It’s Thursday! We’ve made it through most of the week. I’m going to
assume that means we’re ready to take on another tough topic, another subject
that a lot of us don’t like to think about—much less talk about, for fear of
being called a conspiracy theorist.
I’d say I’m just enough of a conspiracy theorist that this was an easy
one for me to grasp. Let’s see how you guys do with it.
Amazon decides what you’re going to read.
Now, I don’t mean that they’re going to pick one specific book and get
you to read it. I mean that they’re going to give you a list of maybe (and I
stress the word maybe) fifteen books
that they’ve handpicked just for you, and they’re reasonably sure that you’re
going to read them. Oh yeah, and they’re right most of the time. Oh, yeah, and those books are the ones they're going to make the most money off you buying.
See, I know it’s something nobody likes to think about, but we’re being
watched all the time. We really are. The difference between being watched in
the US and being watched in Europe is that in Europe, they’re at least polite
enough to tell you. Here, we pretend it isn’t happening. But I’m not
talking about the government watching you. I’m talking about businesses.
Amazon is watching you, and they have been since you signed up for an
account with them. They know what you like to watch, what kind of music you
listen to, and yes, what kinds of books you read. And they’re going to use this
information to push the titles that will make them the most money.
Let me give you an example.
I went on a hunt recently, on Amazon, for a book one of my friends had
told me about. Only I couldn’t remember the name, and I couldn’t remember the
author. I knew what was on the cover, what the book was about, and it was all fairly unique, so I thought it
couldn’t be that hard to find. I searched for the genre, refined my results
down by what I knew about the book, and do you know what I found?
Nearly all the results were Createspace books.
I thought that was a little strange, being that I was looking for
something by an established author who’d been published through a large publishing house.
Then I thought about it a little more, and it all began to make sense.
See, when Amazon works with other companies, like Random House, for example, they
don’t make as much money. They have to give some of the profit to the other
company, and so they lose something in the transaction.
On the other hand, when they’re only working with an author, they don’t
have any overhead charges. There’s no secondary company they have to work with
to make that sale. It’s simple profit for them, with a little handout to the
author on the side.
It’s a brilliant business strategy, if I’m being honest. Amazon is
really good about those, and that’s what’s built them up into such a big
business to begin with.
The problem is, they’re preventing us from finding books that have been
edited, that have gone through the real process and have reached their full
potential. Instead, they’re pushing books that aren’t properly edited, books that still
need some help, stories that have plot holes hidden in their subplots.
Some readers won’t notice. That’s true. But the real readers, the
devout readers that we’re all striving to reach, they’ll notice. And those are
the ones who won’t come back. They’re the best kinds of fans to have, and
they’re the ones we have to fight to keep once we get them.
Amazon is doing everything they can think of to keep those fans from reaching us. Everything. It’s up to us to stop them, to step in and make our own decisions on what is and is not good writing.
Don’t let Amazon tell you what to read. Don’t let Amazon’s pages be the
only ones you look at when you’re deciding what you want to read.
Go to a bookstore. Check out other websites. Go look at direct from
publisher sites, see what else is out there that Amazon would never allow you
to see. There’s some gold out there, hidden amid the drivel.
All you have to do is find it—but Amazon’s not going to help you do it.
[love]
{Rani D.}
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