Literature Map (actually a map of authors and reader associations)

[Luke Everhart]

This is pretty cool.

https://www.literature-map.com

[Sailor Stone]

Too cool!

[TimothyEllis]

Very sad.

There was not a single name on there I recognized.

Last time I tried that, there were a whole heap of names I knew.

Glynn Stewart shares some fans with me. His name wasn't even there.

That probably explains why my income is tanking. I'm no longer getting any exposure on the books of the authors my fans share.

That would be the result of the also-bought slider finally vanishing completely.

[Bill Hiatt]

Yeah, that was definitely a bad choice on Amazon's part.

I just glanced at one of my product pages. There's a thirty-five page "Products Related to this Item" slider (ads with a little sponsored label above it). Further down, there's another twenty page PRTTI slider (as if one weren't enough). As if anyone is going to sift through that many pages of ads.

Near the bottom of the page, we also have "Explore Similar Books" (4 pages), and "Books You May Like (12 pages). I don't know where the former titles come from, but at least, they're all in the right genre, and some of them seem to be thematically related as well. The latter I'm sure comes from my earlier shopping, and aside from a couple of seemingly random titles, they relate closely to prior purchases. As a customer, I might find either of those useful, though they are far enough down the page that I don't know how many people actually see them. Of course, there had to be room for a nice, big banner ad for Violent Night, a movie with no obvious relationship to my book.

[LilyBLily]

I block ads just about everywhere except Amazon. I ignore their stupid ads for products I quite clearly don't care about. The books relating to my browsing history often are irrelevant since I look up a lot of books on Amazon.

I guess it comes down to this: Are most people vulnerable to ads? Amazon and every other advertiser must think so. Even we authors think so, otherwise we wouldn't advertise.

[Bill Hiatt]

I get a lot of clicks on my ads, which would seem to suggest that not everyone screens them out. I don't get as many sales, but since the beginning of my publishing career, Amazon ad sales have amounted to about 9% of my total sales, though that figure it artificially low because AMS ads didn't exist at first. I think I would have gotten closer to twice that in ad sales if they'd existed from the very beginning.

It's lower on KENP reads, but they started tracking that sometime recently, so I don't know how complete that stat is also. Also, there's no way to measure how many additional purchases and reads come from greater visibility generated by the additional sales and reads as a result of ads.

Anyway, this month so far, I have 43 sales generated by ads, which isn't much, but probably a reflection of my relatively low budgets. If even a low budget can do that much, that's evidence that people aren't just ignoring the ads.