I don't see anyone else talking about this so to hell with it, might as well be the first.
Most of my writing career has been in traditional publishing and I decided to dive in with a short story collection back in March on the reasoning that, simply, all I had available to publish outside of my trad published stuff were those stories. So it might as well be them.
Despite the warnings of doom for any short story collection, the book, Scienceville and Other Lost Worlds, did really pretty well, all things considering, and continues to bring in money regularly every month. Not much by comparison to the amounts made by some people knocking out books every other month, but pretty gratifying for all that.
At the same time I ran AMS ads in both the US and the UK, where you have to jump a few extra hoops. AMS in the UK has definitely brought in some sales, although it's taken a lot of time and effort to figure out what works best. I'd say though that I'm lucky in that I have a large number of organic sales, ie people who've read and liked my trad published stuff. I'm looking at self-publishing more in the future.
Here's the thing: my sales are mostly in the UK, and very low in the US. It's the same with AMS: extraordinarily low clicks in the US, a hundred times more in the UK. And as people have noted, it's getting worse and worse.
Right now, however, we're looking at the advertising equivalent of the apocalypse so far as Amazon Ads in the US are concerned: also-boughts appear to have vanished, removing not only a hugely valuable tool for the self-publisher but also for the consumer who could in that way find books similar to the stuff they already read and liked. Which includes me: I don't want to buy a book advertised at me in that fashion - I want to buy the books people who share my tastes bought.
What we have now is a situation broadly similar to when major bookstores, before most of them went the way of the dinosaurs, demanded payment to put titles on their front tables. Advertising is king, but in both cases, both the consumer and the creator are effectively being held to ransom.
To my mind this is a sh*tty, sh*tty situation, but I'm surprised by how few people are calling it that. Instead I'm hearing a lot of talk about 'adapting to the new situation' and so forth in forums and in podcasts.
It's not a new situation: it's the outright murder of good and passionate writing.
Look, I have a great deal of time for self-publishers. Even before I became a trad published author back in 2005, long before, I was really into DIY small-press publishing in the early 90s, even before the internet. But I'm amazed more people aren't angry about the fact they--or rather, all of us--are now being held to ransom by Amazon.
How can any new author possibly hope to gain traction if the only books the prospective buyer is going to see are by those able to pay the spiralling costs for advertising? What kind of books is this going to result in? Books written by good writers, or books written by people with deep pockets?
I strongly suspect the latter. if anything, all this is a salient and powerful reminder that Amazon is Not Our Friend. Amazon, for all its amazing convenience, is nonetheless a vast, be-tentacled leech draining money like a Wellsian Martian draining blood from a hapless victim by any means necessary.
And there's absolutely bugger-all any of us can really do about it. So I don't know just what lies ahead in this new future we've been handed - this bleak dystopia built of multi-part novels written by authors of considerably more financial means than any writer I've ever met in my life. So far this insidious plague of monetary cultural reductionism hasn't spread to the British shores, so we still have out also-boughts.
Yet I fear it's coming, and soon. And when it does, a thousand - ten thousand - books that slipped through the cracks of traditional publishing, and which might have found new hearts and minds, are going to be buried under a ton of kack, left invisible while the remaining spoils are left to the leeches running Amazon and the vultures running the publishers.
Of course there's going wide, and I've taken my own book wide, but there are damned few ways to really grab hold of an audience out there. Amazon gave us what we needed to thrive--for a short while, at least. And now, like a street dealer who offers the first hit free, or the devil coming to collect your soul, Amazon is polishing its teeth and sharpening its nails while thinking of how tasty we'll be tumbling screaming into its maw.