The worst consequence of AI might be mediocrity

The internet has been flooded recently with AI-related doom and gloom. AI is coming for your jobs, your art, and your writing. Nothing is real; the internet is dead space filled with bots. Our time as the top species is rapidly coming to an end and we will all soon be replaced with AI. 

But the more I research what is driving the news, the more underwhelmed I am. AI isn’t creating great art, it’s creating mediocrity. It’s not taking your job, but predatory companies would sure like to use it to take your job. It’s not creating new problems so much as augmenting existing ones and allowing bad-faith actors to massively increase their output of fake news, spam, and phishing attacks.

The internet buzz around Chatgpt really grew to a deafening roar when Chatgpt passed the board exam for law.* 

*big caveat here, someone passed a mock exam using answers from chatgpt. Chatgpt is a long way from being able to spontaneously take an exam and can not practice law nor can it be used to practice law. 

That said, it passed with a mediocre C+ average. And the first attempt to use Chatgpt in the wild to practice law ended, well, badly. Like really, really badly. This video breaks it down well, so I won’t go into detail. But the short version is that Chatgpt tends to make things up. 

Insert video

Just how amazing is this? 

Not very, unfortunately. Chatgpt is good at aggregating information from many sources, kind of like Wikipedia. In fact, I bet a student copying and pasting from Wikipedia could have passed most of the exams that Chatgpt has passed. 

Can Chatgpt now be used to practice law? 

No, absolutely not. The problems addressed in the video notwithstanding, every legal motion must be signed off by a human being with a law license, who then takes responsibility that the motion is in accordance with legitimate legal practice. 

The same can be said for medicine. Passing the boards using Chatgpt doesn’t grant you the right to practice medicine. Every medical decision still needs to be made by a human being. 

Is it useful? 

If the problem of Chatgpt making things up. (Experts call it hallucinating) then definitely. The information would still need to be read and interpreted by an expert but Chatgpt could:

Use a set of symptoms to suggest possible tests to run and diagnosis to make, greatly increases a doctor’s efficiency. 

Create the legal framework, with necessary citations for a lawyer to build a case around. 

Fans of Chatgpt like to point out that it could drastically decrease routine paperwork by writing drafts of legal contracts, reducing medical charting, etc. The problem with this is that we already have, and have had for a long time, tools for this. Lawyers use boilerplate contracts and then modify them to fit the needs of the client. They even use autofill forms to avoid having to add things like the names of the various parties into a form over and over. Medical charting is mostly done on the computer these days and is mostly click-through charting with drop-down menus of standard options. 

What about creative writing? 

Authors are terrified that Chatgpt will flood the market with AI-generated content that will drown out already beleaguered authors and reduce are already meager earnings to zero. There are two reasons why this probably won’t happen. 

The first has to do with how AI works in the first place, and why it only got a C+ on its legal exam. Chatgpt is a writing “aggregator” It collects thousands of examples of writing and then constructs a similar-sounding text, putting one word after another in a way that resembles natural text. There are a couple of shortcomings to this approach. 

AI has no idea what it is doing or why. It’s simply copying other texts. This is why it regularly “hallucinates” or makes up information. It’s stringing text together in a logical way, but not one that is based on any reality. So if it’s writing a legal document, it will give realistic-sounding citations, but it can’t understand the difference between real and fake citations. That’s why it’s untrustworthy.

But the second aspect of this is why I’m not afraid of AI-generated content. AI-generated text is almost by definition, average. That’s the whole point of aggregations, to learn what is average and apply it. 

I like to think my writing is above average. Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I am going to stick to that belief. And AI-generated content is never likely to be better than average. If anything it aspires to be more average. This tendency towards average-sounding text is likely to make the majority of AI-generated content boring and repetitive. 

AI as it exists now is not designed to create great, or even good writing. It’s designed to create realistic and believable but on the whole, average writing. 

The real danger of AI writing: unexamined bias

There are, in my opinion, two real dangers to AI writing, its tendency to make up things that aren’t true but sound plausible, and our own biases. Because AI aggregates the writing of millions of people from across the internet, it is also aggregating our biases. 

When AI “hallucinates” completely new information, that can present a danger if the information is taken at face value as fact. But typically people quickly recognize it as false information. But often the fabrications that AI makes aren’t so obvious and do in fact get taken as fact. 

Because we have a history of racism, sexism, and homophobia, AI tends to aggregate these biases and incorporate them into its output in ways that aren’t always directly obvious. And this presents a huge danger of those biases spreading and becoming increasingly accepted as facts. 

AI art and the dead internet

What about AI art? 

AI art faces many of the same problems that AI writing experiences. For example, AI art also hallucinates, coming up with unreal images frequently in response to prompts. But then again, in art, the question might be what is real and what is unreal. 

There is also evidence that AI art is getting worse in large part because of AI art. AI creates art the same way it creates text, by scraping the internet for large numbers of examples of art and then creating something that appears similar. But as more and more people create and share AI-generated art, a greater portion of the art being scraped is AI generated, and the problems with it get amplified. 

Is the internet dead? 

There is a wild new theory called the dead internet theory. What I love about this theory is that if it isn’t true, it likely will be soon enough. 

The theory goes like this. Humans create bots to interact with others on the internet. Already studies suggest that the majority of interactions we have on the internet are not with people but with bots. We go to a website and immediately get offered assistance, but these aren’t call center employees, as we might think but bots trained to act like call center employees. Dating sites often use bots to pretend to be women, to make men think there are more women on the site than there are. And of course, so many people create Twitter bots designed to drive engagement to posts from a certain account or on a certain topic. 

So along comes another person who creates a bot to scrape commercial sites for certain information by interacting with the call center bots. Others create fake Twitter accounts that act in a way to attract Twitter bots to boost their account. And now we have bots interacting with bots. 

This is the dead internet. There are few if any, actual people involved in it. We go to commercial sites and see products recommended by bots, not people. We go on social media and see trends that are driven by bots, rather than humans. Blogs are written by AI. Pictures are created by AI. Both are shared by automation. They receive likes and engagement, but much of it comes from bots, either bought by promoters or received because the content matches some criteria that other bot manufacturers value. 

And it’s all driven by algorithmic averages. 

Let’s imagine the AI-generated influencer of the future. 

A seedy entrepreneur wants to make money by creating an artificial “influencer” that will travel the world and sell content. So he goes to an AI art generator and starts to load in prompts like “beautiful woman.” And let’s be honest, it generates a white woman because racism. 

And because our seedy entrepreneur isn’t the only such entrepreneur out there, a fair amount of the “art” scraped to create this ideal “beautiful woman” is also AI-generated. So beauty standards become exaggerated. Thin becomes ridiculously thin. Big breasts become even bigger. The proportions are unrealistic for most women.

But something else happens at the same time, these AI-generated beauties become more average as well. Distinct forms of beauty are erased. Features that cause one to stand out don’t work in this new artificial world of beauty. 

Where does the entrepreneur send his new AI influencer? He scrapes that from top hitting keywords like “best tourist destination.” And so she only goes to the top tourist destinations and is only pictured (artificially of course, through more AI-generated images) at the best beaches, the most famous sites. 

And it’s accompanied by AI-generated text, stuffed with SEO keywords. 

Once he’s created his new influencer it is time to make her famous. To do that he creates a small bot army to follow and like her posts. He might also steal some bots from other entrepreneur’s bot armies, by figuring out what keywords, images, and other identifying traits they are using to program their bots. 

After a while, he gets some impressive numbers and uses these to get companies to pay him to put his AI influencer in their brands. She’s pictured wearing the latest fashion, visiting restaurants that pay top dollar for the mention. 

You might be thinking that surely companies will get wise to this and stop spending money on fake likes. But it’s just as likely that commercial sites like Amazon will see the massive “engagement” these brands have and move them up in their own algorithm, putting them on the landing page and artificially boosting sales. All of this with no evidence that any actual human being.

It’s bad enough that so many young women have problems with their self-image because they are constantly bombarded with unrealistic images of beautiful women online. What’s worse is that these beauty standards are increasingly “average” and despite hundreds of “likes” not one actual human being has looked at that picture and said, “Wow, I like that.” That is the dead internet at its’ worst.

What do you think? Do you trust what you see on the internet? Is it real? What should we do about it? Will AI be the end of humanity? Or maybe just the end of the internet? I would love to hear other ideas in the comments. 

An Atomic Year

I recently read Atomic Habits by James Clear. I’d seen some hype online about the book but hadn’t read it. I’m sorry I waited so long. It was definitely worth it. It is all about making small (aka atomic level) changes to create huge results. 

What really hit me was the story about the English Biking Team. Having not won medals in international competitions in years, they knew they needed to make a change. But instead of focussing on the athletes, assuming they were already giving their best, they looked around the edges for small things they could do. They tested tires, gears, sports drinks, everything they could do to increase the team’s performance by even a tiny bit. And slowly it began to work, they began to win more and more competitions. 

What about my writing?

I’ve always been a natural story teller. Actually writing down those stories took a level of discipline that escaped me for years. Meanwhile, grammar, let’s just say it took me learning a second language to come to terms with English grammar. 

Publishing is a mixed bag. Parts of it I love. I love playing with technology and I’ve learned to do a good job with Indesign and Photoshop. However there is still more to learn. As with everything, consistency and discipline has been a lifelong problem for me. 

Finally there is the bane of my existing, marketing and promoting. I’ve never quite figured out what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve tried lots of things but none of it paid any results for me. 

So one of my main goals for this year, besides getting back to writing regularly, is to work on atomic changes around the edges of my writing career. This means making sure they are published in all appropriate channels. (I have several books on Amazon that are not exclusive there but haven’t been published on Kobo or through Draft2Digital.) 

I want to slowly to look at making new covers and writing new blurbs for all my books. If I can I might even look a bit deeper, at re-edits and new formatting for some of my books. I also need to work on my blog, get my newsletter up and running again. 

My new cover for Bear Naked. More to come…

What else?  Do you have any suggestions. Are there things I should be doing to promote myself? Things you don’t want to see? Let me know in the comments. 

A New Look for Bear Naked

I’m trying to give some of my old books a glow up with new covers and blurbs. My goal is to make covers more inline with the genre of the books and hopefully get some more sales.

What do you think of Bear Naked’s new cover?

Blurb:

“I like to look my prey in the eye when I kill it.”

The words filled Amanda with fear and anger. But later they would fill her with foreboding. Who was the man? Why did he want to kill her? Who were the others that he mentioned? 

Amanda Burnson was a normal teenager, if you counted living in a cabin on the edge of town with your Neo-pagan uncle and being friends with two gender queer youths as normal. She definitely wasn’t involved in anything that caused scary looking men to want to kill you. 

Her uncle seems to know something, but he’s got his hands full helping the local DNR with a wild wolf. Her new boyfriend, Connor, also seems to know something, but he won’t say what and she already has a different suspicion about him and his friends, like that they are werewolves. But that’s crazy, isn’t it? 

Have you read Bear Naked yet? If not head over to Amazon to buy your copy today.

The Mage Chronicle Audio book is here!

The Mage Chronicles, with Narration by Georgie Leonard is now live on Audible and Amazon!

Audible

Amazon

I think Georgie did an incredible job of bringing the story to life and I’m thrilled to have this on the market.

Check out the retail sample for yourself:

Blurb:

It has been a centuries-long golden-age for the empire, a time of peace and prosperity. Mary, a mage class healer, is content to live an ordinary life in one of the rich central worlds. Her old master Ashely La’Margin wants her to do more with her magic, but Mary has little use for riches or power.

Now a border dispute in some distant province threatens to become war, and there are rumors of Juggernaut, super warriors that can’t be killed. The civilian council of mages sends Mary to stop it, but what does a healer know of war?

On the way she will confront a harsh medieval world unlike the central worlds she has known. If she is to save this empire she must discover untapped powers and face the ghosts of her past, especially the boy Martin and the orphanage that she left behind as a child.

To keep up to date about R. J. Eliason’s writing, sign up for her list. And receive a free copy of The Mage Chronicles:

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A New Short Story From R. J. Eliason

I am part of an anthology!

Changeling Ward is a collection of three short stories/novellas from local Iowa Authors. All the stories are fantasy and all are based around the theme of changelings.

My story is A Knife in the Dark and it’s set in the Gilded Empire world. (The same world that Mage Chronicles is in, though the characters aren’t the same.)

The ebook is currently available as an Amazon exclusive. That means if you have Kindle Unlimited you can read it free for a short time. Check it out today!

And as always, if you want to stay up to date on the latest from R. J. Eliason, sign up for my email list:

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Introducing Zoey and the Zombies

Zoey one

The world is overran with undead. Giant hordes are pouring out of the East Coast, threatening the Midwest. The defense of Mondamin Court, a quiet neighborhood in Des Moines, Iowa is up to a disabled cop, a fourteen year old boy and a transgender girl. What could go wrong?

Mondamin Court is a typical lower middle class neighborhood in a midwestern city. The people are a cross section of America. Each book starts with the same setting and characters but they face a different apocalyptic scenario.

Release date is: June 20th

Update, it’s out:

Amazon

Kobo

Everywhere Else

I Broke my Near Perfect Followback Record on Twitter. Here is Why.

Some time last week I got followed by an aggressive bot. (The TL;DR version right there.) How do I know it’s a bot? Well, the first hint is also why I describe it was aggressive. I noticed a suddenly rush of new followers. And I mean a lot of followers. In one day alone I had 235 new followers.

I typically get five or six new followers a day. It’s not much but you’d be surprised how quickly your follower count grows when you consistently get even a small number of new followers like this. When I am trying to build my follower count by actively following new people, interacting with people or running promotions I can add more, but never in the range of two hundred a day.

I noticed these new followers were all from the Middle East. In fact around ten, twenty new followers with Arabic profiles I started to wonder what was going on? Had I suddenly gone viral in that region and not known it? Was some Arabic reader rushing around with his/her kindle saying, “you all got to follow this American writer, she’s awesome!” (We all wish this was at the root of every mysterious bump in followers, page hits or sales. But sadly it’s rarely true.)

Here Temporarily and Tomorrow I will spend,, Thief, My Character. -Unknown twitter bot

Bots are automated software systems designed to tweet and act like real users. Some are very sophisticated. Others, not so much. Bots follow new accounts based on algorithms. I don’t know what keyword I used, what followback ratio or klout score led them to my doorstep, but here they are.

Bots can also be automated to create new accounts, so skilled bot owners may have hundreds or thousands of twitter accounts at their disposal.

But what can you do with a thousand twitter accounts? Most twitter bots are created with the sole purpose of boosting other accounts follower numbers. All the ads you see for ten thousand twitter followers for five dollars, are bots. There is simply no other way for such businesses to be viable.

More sophisticated bots can not only create Twitter account they can create the profiles as well, taking pictures from a database or from the internet and adding text to make it look like a real person’s account.  As you know automated text is not a perfected technology and the bots are often programmed to use keywords and any large body of text written with keywords in mind often comes across as funky.  Google translate is far from perfect as well. Put the two together and looking at some of these profiles can be downright hysterical.

Screen Shot 2015-09-20 at 8.59.49 AM
One my new bot follower’s profile.

Having decided that most of this rush of new followers were bots I decided not to follow back. I usually have a pretty liberal followback policy, including eggs and accounts that under other circumstances may also be bots.  A few bots here and there don’t bother me but a huge rush like this this did.  Here is why I chose not to follow them back.

Another wonderful bot profile
Another wonderful bot profile

1. Bots are usually created by people who are looking to sell followers. I do not buy followers. Having a huge run of automated bots following me might create a different impression.

There is an interesting  parallel with the recent controversy around paid reviews. An expose was written about well known Indie authors buying reviews from review websites. What the expose didn’t cover was whether or not all of the reviews written by paid reviewers were paid for. Twitter bots and fake likes on social media sites often do a lot of legitimate following and liking, to avoid suspicion. It would make sense to me that to sell paid reviews, reviewers would have to do the same, write many legitimate reviews of popular works so they look like legitimate reviewers.

Either way, it’s clear that people notice. Even though I didn’t pay these bot accounts to follow me, it’s likely that some people will notice and assume I did. Which Is why I won’t follow them back. If they unfollow me in a few days, all the better.  

2. Bots will never buy my book.  no matter how many bots you have in your following list not one of them will buy your book, review your book or give you any tangible benefit. Bots and paid followers are the perfect example of failing to understand what social media metrics really mean. Paid following does not equal a large fan base, any more than political candidates hiring crowds for events equals votes in the voter booth. If you stoop to paid followers, or encourage others to do, you will lose in the most important sphere of all, long term success.

3. Bots do not  interact the same as real people and their value as followers isn’t the same. It is better to have 100 followers who are real people and want to interact with you then ten thousand bot followers. Bots do what they are programmed to do and little else.

4. Like attracts like. I have five thousand and some followers. As a writer, I find the majority of my followers are also writers, bloggers or book lovers, as it should be. Bots follow by automated algorithms. Invariably they will end up following other bots, who share their online behavior. Then it becomes a vicious cycle of triggering each other’s algorithm. So bots may have hundreds of thousands of other followers, all of whom are also bots. They share what they’ve been programmed to share and retweet what they’ve been programmed to retweet, all to other bots. Interacting with such accounts is like shouting into the void. Your post might get shared a hundred times and never seen by a human eyeball. Don’t waste your breath.

 

If you can’t Write Fast, Fake it

I was given this advice, almost word for word, from a fellow writer recently. And surprisingly, it reverberated with me.

Indie writers often advise writing fast and publishing a lot. There are lots of good reasons to do this, if you are able. Publishing regularly keeps your name fresh in reader’s minds. Having lots of published works out allows readers to enjoy one story and then immediately move on to others. Writing fast makes it possible to write a lot, and writing a lot helps you get better at writing. If nothing else, publishing a lot of work means that even if you only have modest commercial success, if you multiply that by many books you can still make a decent income.

Writing fast gets a bad rap because it’s too often associated with writers publishing poorly edited manuscripts or cutting novels into pieces make serials. Those things that do happen, but there are many great writers who put out books regularly without sacrificing quality.

Not everyone can do it, however. Some of us naturally write fast but others do not. For those who do, what can they do?

The answer is to fake it. How do you do that? This writer suggested writing at least three books before even considering publication. Then either publish all three at once or space them out a month apart or so. That way you get the same advantages, bigger buzz and multiple books on the market, without having to write a book a month.

I write fast. But I also tend to write scattered. I have several books in progress at any one time. I have several series up in the air right now. The third Bear Naked book will be out very soon. There are three more in the story arc that aren’t written.

Meanwhile I have the next Gilded Empire book almost done. It’s the beginning of a trilogy. I have the Galactic Consortium serial running on Wattpad and the first Mondamin apocalypse novel on that site.

The Bear Naked hasn’t performed as well as I expected. Part of it, I think, is that readers don’t like to start series that aren’t complete, or at least well under way. There is always a concern that the author will abandon the series uncompleted. We have been conditioned by the availability of so many series that it’s hard to get traction with one book. Hopefully, The Hunted will give the Bear Naked series that kind of traction.

In the meantime I am thinking of taking this advice to heart. I have temporarily tabled The Banner of Kash until I can finish at least the rough draft of books two and three. I have a second Mondamin book in editing stages and a third in planning. Once the Banner of Kash is completed I will come back to that series.

What do you think? Will you read the first book in a series if the others aren’t completed yet?

5 reasons that Twitter power users hate DM

I see it all the time, twitter power users with a little message in their profile, “No DMs.” These users won’t respond to direct messages, they don’t read them and woe to the user who tries to DM them. Why do so many power users seem to hate Twitter’s direct message feature? Here are five reasons:

  1. Hi! Generic greeting – via thirdparty app.

Nothing says engagement like using a third party app to auto message people. I understand that social media takes time. I schedule posts and automate some things as well, but not DMs.

I don’t expect every follower to interact with me personally, but getting hundreds of DM’s from autoresponders wastes my time and it looks tacky. If you use an auto-messaging app, you might want to rethink it. It won’t make me unfollow you, but it does make me tune out DMs.

 

  1. Hi! Thanks for following me. Want to follow me on Facebook here?

Yeah, I get this one daily. You follow someone and they send you a dm requesting you like their facebook page as well. You know what? I followed you on Twitter. If I wanted to follow you on Facebook I would have done that instead. Twitter is an actual social media in its own right, not Facebook’s recruitment app, so stop treating it as such.

 

  1. Thanks for following me! Want to buy my book now?

This one is often followed by the little via third party app tag, making it a double whammy. I love connecting with authors, but if I wanted to buy your book I would have looked you up on Amazon, not Twitter. DMing your book link is spam, pure and simple.

 

  1. DM’s from people who don’t follow you.

Yes, it happens. Why is that a problem? Because Twitter won’t allow you to respond if you don’t have a mutual follow relationship. Obviously you didn’t know that, or you wouldn’t have wasted both our times with this message that I can’t reply to even if I wanted to. Stop it.

 

  1. It’s called social media for a reason.

People forget what social media is all about, being social. I can understand people being more hesitant on Facebook. You have personal pictures, you’ve friended family and close personal friends. You want to share with them, not the world.

But Twitter is an entirely different beast. Everything you do on Twitter is public. That can be a downside as many of the conservatives that treated the president’s arrival on Twitter with racist scorn may soon find out.

But that’s also the beauty of Twitter. Twitter is the cocktail party of social media sites. It’s all short conversations held in a public forum. Twitter power users get that. They are on Twitter to promote themselves, not by constantly spamming people with buy my books links, but also not to spend most of their time in private conversation. They want to mingle, to share tweets with followers and talk to each other in a semi-public forum.

The @ mention is the secret to being a Twitter power user, not DM. @ mentions are seen by both your followers and theirs. Public interaction with the right fellow authors can increase your visibility and announce, in a not so spammy way, that you, too, are an author.

As a bonus: One reason I personally dislike all of the social media messaging features, be it Twitter, Facebook or wherever:

I have an email.

I get plenty of emails. It’s hard enough to keep track of everything when it’s one place. (Two places, actually. I have a second email I use specifically for newsletters, or websites where I have to sign in.)

What’s worse is trying to keep track of hundreds of contacts and messages across a half dozen platforms. To keep things simple, I keep Facebook chat off and redirect any important contacts to my email address. Otherwise things get lost in the shuffle.
That’s my take on why Twitter power users don’t use direct messages. What is your take? Any issues I missed?

Amazon’s BS Machine

I absolutely adore Ursula K. Lequin. I want you to know that right up front. She’s one of my favorite writers of all time. I love how passionate and outspoken she is about many issues, ranging from books to feminism. However her latest post on Bookview Cafe missed the mark on a number of levels. The post, title Up the Amazon with the BS Machine, takes Amazon to task for creating a system where the latest best seller drives out better books.

 

Her argument in a nutshell is that Amazon has an obscure algorithm for determining best sellers. It focus on selling books fast and cheap, favoring the quick pop success of fad titles and then burying books that have ran their course into obscurity.

I see three big issues with what’s she’s saying. The BS machine (best seller machine) predates Amazon’s rise and dominance by many years. Amazon’s admittedly murky algorithm actually works against the BS machine and Amazon doesn’t condemn any book to obscurity, quite the opposite.

The BS Machine

Let’s start with the rise of the BS machine. It didn’t happen overnight. It rose in large part due to the same market forces that slowly turned hundreds of medium sized presses into the big five corporate publishers we have today. You can glimpse the same complaints in books on publishing that were themselves published as far back as the 1980’s.

It goes like this, as publishing becomes more and more driven by corporate bottom line, publishers natural focus on “marketable” or “commercial” fiction. i.e. books that sell well enough to make the company a big profit. The hunt for the next big thing soon trumps keeping a stable of moderately successful writers happy.

The rise of big box stores and discount sellers in the nineties drove this to new heights. Suddenly books didn’t just have to sell enough copies at regular price to be profitable, they had to sell at a sharp discount and still be profitable.

Amazon came along in the mid-nineties and has slowly gained a greater and greater market share, eclipsing Barnes and Nobles and driving Borders out of business. Lequin is right to say that they have continued to force the trend towards highly discounted books, but wrong to say they are responsible for the best seller mentality, which came from publishers and big box stores.

Amazon’s Sales Rank

The way Amazon determines sales rank for books, and therefore best sellers, is indeed a murky business. They are notoriously secretive about their algorithm. But what we do know about the process actually works against the BS machine, not for it.

First off, the reason Amazon is so secretive is that they fear publishers or indie writers will game the system if the system is too well understood. After all, it happens all the time. Every time the algorithm becomes too clear, someone figures a way to make it work for them.

The best example is free. It’s also the best example of how the current system works against the BS machine.

Back in the early days of KIndle Direct Publishing, Amazon counted any download equally. Authors figured out that they could make their book free for a short time and shoot to the top of the bestsellers list. Once they put the book back to regular price it would slowly drop off the list. In the meantime, they would be on Amazon’s front page, getting a huge boost in publicity. This would result in a huge number of sales for the author, enough to justify the free promotions.

Problems abound for Amazon and for author’s in general. The value of being a best seller was watered down. Bad books often did come to the top. Clever marketers succeeded while good writers failed.

So, Amazon started changing their system. They no longer count free downloads towards sales rank. Free giveaways still have value for some writers but they aren’t a quick way to game the system anymore.

The murkiest part of Amazon’s algorithm is “stickiness.” What exactly counts as stickiness is uncertain, nor how they measure it or how much weight they give it. In general terms what it means is this, Amazon weighs consistent long term sales more than short term ups and downs.

For example another way to game the system was to get all of your fans to buy a book on a certain day. Authors did this through email lists, twitter or other social media. By micromanaging their sales they hoped to get enough downloads within a given period to push their sales rank up into the bestseller list. Like other ways of gaming the system, it worked for a time.

Then Amazon changed the system. They started updating the sales rank more often. That had the result that sales all in one day would boost your rank, but it would drop the next day, back to what it was. The benefits of gaming the system became short lived.

Now many indie authors have noticed they’ve taken it a step further. If your book has been selling at a certain rate and had a certain sales rank for several weeks, small bumps in sales have little effect on that rank. So do small dips in sales. Sales ranks have become “sticky.”

Amazon has done this to prevent gaming the system, but it also works against the BS machine. Stickiness means that books that sell reasonably well will be kept around and will keep selling reasonably well, while fad books rise and fall in the background.

“But you can’t buy and read a book that hasn’t been kept in print.”

Of all the arguments Lequin makes, this one is just plain wrong. Amazon had no mechanism to force publishers to take a book out of print and two important mechanisms in place to prevent it.

Amazon doesn’t want books to go out of print to make way for the next big thing. Publishers do. They can make more money off one title if they get the competition off the shelf. The generous return policies they offer retailers is in part aimed at that. Can’t sell title A? No worries, we will credit you for it and send you title B.

Digital shelf space is unlimited and Amazon makes far more money by selling a few copies of title A and a few copies of title B then they do by concentrating their efforts on a best seller. In fact they’ve driven Borders out of business, not by having more copies of one book but by having an enormous selection of books on sale, a selection no physical retailer could match.

How does Amazon preserve books? The most direct way is their own Kindle Direct Publishing. Digital books never go out of the print. Many authors have created large side incomes by taking older titles that went out of print and republishing themselves on KDP. Newer indie books are never in danger of being taken out of print by the vagaries of a traditional publisher.

The second way that Amazon keeps books in circulation, if not print, is through a vast collection of associate sellers. Anyone can start an online store through Amazon’s associate program. Used bookstores and book collectors run lucrative businesses reselling older titles.

I resisted online book buying for many years, preferring to shop at a local bookstore. But time and again, I couldn’t find the title I was looking for. Meanwhile, I’ve found hundreds of great out of print books on Amazon. I’ve been able to access some great books that publishers would have let die long ago, if not for Amazon.

 

I am no Amazon fangirl. You can criticize many of their business practices and I will be on board with you. They are a huge corporation. If you believe you can trust any corporation to serve anything other than it’s own best interests, you are dangerously naive. Publishers and authors should always keep one eye open to what Amazon is up to.

Amazon is also an online platform. That’s a big part of why I am not afraid of them.  Like Facebook and Google, they have a good side and a bad side. They have value to both consumers and publishers alike. In the future that might change, and we will all have to roll with it.

It’s important to be objective, to not blame them for every ill of modern publishing, or for market forces beyond their control. They have their good and bad side, but this one is not on them, in my opinion.

What is your opinion? I would glad to hear it in the comments below.