list down to 10 categories and send your list, ISBN, and contact information to Amazon. First you’ll need to complete publisher contact information which is for use only by the publisher and author. Find the form here.

Q&A: Am I wasting my time mailing review copies of my self-published novel?

QUESTION: I'm considering mailing review copies of my self-published novel to a mailing list of reviewers. Since this will cost quite a bit of money, I'm concerned whether I'm likely to actually get any reviews, or whether this might backfire.

ANSWER: It depends on what kind of reviews you're trying to get. For self-published books, the best types of reviews to aim for are the amateur customer reviews on Amazon. Here's one way to get reviews on Amazon.

Trade review publications such as Publishers Weekly and Kirkus simply won't review self-published books.

There are some fee-based book review services, but book buyers don't generally read them, so they're ineffective. For example, I was scanning some of the reviews in today's edition of Kirkus Reviews -- where self-publishing authors pay hundreds of dollars to have their books reviewed -- and I noticed this review.

I noticed the price is pretty high for a novel, $24, so I looked it up on Amazon. Believe it or not, "used" copies are selling on Amazon Marketplace for 90 cents!

Does this make any sense? The book was published three weeks ago, and already Amazon is flooded with used copies priced at 90 cents?

Unfortunately, this isn't unusual. And here's the shame about it: Those aren't really "used" copies, they're review copies that have ended up in the hands of used bookshops, and they're all desperately trying to unload them on Amazon. There's enough copies available that price-cutting has ensued, and the price has gone all the way under a dollar.

What's the proof these are review copies, and not really "used" copies? Look at the listing descriptions provided by the sellers. Most of them indicate "staple holes" in the front cover, a sure sign of a review copy.

Amazon's policies prohibit the selling of review copies on Marketplace, but it happens every day.

So here's a case where a big mailing of review copies to an inappropriate list has come back to haunt a self-publisher, a BookSurge customer in this case. You'd think if anyone could get relief from this, it would be BookSurge users, since Amazon owns the company.

If any copies of the book sell on Amazon, it's likely to be the 90-cent review copies, and the author won't receive a dime.

Online word of mouth and how Amazon recommendations sell books

In 1988 a first-time author, British mountaineer Joe Simpson, wrote of his disastrous climbing accident in the Peruvian Andes. His book, Touching the Void, got good reviews, but wasn’t too popular outside England. It sold modestly and then, like most books, began fading into obscurity.

A decade later, another climbing book was penned by Jon Krakauer, an American journalist who scaled Everest but barely lived to tell the tale. Into Thin Air, with a boost from its conglomerate publisher, was an instant No. 1 bestseller and worldwide blockbuster.

And then something really interesting happened. Bookstores started getting requests for the earlier book, Touching the Void. Weeks before, stores couldn’t give it away, and now the book was sold out. Library copies went missing. The original hardback, if you could find one, was going for $375. Harper Paperbacks rushed a new printing onto shelves, and Touching the Void started outselling the new “blockbuster” by two to one.

What happened? Was it a stroke of brilliance by some publishing mogul? No, it was Joe Six-Pack, reacting to book recommendations from Amazon.com. The online store began suggesting the older book to millions of people who Amazon knew liked mountaineering books, based on their previous purchases. If you’ve shopped on Amazon, you’ve seen these recommendations yourself: “People who bought this book also bought … that book.”

Many of the new readers liked Touching the Void so much, they wrote rave reviews on Amazon’s site. These “amateur” book reviews, written by real climbers and armchair explorers, resonated deeply with the next wave of shopper. More sales, more good reviews.

Word of mouth, amplified by Internet power, lifted Touching the Void onto the bestseller charts, where it spent 14 weeks on the New York Times list. The story was adapted for an acclaimed docudrama. Simpson, his writing career turbocharged, followed up with four successful true-adventure books, a novel, and lecture tours—so far.

Does all this make sense? Yes, and it’s just the beginning. Readers are finally able to find the books they want, even in the smallest niches. Readers are finding their books at Amazon and other online retailers, not at regular bookstores, where you might get a scolding if you try using the computer.

All this is a godsend for authors, who finally have a way to effec-tively, inexpensively build their audience. Never has it been so practical, so straightforward, for writers to earn a living at their craft, and build a loyal audience.

Today book readers are helping decide which books sink or swim. As an author, you can hope to be swept along with the tide. Or you can take advantage of this new environment.

Problems with Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" submissions

I want to talk about my experience submitting my book to Amazon's Search Inside the Book program and see if others are having similar problems.

In November, I completed the application for Search Inside on Amazon's Web site. After a few days, I received their OK for my title via e-mail, and airmailed them a copy in mid-November. Then nothing.

A week ago, I replied to the Search-Inside approval e-mail, noting that the package tracking showed they received my book in mid-November, and could they tell me when my book would appear?

Today Amazon replied, saying, "... it looks as if we did indeed receive this book at our warehouse back in November. However, it has been sitting there awaiting approval status, so I went ahead and approved the title for our program, and am hoping that this expedites the process of getting it scanned."

Huh? They approved it in November, and asked me to send a copy! I enclosed a copy of their approval message with the book.

I know many people aren't fans of Search Inside the Book, but I think it can really boost certain types of books. Mine is a niche how-to book, and my hunch is that anyone who visits its product page on Amazon is much more likely to buy it if they can read the table of contents, index, and a few pages of content.

I published the book through Lightning Source, and I've had other problems on Amazon. For example, a couple of months ago, the image of my book's cover was deleted, and it took me about three weeks of constantly e-mailing Amazon and LSI to get it back on. I still don't know why the cover was deleted, who deleted it, or how it got back on.

I'm wondering if Amazon is deliberately dragging its feet (or even creating problems) with people who self-publish through providers other than BookSurge. I've heard this theory from a few people.

Google had no problems adding my title to its Book Search, and they aren't even making money on it, Amazon is. Due to a variety of factors (including my book's content and target audience), I know most of my potential buyers are on Amazon. So I am irritated, to put it mildly, with the possibility Amazon is throwing up roadblocks to my book being sold there.

Has anybody else had these types of problems?

'Amazon Connect' allows authors to post directly to readers

Authors can now post messages about their book on its product page at Amazon.com and even host a blog on Amazon's site.

Signing up for Amazon Connect also enables authors to post a bibliography on their Amazon profile page. Messages show up on the book's detail page and the author's profile page.

This is a good step for Amazon, but so far the move appears tentative. For example, there's no direct link from a book's product page to the blog. The blogs have no RSS feeds, and if you search for "blogs" on Amazon, you won't find anything except books about blogging. A directory of blogs would be useful.

Nevetheless, Connect could be a powerful new way for authors to build relationships with new readers who stumble onto their book's Amazon page.

Many authors are skeptical of the program: "Why should I write a blog on Amazon, when I have my own blog? Why give free content to Amazon instead of putting it on my own domain?" Good question. My answer is, you should explore all avenues for wider exposure to readers. Some author-published blogs (even the good ones) have very little traffic. One reason is that their blog doesn't get indexed by Google very well -- or if it does, it's not assigned a decent Google Page Rank. And so these blogs aren't returned in the top search results, even when there's an exact keyword match. That cripples search-engine traffic.

Amazon's Connect program could lift your blog out of the Web's backwaters. Since the author posts on Amazon are crawled by all the major search engines *and* is hosted on a major Web site (Amazon is the 12th most popular Web destination), authors and their blogs could get tons more exposure.

And you don't necessarily have to give away all your good stuff on your Amazon blog. Amazon doesn't want you to simply repost content that's already on your blog. But you could post summaries to your best blog posts, along with a link directly to your site.

For more information, see this post on Slashdot.