Garbage books on Amazon

[AlanHK]

On Youtube I keep seeing ads from a marketer "Sophie Howard" and her amazing methods of selling crap on Amazon to become rich with a few hours of work a week.

As always, if someone knows how to do that, why aren't they just doing it instead of selling seminars telling others how to ...

One of her scams is "selling thousands of ebooks on Amazon a day, without writing a word".

So I guess she is telling other scumbags to take Project Gutenberg books or Wikipedia pages or other public domain text and automatically convert them to Kindle books and sell for $2 or the like.

One of her pages:
https://blueskyamazon.com/90-million...r-amazon-boom/
NOT AN ENDORSEMENT. In fact, the opposite.

I'd guess in reality hardly anyone makes money out of this. They do it for a few months and give up, when they find thousands of others are offering identical products. Or if they actually sell any, get so many quality complaints that Amazon cancels their account.

A few work out an algorithm to find "hot" subjects and scrape together some free text to make books that will be found by people searching for that. But that takes serious skills to keep ahead of the zeitgeist.

[hobnail]

There's a sucker born every minute

Meanwhile, anyone looking for a good price on hydroquinone or ivermectin?

[Quoth]

There are garbage books in bookshops. Half of big publisher books don't make their advance in royalties. Maybe less than 1% of books make a living wage for an Author.

Also some top selling books (Successful books are about 0.1%) are total garbage, just a success by accident or media hype.

Some useful free titles
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431

There is no magic recipe. You need good content (that's a lot of experience and hard work), marketing, good presentation and a lot of luck.

As with almost anything else entrepreneurial, the ideas are your internal motivation, not much to do with the success.

[Quoth]

See also
https://blog.smashwords.com/2010/10/...ublishing.html

[issybird]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

So I guess she is telling other scumbags to take Project Gutenberg books or Wikipedia pages or other public domain text and automatically convert them to Kindle books and sell for $2 or the like.

Eh. I think “scumbag” is overkill for something that’s entirely legal. Given the penny ante nature of the transactions combined with a good dollop of caveat emptor, I can’t get exercised about this.

But why would you give someone loathed more traction by providing a link that’ll result in clicks?

Originally Posted by Quoth

Also some top selling books (Successful books are about 0.1%) are total garbage, just a success by accident or media hype.

A rose by any other name. There are a lot of books that are junk to me, but I acknowledge that the authors and publishers have tapped into a market. More power to them.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

So I guess she is telling other scumbags to take Project Gutenberg books or Wikipedia pages or other public domain text and automatically convert them to Kindle books and sell for $2 or the like.

If they do a good job on the conversion and make a decent cover, more power to them.

I'm happy Gutenberg exists, but the files are a mess.

And of course, you can get nicely converted files for free at places like Standardebooks.

The 'get rich quick' lady is scummy. But what are you going to do?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by issybird

A rose by any other name. There are a lot of books that are junk to me, but I acknowledge that the authors and publishers have tapped into a market. More power to them.

That can be true. But when certain books are best sellers AND end up in 1000s in charity shops in pristine condition and only get good reviews initially in the media maybe they are really junk. Sometimes a successful book is merely junk. There are lots of books I don't like or wouldn't read, or I would even think obnoxious (though I don't believe in banning books), but they aren't junk in the sense I meant.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

The 'get rich quick' lady is scummy. But what are you going to do?

Unrecommend her books and don't buy them. Even if I was World Dictator I'd not ban any books, but I might want honest blurbs or insist it have a Caveat Emptor sticker!

[JSWolf]

There are three types of books. Ones I like or might like, books I don't think I'll like but agree that others may, and those that are total rubbish.

[haertig]

I "bought" a cookbook on Amazon once. OK, it was a freebie, so I "paid" $0 for it.

Excited to download my new cookbook (not really!), I went looking for a quick dinner recipe. I went to the chicken section. Hey, this one sounded good: Delicious Sauteed Chicken Breasts. I turned to that recipe page. "Thaw chicken breasts, salt to taste, saute in frying pan over medium heat. Serve warm." Well, the few seconds it took me to download that cookbook were worth it for the laughs I got. I should go back an check out the Breakfasts section of that cookbook. I expect to find something like "Open cereal box, pour desired quantity into a bowl, add milk if desired. Serve at room temperature."

[Critteranne]

Originally Posted by Quoth

There are garbage books in bookshops. Half of big publisher books don't make their advance in royalties. Maybe less than 1% of books make a living wage for an Author.

If a book doesn’t earn back its advance, that doesn’t mean the book is garbage. It could mean lots of things: bad cover; distribution problems; a book that’s ahead of its time; lousy cover copy; etc.

Also, statistics like this change. We have to be careful where we get our stats about publishing. There are some people out there spreading inaccurate stats on their websites because they want to promote their own publishing services or because they don’t know publishing that well.

For example, I looked this up, and I found one saying that it’s 25% of books that don’t earn back their advances.

Also, the stat about successful books being just 0.1% of books being successful doesn’t sound right. How are they defining “success”? Hitting the bestseller list? A book can be successful without hitting the lists.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Critteranne

If a book doesn’t earn back its advance, that doesn’t mean the book is garbage. It could mean lots of things: bad cover; distribution problems; a book that’s ahead of its time; lousy cover copy; etc.

No, I agree. Also sometimes good books are withdrawn and pulped because the big publisher made a mess of marketing.

It's just one example that Big Publishers are not experts at choosing success, in fact they seem to be worse at picking winners now than experts on horses. Some have bizarre criteria for picking titles and most are insulated by professional agents. Some agents are great. Others are worse than the big publishers.

[drofgnal]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

On Youtube I keep seeing ads from a marketer "Sophie Howard" and her amazing methods of selling crap on Amazon to become rich with a few hours of work a week.

As always, if someone knows how to do that, why aren't they just doing it instead of selling seminars telling others how to ...

One of her scams is "selling thousands of ebooks on Amazon a day, without writing a word".

So I guess she is telling other scumbags to take Project Gutenberg books or Wikipedia pages or other public domain text and automatically convert them to Kindle books and sell for $2 or the like.

This is why when I look for a public domain book on amazon, I have trouble finding the freebie that amazon itself puts out there. She's not the only one doing it. I recently read David Copperfield and it took me a while to find the amazon $0.00 version as there were a bunch that were .99, 1.99 etc. The freebie amazon one was great, even had x-ray enabled. It was just hard to find. It's a free market so I guess they are entitled, but Amazon should do a better job when you search for a classic in showing their freebie first. But they probably get a cut as well, so there's not much incentive I guess.

But there are all sorts of people hawking all sorts of hard to find titles and not just books, music CDs, SACDs, DVDs, BDs, etc. Many used book stores and CD stores put their inventory on amazon to sell as well. My local used CD/DVD store does. I took some old movies in I never watch for trade for some music CDs, they give you about 10 cents a disc, then charge about 4-7 bucks for a music CD. I bought a handful of titles, but just gave away the movies to a thrift store as opposed to trading them in for 10 cents/per disc.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by drofgnal

This is why when I look for a public domain book on amazon, I have trouble finding the freebie that amazon itself puts out there. She's not the only one doing it. I recently read David Copperfield and it took me a while to find the amazon $0.00 version as there were a bunch that were .99, 1.99 etc. The freebie amazon one was great, even had x-ray enabled. It was just hard to find. It's a free market so I guess they are entitled, but Amazon should do a better job when you search for a classic in showing their freebie first. But they probably get a cut as well, so there's not much incentive I guess.

But there are all sorts of people hawking all sorts of hard to find titles and not just books, music CDs, SACDs, DVDs, BDs, etc. Many used book stores and CD stores put their inventory on amazon to sell as well. My local used CD/DVD store does. I took some old movies in I never watch for trade for some music CDs, they give you about 10 cents a disc, then charge about 4-7 bucks for a music CD. I bought a handful of titles, but just gave away the movies to a thrift store as opposed to trading them in for 10 cents/per disc.

It is in my industry too. I had a gentleman my store with a ring that a pawnshop offered him $150.00 for it. The center diamond was a half carat with side stones and the ring was solid and heavy. Just the scrap value of the gold was worth four times the offer. That quality diamond wholesales at over $900.00. I tell them to either sell it on Ebay or ask friends and family for the names of people wanting to get engaged. He would get a fair price and the purchaser would save over retail.
Apache

[Calenorn]

Originally Posted by drofgnal

This is why when I look for a public domain book on amazon, I have trouble finding the freebie that amazon itself puts out there. She's not the only one doing it. I recently read David Copperfield and it took me a while to find the amazon $0.00 version as there were a bunch that were .99, 1.99 etc. The freebie amazon one was great, even had x-ray enabled. It was just hard to find. It's a free market so I guess they are entitled, but Amazon should do a better job when you search for a classic in showing their freebie first. But they probably get a cut as well, so there's not much incentive I guess.

I think Amazon should have incentive to clean up this mess. How much can they possibly earn on a $0.99 ebook? These bottom feeders clutter their site, and bandwidth isn't free. Want to guess how many Kindle versions of "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" are currently for sale on Amazon? Exactly 1,947. Find one that will look good on your ereader; I dare you.

Does Amazon EVER clean house? If an ebook has been listed for five years and only sold a handful of copies, why don't they just delete it?

Not to mention the terrible formatting that many of these books have. it frustrates buyers and reflects badly on Amazon. They exert no quality control whatsoever.