“AI is the reason I can’t get discovered.”
Sigh.
Okay. I’m going to peeve a lot of people off with my take on this very popular complaint, but hear me out.
Amazon is the reason you can’t get discovered. And by insisting on playing Amazon’s pay-to-play game, you are very complicit in this lack of discoverability.
Algorithms have long been a fact of life for those of us living on the internet. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and retail stores use these little pieces of computer code to examine what you’ve seen or purchased, and then spoon feed you even more in that same vein to keep you looking or buying.
And lately, over the last five or ten years, quite a number of those algorithms have been tweaked so that what you see first… is what someone has paid for you to see. (I can barely stand to go to my Facebook feed these days; I see posts from everyone except the people I want to hear from.)
Anyone in the self-publishing space can attest that one of the things you’re told you “must” do is buy Amazon ads.
Except… no. You really don’t.
Amazon ads are the equivalent of end-caps in a brick-and-mortar retail store. Companies (or individuals) pay a fee so that their product is the first thing you see, either when you enter the store or you start searching for what you want to buy.
In a brick-and-mortar store, that’s not such an evil thing. In a brick-and-mortar store, every product on the shelf has equal access to you. By going up and down the aisles, you will have the opportunity to see every single product the store has. Even though the pumpkin spice version of a treat is the most easily seen at Halloween, if you just want the plain graham version… it’s there. They don’t hide it.
Amazon in particular, and probably others — this is all anecdotal, from my own experiences and observations — don’t show you everything. Hell, even when you are specifically searching, they will prioritize the products people have paid to show you, and if you search for a very specific thing, you might find it on page two of the results. If that high.
As a random writer from the internet, I have zero expectations that anyone has even specifically searched for my books. Those who have accidentally found my website might have clicked on my Universal Book Links… but I doubt a single person has ever gone to Amazon and searched for either of my published works.
But I have. Just to see.
Because my titles aren’t completely unique, one doesn’t actually expect them to show up right away in an algorithm-driven search. More popular books with those titles generally show up before mine.
That’s fine.
However, where I call BS is when I typed “Darren Blake” into the search, and Darren Shan (and his Cirque du Freak books) come up before mine. Part of me gets it. Shan is a name. Those Cirque books were a big deal. But I didn’t search for him.
And who the hell is Doug Lamoreux? (Incidentally, at the time of this writing, Book one of his Nod Blake Mysteries is free on Kindle.)
It isn’t until I filter the search results by “Kindle Edition” that an actual Darren Blake even shows up — another Darren Blake.
No, my writer friends, the reason you don’t have discoverability isn’t AI.
There are stats that are saying that with the rise of AI, the number of books being released each calendar year is getting nearer and nearer to a million, if it hasn’t already surpassed that.
Okay, fair. That’s a lot of noise.
But how many “masterminds” behind these works are paying Amazon to show them to you? How many of them will show up in a generic search for, I don’t know, “Peanut Butter Murder Mysteries”?
I know how demand works, and the harsh reality of this pay-to-play system is simply this: Amazon has no reason to care that your book sells — especially if you are paying them for ads. They’re already getting money for your books, whether anyone buys them or not.
Meanwhile, they are currently making $0 on my books. (Yes, I’m selling like hotcakes there.) How invested do you think they are to sell my books?
Exactly.
In the olden days of the internet, Amazon had this feature called “browse” — you could pick a genre and just look through the books available. Kind of like, say, the bookstore they purported to be back then. Yes, James Patterson and Dean Koontz were the authors whose books you’d see first, because they sold the best. But eventually you would see mine, had I been publishing back then. And that other random writer over there. (I see you. Hi.)
But now? With all the *insert indie publisher name here*s giving them money they haven’t earned by selling books? Why should they bother?
They’re already getting paid, either way.
The only way to level the playing field in any meaningful way, to force Amazon and others to showcase all books equally… is to stop playing their pay-to-play game.
But you won’t.
Because so many more successful people say you can’t.
And they’re lying.
WRITING REVISING IN PUBLIC
I wish the vim and vinegar I displayed just a moment ago carried over to my current project.
Just as last time (which was longer ago than I wanted it to be), I’m stuck. I have a question to answer, and I just can’t figure it out.
That question… that lack of answer… has completely gummed up the works.
GAMING THINGS
I love my gaming group. We play. We talk out strategy. On off weeks, we (two of us, anyway) meet to talk and write. Or try to.
We were missing a member recently, so the remaining three opened up Jackbox 11, which we hadn’t yet played. Of the five games in this one, we could only play four. The last requires four people. But Doominate, Hear Say, Cookie Haus, and Legends of Trivia were pretty fun. I’m not a huge fan of drawing games, so Cookie Haus was less fun. And Hear Say was just weird.
But Legends of Trivia! Man, that was Pathfinder meets Jeopardy! And the best part was that we worked together to answer the questions and beat the monsters. That’s one we definitely want to play again, because it’s not just a one-and-done thing. We’re on a quest… of some sort.
WRAPPING UP
As is so often the case, I hope life is treating you relatively well. In spite of the severe heat happening in many parts of the northern hemisphere, I hope you’re chilling out — figuratively and literally.
Be awesome. Because you are.