Quote:
Originally Posted by Pajamaman
Many posts by people on this thread directly involved with independent publishing disagree with you. If Amazon imposes any kind of biased filter, sort or algorithm, or if it makes advertising/visibility more available to some than others, than it is acting as a gatekeeper.
It has been stated repeatedly (though some have disagreed) that Amazon has made it more difficult for indies to have visibility on the Amazon website than in the past, and in addition, Amazon has made Big 6 publications more visible.
That's a bias. That's a form of gatekeeping.
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Yes and no.
Passing judgment on any Amazon bias isn't a clearcut matter.
Not like when Nook was systematically shifting all Indie (romances?) downwards 100 slots to keep them off the first page of their listings. That was easy to spot and they had to stop once they were called out on it.
With Amazon there's a variety of effects going on:
1 - not all Indies are equal. KDP Select (the Kindle exclusives) have higher visibility from being in KU which results in slightly lower sales in return for the page read payouts. (For some it is a net gain, for others a loss offset by the higher visibility of their brand, while for others it is a net loss. Milleage varies.) Nonetheless, since KU reads count towards rankings (people paid to read the book, indirectly but they paid) those reads mean a higher ranking for the Kindle store listing. This disadvantages Indies not in KU.
2- Amazon Publishing books are (because of the boycott) de facto Amazon exclusives. So to compensate, Amazon promotes them heavily. And their catalog is growing. They have a lot of really good books. More, some of those books are used by the PRIME unit as perks for subscribers, who every month get to choose one of six as a free-to-them perk. (PRIME pays APub & Kindle for those books. They're deep discounted but paid-for so, again, they count towards the rankings.) I've seen no estimates of what percentage of Prime subscribers actually download their Kindle First books but there's on the order of 50million Prime subscribers in the US. Look at the rankings early in the month and you'll see a big spike for those books. If you're an Indie publisher you probably don't want to release your book the first week of the month.
3- By some reports, Amazon is now doing coop promotions separate from the alsobots and Kindle store algorithm promos. They don't discriminate but they're not cheap if the reports can be trusted. Unlike the paid promo services they apparently cap the number of promo slots the BPHs can buy but again, it is a visibility tool the smaller indies can't afford.
4- there's a lot more Indie publishers active and, unlike the tradpubs, they don't stop at two books a year per author. There's a lot of books coming out both bad and good. Ten years ago, a good ebookstore carried 30,000 titles. Nook launched with 35,000 if i recall correctly. Today, Kindle is running around 5M titles and KU runs well over 1M heading to 1.5M. A lot of that growth is the last three years.
Add it all up and the total Kindle environment is a lot more challenging than it used to be. The silver lining is that the new environment is shaking out a good portion of the quick buck and delusional players. With the gold rush over the business will start to settle down for authors actually looking to build a stable long-term career.
There is no need to posit an actual anti-Indie bias at Amazon when a lot of the factors are externally-driven. Like, take away the boycott and A-Pub would be spreading their promotional budget more broadly instead of concentrating it on Kindle. If other ebookstores were more effective at selling ebooks (and Nook weren't imploding) we wouldn't be seeing as many Indies going all-in on KDP Select and putting *all* their titles into KU full time.
Things change and change isn't always in one direction.
Tech disruptions and new product evolutions take time to shake out.
The story isn't ending but the business is starting to take on it's long term shape and what worked in 2011 stopped working in 2012 and what worked in2014 didn't work as well in 2016.
We have yet to see how 2017 plays out but it most likely won't be like 2016. The changes are still coming.
Trends to watch? More Indies doing print and audio is obvious. Kindle Unlimited 3.0 is just about due. I suspect it might come with a cap on the number of titles a publisher can keep on KU at any time, encouraging a rotation of titles. And there's still the fallout from the slow motion fade of Nook...
It's a tough business.
Always has been.