Self-Publishing & Big Five Dominate Book Market...

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Some have gone full on trad pub, while others have gone hybrid. Keeping the ebook and often audiobook rights for themselves while farming out the pbook rights to a trad pub for a nice advance. Such as Bella Andre who got a seven figure deal for world print only rights with Harlequin on her Sullivan's series or Hugh Howey who signed a print only deal of around $500,000 for Wool with Simon & Schuster.

And if anyone wants a list of indies that I have read and recommend, PM. I can't post the link here because my blog is an affiliate blog. But I do reviews there and often read indies (I don't separate them out specifically, but a lot of what I read and review happens to be indie work). Some of them are probably hybrids and others aren't. I can think of at least one that I read that has since been picked up by a trad publisher so your mileage will vary on price. I have a link for "under 5" that includes a lot of reviews (and the price will vary too because it may not be under 5 and at least one indie I have reviewed charges 5.99 for her books).

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Traditional publishers are still extremely relevant. I almost never read self-published books simply because the overwhelming majority are complete crap.

Personally I like self published books. Let's be honest, how many new authors get published by these publishing giants? Not too many! They are only interested in established authors who bring in their own fan base.

If you want to get a feel for what new authors are doing, you've got to read the self published books, there's no way around it!

Yeah most of them are awful, but no one puts a gun to our heads and forces us to read, we can quit a book when we start to hear that loud sucking sound! And they don't cost much, frequently they are given away, so the cost is minimal.

[fjtorres]

The free ren percent samples are enough to tell if the author can write.
No guarantee the narrative won't go south later but it helps weed out the ones who can't spin a coherent sentence.
The same applies to tradpub titles. (And let us not forget how publishers screamed bloody murder when Amazon introduced "look inside". They prefer it when people buy their books sight unseen.)

Finding good reads isn't anywhere near as hard as many like to pretend.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

The free ren percent samples are enough to tell if the author can write.
No guarantee the narrative won't go south later but it helps weed out the ones who can't spin a coherent sentence.
The same applies to tradpub titles. (And let us not forget how publishers screamed bloody murder when Amazon introduced "look inside". They prefer it when people buy their books sight unseen.)

Finding good reads isn't anywhere near as hard as many like to pretend.

Really?
Because filtering "Science Fiction & Fantasy" & "Last 30 Days" on Amazon UK gives me 6,947 hits, 519 of which are 4 stars and above.
So reading the samples is out unless I've pre-selected them somehow.
And that's just the last 30 days, I've given up

I check out the Humble bundle / story bundle stuff but other than that my only halfway reliable guide to what I will like is publishing imprint. Unless I spend more time looking for books than reading them, which kind of ruins the idea of reading for pleasure.

So, personally, I seem to be stuck in TradPub land as it currently seems to be my best filter mechanism. On the plus side SF Gateway alone can keep me stocked for several lifetimes so I'm not too worried about it.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Really?
Because filtering "Science Fiction & Fantasy" & "Last 30 Days" on Amazon UK gives me 6,947 hits, 519 of which are 4 stars and above.
So reading the samples is out unless I've pre-selected them somehow.
And that's just the last 30 days, I've given up
:

That's the only filtering you do?
No sub-genre? Like, "Let's see what hard SF is new?" Or "what alternate histories are new?"

There are 21 categories under SF at the Kindle store.
Alternate history lists 6000 or so. Filter for the last 30 days and it comes down to 145.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st_re...rt=review-rank

That is about a five minute scan for me.

Or, even in the bigger list: sort by release date and glance at the top few pages in the listing. If you are a regular to the site and not a first timer you'll soon see older titles. Or sort by average reader reviews. Then let your judgment take over. When Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crap he wasn't thinking indie titles. Just tradpub.

It is only as hard as you want it to be.

Back in the day, the local Borders--one of the bigger ones--carried over 50,000 titles. I could do a fly-by in ten-fifteen minutes to see if there was anything interesting because I did it every week or two. And because I wasn't wasting time looking at every book in the store or every book in the SF&F section.

6000 titles, for me, is at most a half hour worth of browsing. Which in itself is a pleasant diversion.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

That's the only filtering you do?
No sub-genre? Like, "Let's see what hard SF is new?" Or "what alternate histories are new?"

There are 21 categories under SF at the Kindle store.
Alternate history lists 6000 or so. Filter for the last 30 days and it comes down to 145.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st_re...rt=review-rank

That is about a five minute scan for me.

Or, even in the bigger list: sort by release date and glance at the top few pages in the listing. If you are a regular to the site and not a first timer you'll soon see older titles. Or sort by average reader reviews. Then let your judgment take over. When Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crap he wasn't thinking indie titles. Just tradpub.

It is only as hard as you want it to be.

Back in the day, the local Borders--one of the bigger ones--carried over 50,000 titles. I could do a fly-by in ten-fifteen minutes to see if there was anything interesting because I did it every week or two. And because I wasn't wasting time looking at every book in the store or every book in the SF&F section.

6000 titles, for me, is at most a half hour worth of browsing. Which in itself is a pleasant diversion.

Right, I think we browse & buy books differently
I tend to buy a bunch every 3-6 months, read them, then buy more.
Frankly browsing through 6000 titles to find a handful I may want seems incredibly... inelegant.

If they had a filter that said something along the lines of "only show titles with more than x reviews" that might work. But the only filter on ratings seems to be x stars or above - and for some reason huge numbers of books have only a single review of 5 stars
Just in the list of 142 books you linked to - of the 19 rated books 18 of them are 4 stars and above making it a fairly useless metric. It gets worse looking for older books as all those single 5 star reviews are ranked above anything that doesn't only get 5 star reviews (Or to put it another way higher ranked than the lord of the rings trilogy with 9082 reviews averaging 4.6 stars)

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Right, I think we browse & buy books differently

If they had a filter that said something along the lines of "only show titles with more than x reviews" that might work. But the only filter on ratings seems to be x stars or above - and for some reason huge numbers of books have only a the lord of the rings trilogy with 9082 reviews averaging 4.6 stars)

Do NOT wish the review thing on us. Amazon already does some sorting by not showing books with less than 100 reviews in the hebought/shebought lines. What that does is encourage fake reviews by all kinds of authors/products/etc. So they are essentially already doing that in some form and it's made reviewing even worse than it was before!

It's fine that some people only read trad and some read indies. There's enough to go around.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

Do NOT wish the review thing on us. Amazon already does some sorting by not showing books with less than 100 reviews in the hebought/shebought lines. What that does is encourage fake reviews by all kinds of authors/products/etc. So they are essentially already doing that in some form and it's made reviewing even worse than it was before!

It's fine that some people only read trad and some read indies. There's enough to go around.

Right ya is
Must work different here in the UK, just picked a couple of books at random and the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" have titles ranging from no reviews at all to many reviews, doesn't seem to be any filtering here.

I have nothing against reading indies. I'm just after some, at least, half decent filter mechanism.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Right, I think we browse & buy books differently
I tend to buy a bunch every 3-6 months, read them, then buy more.
Frankly browsing through 6000 titles to find a handful I may want seems incredibly... inelegant.

If they had a filter that said something along the lines of "only show titles with more than x reviews" that might work. But the only filter on ratings seems to be x stars or above - and for some reason huge numbers of books have only a single review of 5 stars
Just in the list of 142 books you linked to - of the 19 rated books 18 of them are 4 stars and above making it a fairly useless metric. It gets worse looking for older books as all those single 5 star reviews are ranked above anything that doesn't only get 5 star reviews (Or to put it another way higher ranked than the lord of the rings trilogy with 9082 reviews averaging 4.6 stars)

Ok so he narrowed it down to 18 books. Sounds like a good system to me. What exactly do you want?


Oh in cookbooks and the like, you can't trust a 4+star book. I have found hundreds of "fake" reviews there.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Right ya is
Must work different here in the UK, just picked a couple of books at random and the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" have titles ranging from no reviews at all to many reviews, doesn't seem to be any filtering here.

I have nothing against reading indies. I'm just after some, at least, half decent filter mechanism.

I am confused. What filter do you want? Customer also bought means if they liked Author A, Author B will also be good.
If you are just going by ratings, I wish you luck.
I find reading blurbs is a much better indication of what a book is about.
I know that thousands of people liked that sheep hair book, but I could not get into it at all.

What do you mean by random?

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Ok so he narrowed it down to 18 books. Sounds like a good system to me. What exactly do you want?

Only by narrowing the category to alternative history. If you pick Science Fiction as a whole that gets you 544 titles in the last 30 days (Or a shade under 2000 in the last 90).

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Oh in cookbooks and the like, you can't trust a 4+star book. I have found hundreds of "fake" reviews there.

I suspect it's the same across all categories, so the system doesn't work at all then

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Ok so he narrowed it down to 18 books. Sounds like a good system to me. What exactly do you want?


Oh in cookbooks and the like, you can't trust a 4+star book. I have found hundreds of "fake" reviews there.

I don't trust 4+ reviews on anthing unless there are dozens spread over months.

A lot of it is familiarity with the genre/material.
SF is my genre of choice so I know the names and tropes and I know which authors are automatic buys and which are automatic passes.

Other genres take a bit more thought but I've been around the block more than once and I know my interests as well as my tastes.

Everybody's mileage varies but ebook buying isn't rocket science.
For that matter, neither is rocket science anymore.
Now, brain surgery...

[Cinisajoy]

I think on any broad category, one would need to narrow it down to what kind of SF the reader is in the mood for.
Or any other genre for that matter.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

Amazon already does some sorting by not showing books with less than 100 reviews in the hebought/shebought lines.

Not that I've ever seen. I'm looking at a book right now and the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought line has books with...

no reviews
7 reviews
70 reviews
118 reviews
56 reviews
no reviews
34 reviews
etc.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Not that I've ever seen. I'm looking at a book right now and the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought line has books with...

no reviews
7 reviews
70 reviews
118 reviews
56 reviews
no reviews
34 reviews
etc.

It's relatively new and is filtering through (started about middle to end of Aug). There will always be some books that don't fit the perfect pattern shown depending on buying habits, date of publication and other things taken into account, but a few things changed in Aug. More recent reviews are weighted more heavily (I got this from an email from Amazon telling me how they were improving reviews along with some other info). There's been some other "inside" discussions of publishers being told to get books to the 200 review mark to have more algorithmic benefits. The 100 reviews is just ONE of the 'Marks to hit.' Obviously high sales numbers is going to also affect the algos.

I have no problem with the algorithms always changing--that has to happen. But there's been a plethora of emphasis on certain targets. Goodreads (The CEO talked about it) has had a "100 reviews or more" gets shown more and in certain places. Maybe that is where Amazon got the idea that it was a good thing to do.

All of the rules would be okay except that as producers/authors/etc figure out these gates, they just jump over them.

From what I understand, the UK has always been under different algos and even the rules for being an associate and what is paid out is different. The products there have never enjoyed the huge numbers of reviews that get done on the US side. I don't investigate that as much or keep track. I"m sure there are algos but I don't think they are the same.

Keep an eye on it. Maybe I"m wrong. I hope I am wrong because an arbitrary number that keeps rising just pushes people to add dishonest reviews.