Writer Sanctum
Corporate Sector => What are Amazon doing now? [Public] => Topic started by: notthatamanda on October 22, 2022, 11:30:43 PM
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I was looking for my unranked book, it hasn't sold a copy since 2020, that is gone.
Then I noticed both second books of my trilogies are gone.
My sequel to my WWII novel is gone.
Went to my authorcentral page and different books are missing.
My second psychological thriller is gone and the first book in my Contemporary Romance trilogy is gone.
I was able to find my unranked book by googling amazon, my name and the book name. Asked my kid to buy it to see what happens, they won't be up for several hours at least (teenagers). .
I'm just posting so everyone is aware and will check their own stuff. I really just don't have it in me to deal with these problems anymore. If Amazon wants to kill my account so be it.
Edit - So on my KDP dash it's even different from both the amazon author page and the author central page.
On my dash I can't click on two of my standalones, the second book of my new adult trilogy, the WWII book AND the sequel.
Also - I just went back to my author central page and the carousel at the top of my page is down to one book, the first book in my contemporary romance thriller.
Just to be clear, I last published a book in 2021 and I've never done anything that could be considered low content. I'm going to be out this afternoon but I'm betting myself when I get back all my books could be gone.
Bill - did you grab the copy of my book I gifted you? If so they didn't give me credit or royalties for the sale. If you changed your mind or didn't get to it yet, no problem.
Edit - I have a promo on Kobo that would drop the price on my second psychological thriller, I figured Amazon would just price match, but that doesn't start until the 25th so that isn't it either.
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What's the status of the books on your dashboard?
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I have books missing too. The direct links work but the books don't show on my author page. Doesn't seem to be related to number of sales per book.
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All my books show up if you search Amazon on my author name. It's just on the author age where they don't show up.
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Same thing's happened to me. About half my books are missing. They're doing something with "points" near the pricing info too. Constant new changes all year long. One thing I noticed is some of the books removed popped right back up again after an hour or two. I think it's random AI fun.
Addition: The books that pop up seem to depend on how many times you click on the page. Also, if you toggle by ranking or price, other books pop up. It's really weird. I really don't want to take the time to bring it up to Zon either. They must know. I think??
If any of you contact Zon and they fix it, please let me know. As it stands, it's still advertising my collection, variously, so I'm not going to fuss... yet
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All my books show up if you search Amazon on my author name. It's just on the author age where they don't show up.
I think that's a problem. If someone clicks on an author page from a book page they are not going to see the full catalogue.
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What's the status of the books on your dashboard?
I'm not sure what you are asking. All the books I am taking about are for sale in my KDP account, at least I didn't change anything in KDP on any of these books. When I go to look at them in the KDP dashboard they are greyed out and I can't click on them.
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What's the status of the books on your dashboard?
I'm not sure what you are asking. All the books I am taking about are for sale in my KDP account, at least I didn't change anything in KDP on any of these books. When I go to look at them in the KDP dashboard they are greyed out and I can't click on them.
Can you take a screen image of that and post it?
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I really can't. I can never find a screen shot on my computer when I take it and I'm not up for sifting through endless youtube tutorials on how to do it.
When you are in the dashboard I click on the books drop down for filters and some of my titles are greyed out and when I scroll over them I get the universal no sign.
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I really can't. I can never find a screen shot on my computer when I take it and I'm not up for sifting through endless youtube tutorials on how to do it.
When you are in the dashboard I click on the books drop down for filters and some of my titles are greyed out and when I scroll over them I get the universal no sign.
On my keyboard, a screen image is Fn-Insert. Then I paste into window's Paint program, crop, and save. You can do the same in Photoshop, but Paint is simpler.
I check my dashboard, and none of mine are like you describe.
I'm not checking AC though. I really hate that site. And my author profile slider is just too long to check now.
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I took a picture on my phone and emailed it to myself so if you want to PM me your email I am happy to send you that.
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I'll show you what I'm seeing in the US store with my stuff. Only a few of my books show up. They're accessible and depend on what you toggle. Note 1st pic shows only a few books in my collection at the top. The second pic just ends with no more books showing. This is the US store.
(https://alhawke.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Screen-Shot-2022-10-22-at-9.43.15-AM.png)
(https://alhawke.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Screen-Shot-2022-10-22-at-9.41.45-AM.png)
{edit: I've sent an email to author central with the same screenshot. I'll let you know what they say
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I just checked my author page, and there is definitely something wrong there.
Nowhere near enough books on there.
Less than half in fact, when you factor in paperbacks and audiobooks.
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That's what I was afraid of. Those of you who have big catalogues and actually make a living off this, yikes.
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Only five of my twenty books on the carousel on the author page. Ten of the books on the list below.
Sigh.
:dizzy
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This glitch has been going on for several days and people are reporting it elsewhere, so I'm just gonna sit tight and await developments. Amazon is apparently updating stuff, causing lots of weird little problems lately. On the bright side, they seem to resolve them quickly.
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Only five of my twenty books on the carousel on the author page. Ten of the books on the list below.
I'm down to two in the carousel.
All appear in my dashboard. Nothing seems greyed out.
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Amanda, I'm not seeing an Amazon gift email. If you could go to your digital orders, find that one, and click resend, I'll watch for it again. Every so often, something does get lost in cyberspace.
My author page has 20 out of 24 titles. The carousel and the list below don't quite match each other. And when I tried to sort the list by publication date to easily see what was missing, only about six titles showed.
As far as I can tell, the missing ones are arbitrary. The books that haven't sold in a long time are all there, even the deranked ones.
Series books all still remain on their respective series pages and in the carousel on the related product pages.
Searching by my name in quotes gives me 16. Interestingly, up until recently, searching by my name in quotes gave me about what searching for my name without quotes did--a few of my titles followed by pages and pages of irrelevant items, followed by a few more of my titles. So that's actually an improvement--if all of the titles showed.
Searching for one that didn't show up by searching my name in quotes, I used the book's name in quotes. It didn't appear on the first few pages. But my name and the book's name in quotes got it to show up.
None of my titles are grayed out on the dashboard.
As others have said, I think Amazon is working on something, though it isn't clear to me what.
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Same here. Doesn't seem to be related to sales at all since the carousel shows an years old unpublished title that didn't sell at all and doesn't show a new title that is selling daily. I have only one missing so far.
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Bill bought my unranked standalone romance (thanks Bill!) and I did get the sale. Rank moved up to about 250K. So 1 sale from unranked to 250K, whatever that tells us.
I am now down to 4 books in my carousel, that book is one of them. I have one page of books on my author page, 5 books, 2 of the ones in the carousel, and 3 others. The rest are gone.
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I wish they'd disappear my embarrassing dead titles from the carousel, but nope, those hang on haunting me to the bitter end. I did notice the other day that the missing book had populated to the top of my bookshelf in KDP without me doing anything to it that would cause that to happen. And it's the one missing. So some sort of shuffling is going on, along with disappearing categories.
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Amazon got back to me. They're aware of it and say they should be able to fix it in another 72hrs (hope they mean everyone's). We have to keep watch for now.
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Oops, half my books have disappeared from my author page list and some from the carousel, so I too await the Zon's gentle mercy.
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Bill bought my unranked standalone romance (thanks Bill!) and I did get the sale. Rank moved up to about 250K. So 1 sale from unranked to 250K, whatever that tells us.
I am now down to 4 books in my carousel, that book is one of them. I have one page of books on my author page, 5 books, 2 of the ones in the carousel, and 3 others. The rest are gone.
It used to be that one sale was good enough to put a book that was at about 1,000,000 up to 100,000--which tells us there isn't much activity happening beyond a certain point. But not knowing where the books started, it's hard to draw any conclusions in this case.
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Bill bought my unranked standalone romance (thanks Bill!) and I did get the sale. Rank moved up to about 250K. So 1 sale from unranked to 250K, whatever that tells us.
I am now down to 4 books in my carousel, that book is one of them. I have one page of books on my author page, 5 books, 2 of the ones in the carousel, and 3 others. The rest are gone.
It used to be that one sale was good enough to put a book that was at about 1,000,000 up to 100,000--which tells us there isn't much activity happening beyond a certain point. But not knowing where the books started, it's hard to draw any conclusions in this case.
There are 12 million titles in the Kindle store. Assuming authors are becoming increasingly savvy about marketing, this trend will continue.
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There are 12 million titles in the Kindle store. Assuming authors are becoming increasingly savvy about marketing, this trend will continue.
It's actually around 50 million.
I've seen paid and free ranks in the 15 millions. So that's 30 million.
The other 20 mill is a guesstimate, but I think it's reasonable to assume that for every book with a paid rank, there's more of them that never got a rank.
And those numbers were done before the low content flood began.
It used to be that one sale was good enough to put a book that was at about 1,000,000 up to 100,000--which tells us there isn't much activity happening beyond a certain point. But not knowing where the books started, it's hard to draw any conclusions in this case.
Once a book falls past 250k, it's no longer selling 1 a day.
Once past 500k, it's not selling 1 a month.
The abyss gets bigger all the time, but the top range which is selling doesn't seem to change much.
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There are 12 million titles in the Kindle store. Assuming authors are becoming increasingly savvy about marketing, this trend will continue.
It's actually around 50 million.
Source (link)?
I'm going by this guy's estimate (https://justpublishingadvice.com/there-are-now-over-5-million-kindle-ebooks/).
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Nothing I like better than knowing the number of my competitors has dropped from 50 million to 12 million. :icon_eek:
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There are 12 million titles in the Kindle store. Assuming authors are becoming increasingly savvy about marketing, this trend will continue.
It's actually around 50 million.
Source (link)?
I'm going by this guy's estimate (https://justpublishingadvice.com/there-are-now-over-5-million-kindle-ebooks/).
Basic math.
There was a thread on Quora a year or so back where we worked it out. I was underestimating the number of of books without a rank, and was convinced by the other arguments.
As far as ranks go, I've SEEN actual paid and free ranks on books in the 15 millions.
So there must be at least 30 million books on Amazon.
That's not math, that's observation.
The rest is reasonable given how many books never get a rank, and is probably conservative.
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Can you imagine how much money they would make if amazon just charged $10 to list a book on their site?
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Can you imagine how much money they would make if amazon just charged $10 to list a book on their site?
This is a public area. Don't even suggest that where an Amazon bot might find it! :tap
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Looks like all of my books are back on my author's page carousel. The page is only one page long and still missing some books there.
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There are 12 million titles in the Kindle store. Assuming authors are becoming increasingly savvy about marketing, this trend will continue.
It's actually around 50 million.
Source (link)?
I'm going by this guy's estimate (https://justpublishingadvice.com/there-are-now-over-5-million-kindle-ebooks/).
Basic math.
There was a thread on Quora a year or so back where we worked it out. I was underestimating the number of of books without a rank, and was convinced by the other arguments.
As far as ranks go, I've SEEN actual paid and free ranks on books in the 15 millions.
So there must be at least 30 million books on Amazon.
That's not math, that's observation.
The rest is reasonable given how many books never get a rank, and is probably conservative.
Sounds like conjecture.
I'll stick with Derek's estimate based on his efforts that he outlined here (https://justpublishingadvice.com/how-many-kindle-ebooks-are-there/).
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Sounds like conjecture.
I'll stick with Derek's estimate based on his efforts that he outlined here (https://justpublishingadvice.com/how-many-kindle-ebooks-are-there/).
He's saying 48.5 million in 2020.
I'm saying about 50 million now.
Where's the problem?
We're both in the same ball park.
And just to clarify, I'm talking BOOKS, not eBooks.
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Looks like the missing books might be a permanent thing.
https://www.facebook.com/siobhan.muir.35/posts/2182417321937775
Per this post, they've implemented something called "Top Picks" which shows only books the algorithm chooses to show on your author page. It's active in the US and UK. I'm not in a place where I can transcribe the whole message but it's linked in the Facebook post above.
So... yeah. 😕
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Oy vey.
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https://www.facebook.com/siobhan.muir.35/posts/2182417321937775
That link is just a blank page for me.
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All my books are back up. Is it because I contacted them? Do you guys still have missing ones?
Looks like the missing books might be a permanent thing.
https://www.facebook.com/siobhan.muir.35/posts/2182417321937775
Per this post, they've implemented something called "Top Picks" which shows only books the algorithm chooses to show on your author page. It's active in the US and UK. I'm not in a place where I can transcribe the whole message but it's linked in the Facebook post above.
I don't think so. I think it was a glitch. I can't think of a reason why Amazon would hide books from our backlist. It doesn't make sense for sales for us or Amazon. Unless they were experimenting with "Top books" as an additional category within your author page.
But... senseless or not, only the future can tell, I suppose.
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All mine are back.
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There's 84 of mine in the slider, which is way too low.
There's also a long dead paperback listed on there. I unpublished it years ago, and it's showing up on there as 'out of stock'.
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Sounds like conjecture.
I'll stick with Derek's estimate based on his efforts that he outlined here (https://justpublishingadvice.com/how-many-kindle-ebooks-are-there/).
He's saying 48.5 million in 2020.
I'm saying about 50 million now.
Where's the problem?
We're both in the same ball park.
And just to clarify, I'm talking BOOKS, not eBooks.
I clearly stated above that I'm talking about the Kindle store...
There are 12 million titles in the Kindle store. Assuming authors are becoming increasingly savvy about marketing, this trend will continue.
You introduced data that contradicts my statement and is demonstrably false...
It's actually around 50 million.
I asked for a source. You responded with "math, Quora, blah."
I said I'd stick to stick to Derek's estimate (without pointing out that your claim was false given that I was clearly talking about the Kindle store).
"Where's the problem?"
There's no problem on my end. I speak with precision.