Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
If it sounds that way to you, then I suspect it's more because you are projecting things that I am not saying into my posts. I never mentioned publishers in my post. For the most part, I tend to ignore publishers. I'm mostly focused on authors that I like to read.
Certainly, it can not be denied, or at least not with a straight face, that Amazon's business model of pushing most of the work on to the publisher, be they a company or an individual author, and to the customers with regards to ratings and reviews, lends itself to being gamed. People do what is in their best interest, and generally their best interest and Amazon's best interest are not one and the same. Amazon has had issues with people gaming the system since day one.
The people gaming the ebook catalog system have basically made it useless to me as a tool for finding new books. Thus I use other sites. Authoralert was a pretty handly site for finding out when my favorite authors have new books coming out. It wasn't perfect by any stretch, but it was better than nothing. If Amazon's follow feature actually worked, I wouldn't need them.
People who do business with companies like Walmart and Amazon ought to know what they are getting into. Both companies are notorious for playing hardball with suppliers.
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Amazon's follow doesn't work that great for me either, but I've seen improvement in it recently. I also use
https://www.fictfact.com/ and it's been way better and has been around a long time. I've been pretty happy with them (their most useful feature is the alert for new books, but they have the typical "rate books" and catalogue features).