09-17-2021, 10:52 PM | #1 |
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Garbage books on Amazon
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. Last edited by AlanHK; 09-17-2021 at 10:56 PM. |
09-17-2021, 11:42 PM | #2 |
Running with scissors
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There's a sucker born every minute
Meanwhile, anyone looking for a good price on hydroquinone or ivermectin? Last edited by hobnail; 09-17-2021 at 11:45 PM. |
09-18-2021, 06:44 AM | #3 |
the rook, bossing Never.
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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. |
09-18-2021, 07:14 AM | #4 |
the rook, bossing Never.
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09-18-2021, 11:26 AM | #5 | |
o saeclum infacetum
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But why would you give someone loathed more traction by providing a link that’ll result in clicks? 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. |
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09-18-2021, 12:35 PM | #6 | |
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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? |
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09-18-2021, 12:39 PM | #7 |
the rook, bossing Never.
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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.
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09-18-2021, 12:42 PM | #8 |
the rook, bossing Never.
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09-18-2021, 01:28 PM | #9 |
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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.
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09-19-2021, 12:00 AM | #10 |
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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." |
09-19-2021, 09:53 AM | #11 | |
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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. |
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09-19-2021, 10:07 AM | #12 | |
the rook, bossing Never.
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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. |
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09-20-2021, 05:13 AM | #13 | |
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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. Last edited by drofgnal; 09-20-2021 at 05:23 AM. |
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09-20-2021, 06:59 AM | #14 | |
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Apache |
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09-20-2021, 08:06 AM | #15 | |
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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. |
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