One-By-One My E-Books Are Snuffed Out

Last month I commented how a 3-star review on Amazon for one of my e-books cuts its sales by two-thirds and a 2-star review not only ends all sales for that book but freezes the sales of all my other books for a week or more: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-importance-of-sock-puppetry.html  Clearly I have been deluding myself in believing I can write competently. One-by-one my counter-factual history books are being given 3- and 2-star ratings. The basis for the ratings is often due to minor errors. Yes, in ‘Other Americas’ I failed to spot that I, or my spell checker, had named the 15th US President ‘John’ rather ‘James’ Buchanan and that I got the area of the state of Rhode Island wrong. I spend weeks checking and editing my books, but like all authors I am not going to spot everything. If Henning Mankell and Philip Kerr have to do without editors when they are leading authors, how can I be expected to employ one?

Now, with e-books it takes a matter of seconds to correct minor errors when people draw them to your attention and a revised edition can be up online within hours. However, this is never enough. The reviewers my books attract condemn a book on the basis of such errors and despite my efforts there is nothing I can do to counter let alone remove such condemnations. The only choice once I receive a 2-star review is to ‘unpublish’ the book, i.e. remove it from Amazon listings or leave it there hoping that someone might accidentally buy it. Basically, however, the moment a 2-star review goes up, it is dead. I might was well bring all the content back here and make it free access, which increasingly I am tempted to do.

All authors make minor errors and in the past with published books these were eliminated by editors. However, as I have noted before, editing is disappearing from even leading publishers. Yet, tolerance of errors by readers is zero, despite the fact that they now pay far less for an e-book than they would have ever done for a new paperback. There are some other challenging bases on which my books are being criticised and killed that it seems impossible to do anything about.

One thing I have noticed is that with my books open to a global market my readers views of what constitutes ‘correct’ English is incredibly varied, yet I am hammered for not using the style that a particular reader wants. I have both been criticised for writing too lengthy sentences with too many sub-clauses and at the same time attacked for writing sentences that are deemed to be so short that they are nothing but ‘fragments’. I have Word grammar check all my writing, so all sentences in my books are certainly not deemed by that system as fragments. For my counter-factual books, being based on blog postings, I sought a chatty style which I thought would be appropriate for a book you most likely would read on the move. Yet, the style is clearly not tolerable in India where it is seen as too serious nor in the USA where it is perceived as too light or in fact, just British, and so simply intolerably alien. I would certainly welcome lessons in how to write in a universal English style which is not going to warrant such criticism from two of the largest potential markets.

There is a further challenge that authors of counter-factual books face in a way fiction authors probably do not. This is the fact that your books are rated to a great extent not simply by the quality of what you write but also by your opinions. I have been condemned for apparently being too hostile to Finland and for giving too much detail of the potential alternate outcomes so somehow smothering the ‘what if?’ aspect. The greatest insult I have received in reviews is to be said to simply be summarising the arguments of Newt Gingrich and in a less competent way. This cut right through me. I briefly comment on Gingrich’s work in ‘Other Americas’ but not to simply take his ideas, rather to strongly contest them. In my view Gingrich’s writing is basically extreme right-wing propaganda wrapped up in a covering of counter-factual writing. I feel I have utterly failed if any reader thinks that somehow I am making a poor quality replica of Gingrich’s work. A couple of years ago, I dismissed the statement by one commentator in ‘The Guardian’ that seeing how many good books were being produced he saw no point in bothering to try to write creatively, despite having been doing it for many years. However, recognising that I am completely failing in getting my message across in my work and the fact that a book will be destroyed for even minor slip-ups among 100,000 words, I have come to the same conclusion.

Writing e-books saved my sanity at a time when I was being bullied, having my house repossessed and seeing the break-up of my family. However, I have learnt that instead it has opened me up to a new kind of abuse. In a matter of minutes a grumpy reader can render useless months of work. Furthermore they can insult to me such an extent that I am going to be offended for years to come and I am aware that there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop this. At the time, getting in to producing e-books seemed to be an interesting thing to do and gave me a motive to continue. However, it has proven to be a poisoned chalice and the price I am paying for this foray is not worth the now clearly meagre gains I made for a short while.

The Importance Of Sock Puppetry

Regular readers will have noticed how I have not been blogging a great deal over the past few months and that various ‘what if?’ postings and stories have disappeared from here to appear in e-books on Amazon. I did this for the simple basis that I was bullied into selling my house at a knock-down price and after months of unemployment I am in a job which pays £8000 per year less than my previous job and £16,000 less than what I was earning in 2010, whilst costs have risen for all of us. I am compelled to live with my parents until I can find a room to rent within a reasonable distance of my work, so that I simply do not spend what I save on rent in travel costs. The only consolation is that I am not being bullied in my current job. However, I am having to put up with the fact that no-one has decided to train me and I have to pick up scraps of how to do things from my colleagues who ration out such knowledge jealously. One told me I had no hope of escaping from this job, which as you can imagine hardly inspired me.


One thing I thought I knew I could do well was write. I certainly write fast and when not depressed or jobless I can turn out 2-3000 words per evening. In a job where despite my colleagues being very busy, I have not been trained in a range of activities and am begging to be given a password to access certain software, I am left trying to appear busy when, in fact, I have very little to do. Thus, me typing away busily at my computer looks reasonable. In addition, as I have commented before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/kindling-some-e-books.html with the KDP system run by Amazon, I found a way to get a number of my novels and collections of essays on sale as e-books. I have sold a variety of these over the past months, the best has had around 400 sales, the worst less than 5. However, they all bring in money, even in small amounts. The system in getting payments from the USA, my main market, is hard. The US government takes 30% at source. Then you get sent a cheque in US$ which costs £6 and takes six weeks to process. However, I have been making around £200 per month, on which I will also have to pay UK tax come April. Obviously my hope was that my sales would increase as I got better known and this monthly amount.

The key challenge for me has proven to be buyer reviews. Back in 2008, I noted how hard it was becoming for sellers when buyers had so much power: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/strange-death-of-ebay.html  EBay did not collapse but the message boards for sellers show how hard it is for sellers to continue trading, as their account can be suspended after two negative reviews from buyers. Buyers are very aggressive in their comments and get upset about minor issues. Yes, of course, it is right to complain if an item takes weeks to arrive or is damaged. However, some buyers seem to expect things to be teleported across continents to arrive days after they have bought them, with no recognition of the reliability of their postal service. Some US shoppers seem to still believe the UK is part of the USA and are surprised we use a different currency and are on a different continent. One UK seller I know had a customer who bought some greetings cards. Thirty-eight days after they had been sent to her she wrote and complained she had not received them. The seller sent replacements and noted this on the buyer’s feedback. The reason for this is that some buyers are serial ‘non-receivers’ and are simply lying. Just making this statement that a replacement set of cards had been sent, led the buyer not only to leave negative feedback on the seller but also to bombard her with abusive emails.

In the world of online retail the buyer is not just simply ‘always right’ but is also immensely powerful. A single individual can drive a seller out of business on the basis of a petulant attitude. I guess it is of no surprise that I have encountered a similar experience selling e-books on Amazon.

I have to come to the conclusion that I am a very poor writer. Having sold over 500 copies of various books, I have had only three pieces of feedback and all of them are negative. One issue with Kindle sales, as I have been made aware of by those people I know who own them, exclusively middle-aged women, that people will buy stacks of books and never get around to reading many of them. One woman I worked with had 200 books on her Kindle within 3 months of purchasing it. I know that some people buy a set of my books at one time and I can imagine that many are sitting on their Kindles unread. Of course, given my experiences, if they did read them maybe they would be as critical as those people who have provided feedback.

Of the feedback I have received, one reader complained that I had portrayed wartime Finland’s political system wrongly so marked the book down. Another reviewing a different book said that I gave too much detail regarding the alternate outcomes that the ‘what if?’ element was lost. I do not really understand what they meant by that. The worst was on a third book which went into immense detail about how the style of writing was wrong. Being made up of essays from this blog, I had adopted a relaxed, chatty style, which I thought was refreshing and would make the books accessible. However, clearly the opposite was the case and I was condemned for the book being apparently incomprehensible and also with factual errors ‘on every page’.

As I have noted before, on Amazon, a 3-star review will reduce my sales (and I imagine those of other authors too), but two-thirds. The 2-star review I received for the last one mentioned above, not only made the book unsellable but also froze the sales of my other books, just before Christmas when I had hoped sales would be increasing. The number of books sold but then returned, has also jumped up. As a result I have had to withdraw the book for fear of destroying sales of the others. I cannot remove the review. I was told by Amazon I could respond to it, but this turned out not to be true, it kept saying I had to buy my own book in order to respond to a comment on it. Weeks of work has been destroyed by some review someone wrote in their lunch break.

Online reviews are a way of giving value to the facilities websites provide. Every time we buy something we are prompted to comment on the service we have received. In addition, commonly now, for example, with Amazon we are similarly asked to review the quality of the product. It is seen as a necessary part of the online experience. However, we live in a society in which indignation is a cultural norm. We expect anyone supplying us anything whether it is a bed & breakfast guest house, a baker, a bread making machine or a book, to address our own precise personal needs exactly, even without us saying what they are. If anyone falls short of writing a book in the very way we want it at this moment, then we feel it is our right, in fact our duty to get angry and express that anger. This is what makes online reviewing so very hazardous for providers. No-one seems eager to express pleasure at the service or item they have received, such pleasure is taken for granted. No-one bothers with neutral comments. It is simply the feeling of disdain that encourages a purchaser to make the effort to comment.

Yes, it is in the consumers’ interest to show up poorly written books. However, they can be destroyed by someone taking offence to a particular aspect. In one case I saw a book receive a 1-star rating because a new edition had come out with a new cover and the reader had bought this without realising he already owned the book. Rather than accept that he had been careless he put the blame on the author. It is always a challenge when writing counter-factual books as people will often rate them not by the quality of the writing or the analysis but simply whether they agree with the outcomes the book portrays. In theory such feedback should be beneficial in improving quality. Kindle books can easily be taken down, edited and put back up again within 12 hours (if in English). However, there is no point in doing that as the revised book will always carry the black mark of the review of the original version no matter how much you change it. You can ‘unpublish’ and even ‘block’ books on KDP but you can never remove the book from the site. Re-writing the synopsis to say the book is no longer available due to criticism is not accepted either; I have tried.

How does all of this connect to sock puppetry? It comes from comics/satirists who use a sock to make a simple puppet that they then have a kind of ventriloquist’s dialogue with. The most famous one is probably Lamb Chop, a puppet operated by Shari Lewis (1933-98) from 1957 onwards. It is a term which has come to refer to when authors use pseudonyms to write positive reviews of their books online. They can alternatively use friends to do this as well. In September crime author R.J. Ellroy was criticised for using the pseudonyms Jelly Bean and Nicodemus Jones not only to praise his own work but also criticise that of rivals. In 2010 Orlando Figes was charged in the same way and you can find cases going back to John Lott who 2000-3 used the name Mary Rosh to post positive reviews. Thus, it has been a tendency really since the birth of online reviewing; apparently the term goes back to 1993.

Unfortunately for my career as a writer, Amazon seems to have methods to prevent sock puppetry and despite my efforts I cannot create any kind of identity which can even respond to the negative comments that are being put on my books. Even if I could I am not certain that I could counter-balance comments which are so dismissive. Consequently, one-by-one my books are going to be snuffed out from Amazon as someone decided to turn their disdain on each one and end any sales of it. I suppose I have learnt a lesson, that I am not capable of writing for the global English-reading audience; I just do not have the language that people are happy to read. I have tried an easy-going style, that has not worked; I have tried a more serious style, that has not worked. In addition, writing counter-factual books makes me very vulnerable. It only takes me writing that a particular outcome was more or less likely or characterising a particular regime in a specific way to receive a bad review for the entire book. With that the book will no longer be bought, I guess because people judge by the star rating rather than the actual text of the review. I have no intention to go around damaging other authors, as I know how easily even a successful one might be eliminated by bad reviews. The customer has ultimate power because my books are now trapped on Amazon. It is not down to me if I am an author or not, rather this lies in the hands of some bored individual who decides to take against me.

Kindling Some E-Books

Regular readers may have noticed that some of the stories once posted here have disappeared.  This is because I have been introduced to published e-books for free via Amazon.  Whilst they are aimed primarily at the Kindle electronic book reader market, you can download a tool which allows you to read it on your home computer or laptop.  I was introduced to this system known as KDP - Kindle Direct Publishing by the woman in my house who is a novelist and had been encouraged, once the publishing house who produced her books collapsed, to transform her books into e-books.  The advantage is that you keep control over the books and you get a far higher royalty.  She used to receive 10% of the cover price of each printed book she sold which usually came out at 80p (€1.01; US$1.24).  On KDP you can either have 35% or in some regions, notably the UK, USA, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and at some book prices you can get 70% of the price you set.  This means that prices are cheaper.  They are based on the US$ rate you set so even if you put the book up at the same US price at different times you will find it translates into to different £ and € prices.  If you set the book price at certain levels and a royalty of 35% it can be 'borrowed' and you get a share of a fund each time the book is taken out.  However, as yet none of the books I have set to being borrowable has been borrowed even once despite being up for 3 months now.  You can put your book up for free if you like so that it simply gets out there and you can also take part in a promotion period run for your book by KDP.  The one drawback of the promotion period is that when you come off it and go back to full price you are likely to then attract lots of negative feedback.

As with a lot of online provision, people basically want stuff for free or a nominal price.  This is not helped by a lot of writers charging incredibly low prices.  As regular readers know I enjoy alternate history books and you can pick full length alternate history novels with good reviews for 77¢ or US$1.19 (£0.77;  €0.98).  I value my time and effort higher than this, but I guess they are working on the 'stack them high and sell them cheap' principle.  As on eBay and even trading on 'World of Warcraft' it is incredible how few people have even the basic grasp of trading and unfortunately it makes it hard to command even a price which would have been incredibly cheap for a printed novel, let alone one that can make more than pennies, even though the work that goes into them is no less.  There is a lot of advice online about marketing your stuff through KDP and one suggestion from 'Let's Get Digital' by David Gaughran is to start at around US$5 for a full-length novel and something like US$2-3 for a novella.  As he notes, it is far easier to reduce a price if you are not selling rather than raise it.  However, I have seen some authors do that when their sales have risen.

The material on the KDP service varies considerably.  There are categories you can put your work into, to help prospective readers.  When I checked a few weeks ago there were 3 books classed as being 'sea stories' and 44,000 classed as 'erotica' of all kinds.  Some people simply put up short stories of 20 pages and charge for these.  This is one issue which seems rather to be overlooked.  I have put up full-length novels and they have sold nothing or only a handful.  However, short stories and collections of essays fly off the 'shelves'.  In terms of what interests readers I have found a big difference between the .co.uk site and the .com ones.  The latter is not simply for US customers but anyone elsewhere in the world who does not have a nation specific Amazon site so you can get customers from India or Sweden buying through it.  Surprisingly I have sold a range of stuff to Germany but not enough to see a clear pattern of demand.

It is quite easy to understand why even at a time when novels are selling much more than in recent years due to the numerous book clubs, that through KDP it is short stories and essays that sell best.  This is really about how the Kindle is used.  Its key benefit is its portability and I imagine a lot of usage is while people are travelling or are waiting for someone.  The functionality for returning to where you were before is not yet great and there are not numerous 'block tags', i.e. sections that you can jump straight to, which have been around for over a decade within publishing documents and is even now a feature of Word if you set it up correctly.  Thus, quick satisfaction, things you can dip into and out of as you would with a magazine are favoured.  Thus, ironically I have sold tens of copies more of my collections of 'what if?' essays through KDP when the woman in my house, despite being a well-reviewed author, has only sold a handful of her full-length novels.  Saying this, the erotic novel, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' by E. L. James (2011) is reputedly the best-selling product on Kindle.  This probably stems from who owns Kindles and I guess middle-aged women are in the majority.  Something sexy and elicit seems to fit with Kindle usage and reading a novel like that next to a partner or in a public place is akin to the adult version of reading comics under the bed covers with a torch when you are supposed to be sleeping.

I hope that this will be a new avenue for short story and especially essay writing.  Of course, there have been magazines, but short stories tended to be limited to publications for elderly women rather than more broadly.  Blogs and other sites are another source, the author Margaret Atwood raves about Wattpad a free online source of stories, many of which have more youthful and contemporary themes such as supernatural aspects.  As I have noted before, there is an issue of quality, but in this context the customer is all powerful.  On KDP you can even return purchases and be refunded if it turns out that they are not what you thought.  Of course the prices are very low compared to buying a book from a shop, but some people seem to want even their £1 back.  In some cases I am sure they have read and returned rather than bothering with the Kindle library.  People seem to like doing that no matter what the context as the woman in my house knows from clothing bought through her online business and then returned worn.  I suppose it is simply characteristic of our society in which everyone feels they are being cheated unless they can squeeze every last gramme of advantage out of the seller.  Customers then, can walk away, not simply before purchasing but even afterwards.  Of course, there will be wonderful writing that will be missed in the morass of stuff being published and conversely poor quality stuff may sell by the bucketload.

Feedback does not really help because as with voting in the Eurovision song contest, it is so abused in any online context.  As I have noted before, trawling the internet to comment negatively on things seems to be a hobby in itself.  Often the commentators simply expose their lack of understanding of the topic being discussed and usually are using it to exercise this need to be indignant which is the most incredibly pervasive trend of contemporary society, more on that in subsequent posts.  Indignation is proving to be a bigger driver even than lust.  In additon, there are marketing dirty tricks, authors slagging off rivals in their genre.  There is no honour, it appears, in the world of online publishing, but again that reflects our society in which no trick seems to be too low to be seen as acceptable business practice these days.  Feedback can help guide the reader, but it needs to be used carefully; good work may be concealed behind indignant or undermining comments and bad between false praise.

There are a couple of things that need to apply if you are putting your work online.  One is good spelling and grammar.  Even though I see even official documents with such errors, the e-book buying public is incredibly intolerant of them.  The advantage as a writer is if you spot something, it only takes a few hours, 12 hours at most if you write in English, to substitute a corrected version.  In one of mine I had written 'Belgian' when I meant 'Belgium' and I spotted it before any readers commented on it, not that I have had any comments on my books, for some reason.  Poor grammar and spelling will not stop sales but may dent subsequent sales.  I advise use all spelling and grammar checking tools you can; leave a period between writing and submitting your work to allow your 'eye' to become sensitive once again to errors in the text you know so well; read it aloud and if you can, get someone else to read it whether in person or online.

The other thing is the cover.  You can go with a default cover that Amazon assigns but it makes the book look like a West German text book from the 1970s.  Invest in a cheap graphics package or photo manipulation package and start trawling the internet for copyright free images.  This can be incredibly hard as search engines send back images from sites that sell pictures for hundreds and hundreds of the responses you find.  It may be easier to take shots yourself.  Another source are people's home snaps on websites, Facebook pages or blogs, especially if you edit or tint them.  I know a lot of artists these days work with 'found' images, but I am uncertain about the morality of this, especially as they are usually derived from collections put up by ordinary people as they do not have the software to block copying; though this is easy on a system like Flickr.  Personally I am not averse to seeing a shot from one of my French cycling trips appearing on someone's book cover, but others might not be so happy, especially if it turned out to be something in the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' genre.  Anyway, whatever you do for the cover, look what colours are used for your genre.  Interestingly some of these seem influenced by the old Penguin covers for books, so crime has a green tinge and there is a lot of red in erotica it seems, or grey or blue now.  Books on warfare have tanks or aircraft on and alternate history has a lot of flags.  Make sure that there is clear text that can be seen even when the image is at thumbnail size.  Remember it is harder to sell the concept of a novel from the cover than something like an essay collection.

I have found that e-book publishing has reinvigorated my writing but has pushed it in certain directions.  Maybe it will not revolutionise publishing but it will sit alongside print books, self-publishing and website material as another way to access stories.  The thing is, it works for a certain sort of writing and if you want to succeed in it, rather than simply getting your stuff to a small audience this way, then you may have to recognise that only certain types of book will work for this market at the moment.  Saying that, I suspect many changes in the years to come.

P.P. 16/07/2012
I have noticed something else that happens if one of you books sells quite a few copies.  I have my books at a particular set of prices, usually US$5.00 and US$3.50 depending on the length.  These are translated into £ and € at different prices depending on the current US$:£ and US$:€ rate, so if you price them at the same US price even a day or two apart, they can appear lower or higher in price in these other currencies than the book you put up previously.  This is not the only changes in prices, however.  Whilst 'behind the scenes' in terms of what I can see the prices do not change, I have noticed, as I sell more of a particular book, its price to the customer falls.  In some ways this creates a vicious circle as the books that were selling well anyway now look better value and when compared with your less popular books, these increasingly look over-priced.  I have no idea why Amazon does this, but it does attract readers to particular books and can leave others to wither.  As I have noted, my essay collections sell better than my novels and as they become cheaper, my novels look increasingly like a poor deal.  I guess it is Amazon's intention to encourage prices to fall even further using this method, but I cling on as I think my labour is worth at least something and in fact I put more effort into the novels that the essay collections anyway.

P.P. 02/09/2012 - It's Mainly For Americans
So aftwe the last few weeks I have been selling literally hundreds of books via the KDP system and I am wondering when I am going to get paid.  Then I realise I have not read the small print.  Most of my sales are with Amazon.com which sells in dollars, being based in the USA.  The laws of the USA mean that 30% of all royalties earned by people who are not Americans are held back by the US government which means I now find myself funding the wars the USA is perpetrating around the planet to the tune of hundreds of dollars.  A further problem is that Amazon will not send funds to non-US banks.  This contrasts with sales in the EU which even if in euros get sent to my UK bank account.  I cannot set up a US bank account so they will only send me a cheque or 'check' as they call it.  Now to get royalties sent electronically you only have to earn US$10 per month, but to get one of these checks, you have to earn US$100, which means the money is sitting longer with Amazon and gaining interest and of course 30% of it goes to the US government even for sales which are made outside the USA such as to say Argentina or South Africa or Australia.  Thus, I now find myself earning money from my books not for myself but for Amazon and the US government.  It is clear that unless you are a US taxpayer, the system in place for these Kindle books primarily benefits someone other than yourself.  I hate the fact that my books are paying for bullets killing Afghans and missions leading to ordinary US citizens to be mutilated or killed, let alone the nuclear weapons I am paying to maintain.  I feel utterly dirtied by this and wish I had read more carefully before going into this.  Yes, I have read how you can get a deal if your home country has a tax treaty with the USA.  Being unemployed I will have to give it a go.  However, will be hampered by the US demands for me to prove my identity as I cannot afford to renew my passport.  It is always those struggling who are made to struggle harder, the rich just laugh.

P.P. 14/11/2012 One Mediocre Review Can Wreck Your Sales
I had been a bit disappointed that none of my books had had any reviews from readers.  However, I then realised that I should have been more careful about what I wished for.  I had a review of 'Other Paths' which up until then had been my best selling book.  The review gave it only 3 stars out of a possible 5.  The review is reasonably positive, but the reviewer is Finnish and took offence at my portrayal of Finland during the Second World War, so marked the book down.  He saw my portrayal as an 'error' when in fact it was just a difference of opinion from his viewpoint.  I have noticed this problem on reviews for other 'what if?' history books, people tend to rate them by whether they agree with the conclusions contained in the book, rather than the quality of the writing or the research.  However, it is clear that many people shopping for books online simply look at the star rating without reading why that rating has been given.  As a consequence of this single mediocre review sales of 'Other Paths' have dropped abruptly by two-thirds, losing me US$60-70 per month (after tax) and halting the rising popularity of the book.  Someone could utterly destroy my sales simply by posting mediocre reviews on them.  I can understand why so many leading authors indulge in 'sock puppetry', i.e. adopting fake identities and then reviewing their own work positively.  Without positive comments you might as well abandon selling the book as readers will not touch it, if it lacks the magic 5 stars.