This Crazy Writing Life: Four Million And Counting! Please, Somebody, Make It Stop!

By Steven Womack

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As I mentioned in a previous installment of This Crazy Writing Life, it’s impossible to determine how many books are published each year throughout the world. However, most experts seem to agree that our best guess estimates now pop four million a year.

Four million books a year!

It gobsmacks the imagination. And with the advent of generative AI, that number’s going nowhere but up. It’s indicative of how much alarm this has caused that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)—Amazon’s indie pubbing platform—now limits you to publishing three books a day. If you’re good with AI, you can produce a “book” in under an hour. There’s evidence that there are thousands of accounts out there uploading more than 100 books a month.

It’s insane.

So when British writer and indie pubbing guru James Blatch (who is perhaps best known as Mark Dawson’s partner in what used to be called Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula before rebranding itself) wrote a Substack post a couple of months ago in which he suggested that KDP should charge $300 per upload…

Well, as we say in the screenwriting biz, chaos ensued.

This sent people straight into panic mode. I get it; most self-published books don’t earn $300 over the course of their entire lives (and a lot of trad books don’t). This would put a ton of folks out of business. And it’s going against the tide of where the indie-pubbing industry is headed. Ingram used to charge to upload a book, but now they’ve dropped that.

Apparently, Blatch (who is a genuinely nice guy; I had dinner with him and Mark Dawson at the Novelists, Inc. conference a few years ago) received nothing short of an avalanche of insults and threats over this idea. In a follow-up to the original Substack post, he wrote that:

Clearly the figure of $300 was the main issue. Even if it covers all derivatives, including translations, it would adversely affect more authors than I considered. But I will stand by the theme of the post.

Blatch makes a good case for putting up some kind of seawall against this word tsunami. If there’s no limit to AI slop, then we’ll all soon be drowning in it. Let’s also not forget The Elephant in the Middle of the Room, which is that a great many human-written indie-pubbed books should have never seen the light of day either (okay, there, I said it).

Of course, I’m not talking about your book or mine, but c’mon folks… We’ve all seen indie-pubbed books that are, frankly, embarrassing.

Prior to AI, my reasoning would have been that the market would have been the seawall. Word gets around that a book sucks and nobody will buy it. But these AI-generated tomes are also encased in AI-generated covers and backed up by AI-generated marketing. And if you’ve ever noodled around with AI covers and marketing (I have), you’ll soon learn that AI can produce some pretty good B.S. Their covers aren’t bad either.

This massive digital landslide hurts serious indie-pubbed writers. Amazon doesn’t give a rat’s rusty flip about you as an author. What they do care about is profit, and how do you protect profit?

By not p^*#ing off your customers.

Blatch wrote that Amazon has achieved this by altering its algorithm so that indie titles are penalized and held back from some chart positions. The algorithm has been tilted to the conservative side, so that books that make the best-selling charts tend toward those with a larger sales history.

I get why Amazon does this.

But it still hurts.

What we’re up against is the business model of AI-generated books. Humans who take writing seriously want to produce quality work that sustains itself over a long period of time. In the early days of my writing career, I imagined that my books would be a kind of annuity that would support me in my dotage and then continue to produce for my family after I’ve gone (reality quickly shut that dream the hell down).

AI-generated books are a new business model. When you’re producing a hundred books a month, if each one sells a couple dozen copies before people realize they’re drek, then you’re on your way to making a good living.

All this sounds like there are people running clandestine AI-slop farms from obscure offshore locations with no extradition treaty, like the folks with exotic accents who call me ten times a day offering me help with Medicare or make an offer on my house. That’s not always the case, though. Consider romance novelist Coral Hart, who was profiled a couple of months back in The New York Times. Ms. Hart is open and aboveboard about it: she creates romance novels with AI (specifically Anthropic’s Claude). She produced more than 200 last year, selling over 50,000 copies, and earning a good, solid six figures. To prove it could be done, she generated one while being interviewed.

It took her not quite 45 minutes.

So that’s what we’re up against. The competition was bad enough before AI. Now it’s even worse, and it’s not going away.

Now this effluent storm has even hit the trad publishing space. Hachette cancelled publication of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard in the wake of The New York Times raising suspicion about the book. The cancellation of the novel, originally self-published and then picked up by Hachette after presumably good numbers and reviews, has caused a real ruckus in publishing. Apparently, there was a lot of speculation about AI content in the book from the get-go, but Ms. Ballard has vehemently denied in interviews and statements that she had anything to do with this. She maintains that the editor used AI to change some of her text without her knowledge.

But this begs the question of why a professional author wouldn’t go over the editorial revisions and catch the AI changes. Most writers that I’ve ever known, myself included, go absolutely medieval over a manuscript that’s been touched by an editor. Sharyn McCrumb once told me she was so put out over a copyeditor’s changes to her manuscript that she had two rubber stamps made. The first read Stet. The second read Stet, damnit!

The other issue that pops up here is why didn’t Hachette catch the AI problem before the Times pointed it out. Publishing industry guru Jane Friedman speculated that perhaps publishers need to start taking advantage of tools like Pangram, which are designed to detect AI. Maybe trad publishers are just behind the learning curve on AI.

But, Friedman pointed out, the real issue is that AI has now evolved to the stage where it’s going to get harder and harder to detect it. As she wrote: “I hope (finally?) that this is a wake-up call for publishing professionals. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Jane Friedman is spot on with this one. AI isn’t going anywhere; in fact, it’s going to get a little bit better each day. I read a blog post by a very famous and important writer (no need to name names here) who raged against AI, saying it was the devil incarnate and he’d never have anything to do with, never touch it.

I think that’s short-sighted. For one thing, if you don’t know anything about AI and refuse to even look at it, then you won’t notice it when it sneaks into your life. If you consider AI the enemy (and I don’t, by the way), then the first rule of war is know your enemy.

To circle back around to James Blatch, he wrote recently that he’d had a conversation with a senior Amazon executive, who told him that Amazon would never introduce an AI checker. As soon as you created one, AI would find ways to get around it. The technology moves too quickly on both sides of the equation.

I don’t have an answer to this one. I’ve noodled around with AI and found it to be an incredibly useful tool. I’ve done everything from generating marketing copy with AI just to see what it looks like, to screening stocks for options opportunities, and planning travel itineraries. AI’s like any other tool; it can be used for useful, worthwhile purposes or it can be used to cause great harm.

The one thing I would never do is use AI to generate copy that I then put my name on.

Bottom line: this is the price we pay for, as the old curse says, living in interesting times.

Next month, I’ll have some news on a project I mentioned in a previous column.

Until then, as always, thanks for playing along.

This Crazy Writing Life: Amazon Ads Part Three–Don't Forget to Press the Clutch...

By Steven Womack

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So you’re the type that wants to be in charge, right? The thought of targeting your Amazon Ads to a bunch of folks you may or not want the ad to go to is a real problem. Maybe you don’t trust the Amazon algorithm. Maybe you’re the kind of person who would rather drive a manual transmission than an automatic.

Okay, there’s room for all types. So how do you get started?

In last month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life, we pondered Amazon’s automatic targeting and how the Amazon algorithm based its decisions on your metadata. Metadata is a term you see tossed around a lot these days. I kinda sorta think I understand what metadata is and how it works, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actual definition of the word.

So I did what people do these days: I Googled it.

Metadata, according to that internet bastion of absolute truth (Wikipedia), means “data that provides information about other data, but not the content of the data itself.”

Say what? Data about data?

Continuing on with Wikipedia, metadata is data that gives you insights into other data. There are numerous kinds of metadata: descriptive, structural, administrative, reference, statistical, legal… A lot to take in, more than we actually need.

Before we get too deep into the weeds on this, let’s narrow our focus to the question of what is metadata for indie publishers and what does it do?

Now we’ve bitten off a bite-sized chunk. Metadata for indie publishers is the information (data) that will help lead a customer to your book. This information primarily falls under two main classifications: keywords and categories. If you’re going to attempt to manually target your promotions efforts on Amazon (or anywhere else), you’re going to have to get your head around these two dynamics.

Keywords are words or phrases that, when a potential customer types them into the search bar, takes them—hopefully—to your book. If you’ve written a book called Pole Vaulting for Dummies, then when someone types “pole vaulting” into the search bar, your book is going to be in the pool of books that Amazon pulls up.

But there’s more to it. Not only do good keywords make your book show up in search results, but if you’re running a Sponsored Products campaign (see the last two month’s columns on Amazon advertising), then your ad gets featured in pages for other books that pop up as a result of the search. If you include the keyword phrase “Mark Twain” in your metadata, then your book will not only show up in search results for Mark Twain, but as a Sponsored Product ad on every other book page that’s pulled up.

So you’re beginning to see how important this is, right? The right keywords will make your book pop up all over the Amazon place. But the wrong, or ineffective, keywords will consign you to obscurity.

It’s not just the keywords, though. You can also control how closely the customer’s search results match your keywords. There are three broad match types in the Amazon ad platform.

Exact matches are just what the name implies. You know exactly what search query you want to target. Exact matches include close variations like plural or singular versions of the phrase, but you need to be as specific as possible and you need to enter the words in the exact order you want them to appear in the search. If your keyword phrase is “private eye noir novels,” then “noir private eye books” isn’t going to give you a hit.

If you choose the phrase match option, that means you have a precise idea of what you’re trying to target, but you’re willing to be a little looser on the interpretation, like if your keyword phrase is part of a longer phrase. In other words, if your keyword phrase is “private eye noir novels” and someone types in “private eye noir novels set in New Orleans,” you’ll get a hit.

The third option is the broad match. This is the match type that will give you the largest number of hits, but you run a real risk that the some of the hits may be so far off base that they won’t give you any results. Ricardo Fayet in Amazon Ads For Authors goes so far as to recommend that you not choose broad match as an option in Sponsored Product ads.

So let’s look at Category targeting. What are categories on the Amazon platform?

Imagine that Amazon.com was a brick-and-mortar bookstore. If you were looking for a romance novel, you’d either go to the store directory and see which shelves housed romances or you’d just wander around until you found the right shelf. Same with mysteries, suspense/thrillers, or books on car repair or stock trading…

It’s vital that your book be assigned to the right categories. In a brick-and-mortar bookstore, when a book’s put in the wrong category, it’s misshelved. If someone looks long enough and hard enough, they may find it. In the vast online bookstore known as Amazon, though, when your book’s in the wrong category, it’s lost.

But it’s not just a matter of readers being able to find your book. Each category within Amazon (with the exception of some categories that we’ll touch on in a second) has its own best-seller list. The competition within each category varies tremendously. In some niche categories, you might need to sell only a dozen books to be an Amazon number one best-seller.

So what are the exceptions I mentioned? In a recent article on Amazon categories, Kindlepreneur guru Dave Chesson writes that 27% of the categories you can pick on the KDP dashboard are what he calls “ghost categories.” These are categories that don’t have a name, don’t have a category path on the Best Sellers page, and if you select it, your sales don’t count toward a bestseller tag. You almost always want to avoid putting your book in one of these.

It’s also important to understand that over half the categories on Amazon are duplicate categories. Which means if you select three of these categories (and three is all you’re allowed), then you’re really only picking one.

Here’s the other challenge when you’re determining which categories to place your book in: there are over 19,000 categories!

Yep, Amazon’s a dang big bookstore.

And Amazon’s constantly changing the rules. As I mentioned a few lines earlier, you can request that your book be placed in three categories. You used to be allowed ten, but the rules changed. Even then, there’s no guarantee your book will wind up in the categories you want. Amazon can deny you the ones you want or stick your book in other categories without even telling you. It’s important to understand how this complicated system works to get the best results. Embed keywords for a specific category in your book description, your book’s content, or even the title. That’ll help.

Do you have a sense now of how big a task this is? As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, if you’re going to embark on an indie pubbing journey, you’ve got to constantly be studying, learning, observing. This is bidness, folks, and ya’ gotta take it seriously.

How do we manage to get our heads around all this without spending forty hours a week studying how all this works. After all, most of us have lives of some kind and other demands on our time.

The best tool I’ve found, by far, is another offering from our friends at Kindlepreneur. Dave Chesson’s made a career out of mastering the indie publishing space and Kindlepreneur’s PublisherRocket is one of their best tools for mastering the keyword and category challenge (let me just jump in here, as I have before, and say with complete transparency that I’m not an affiliate with Kindlepreneur or anyone else; I’m not making a buck off this if you buy it; I’m just happy to share something that really works).

PublisherRocket enables you to discover categories and keywords, analyze your competition, and develop Amazon Ads—all in the same place. Let’s do a quick case study here, based on my earlier reference to the author who writes a book called Pole Vaulting For Dummies. You’re the author and you’ve written the book, copy-edited it, put together a great cover, and you’re ready to pull the trigger on KDP.

Fire up PublisherRocket and type in the “keyword search” bar the words pole vaulting.

Turns out there are a slew of books published on Amazon about pole vaulting (didn’t know it was such a hot area). Let’s click on the first one, Alexis Monroe Kiefer’s The Pole Vault Coaching Handbook.

PublisherRocket tells us that Ms. Kiefer’s book on pole vaulting was published 1647 days ago, its Amazon Best Seller Rank is 975,271—not great but I’ve seen worse—and it’s 78 pages long. This book does not have targeted keywords in its title, and it costs $20.00. PublisherRocket estimates its daily sales as $3.00 and its monthly sales at $20.00.

Okay, it’s not likely the author’s making a living off this book but, hey, she’s slinging a few copies here and there.

Then you hit the “See The Categories” button and the good stuff happens.

This book is only listed in two categories:

Books>Reference

Books>Sports & Outdoors>Other Team Sports>Track & Field

For each category, there’s a button to get Insights on that category (Sales to #1, Sales to #10, Average Publishers Price, and the Monthly Sales of Category’s Top 30 Bestsellers). Then there’s another button that gives you all the Keywords for that category.

Are you beginning to get a sense of how valuable that data is? I read an article about how date is the new oil—those that have got it control the market and a lot more. I believe that’s true.

Let’s wrap this one up. The last three installments of This Crazy Writing Life have been designed to just barely break the ice on Amazon advertising. I just wanted to give you a start, but if you really want to do a deep dive into making this all work, then you’re going to have to spend more time than we’ve had here. Ricardo Fayet’s Amazon Ads For Authors is the best and most complete resource out there. I recommend starting with that.

Once again, thanks for playing along.

Finding Your Niche as a Writer

By Linda Hughes

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It seems easy enough. You know what types of mysteries sell and make a lot of money, so you figure that’s what you’ll write. But then things start going wrong: It’s a struggle to finish a book, your beta readers are less than enthusiastic, agents reject your queries, or nobody buys your book.

Does that mean you’re a terrible writer? Maybe not. Here are some things to consider before you hang it up and schlep back to that former job you walked out on.

1: Are you certain about the requirements for the genre and subgenre you’ve chosen? They are very specific in most cases. For example, you might think you’re writing a cozy mystery but you have a character who likes to cuss. That’s not a cozy, which doesn’t allow blatant sex, violence, or profanity. Therefore, if you’re marketing it as a cozy mystery, readers and agents are disappointed. They aren’t getting what they want. That doesn’t mean you’re a lousy writer; it means you need to find the genre and subgenre that fit your writing and market to readers who want that type of story.

2: There are several subgenres for mysteries, which is the genre I’ll use as the example here. What they’re called depends on where you look, but let’s assume you want your book to be listed on Amazon. If you’re not sure about genres and subgenres, this helps:

• Go to Amazon, click on “Books,” don’t type anything in the search box but click on the magnifying glass. Scroll down to “Departments” and click “Mystery, Thriller & Suspense.” There you will find Amazon’s version of subgenres, which they call subcategories.

• Click again on the left hand column, on Mystery, for another drop down list, showing more Catagories.

• The most popular subcategories for Mysteries are Cozy, Hardboiled (no holds barred), Police Procedural (usually from a police detective’s point of view, the “POV”), Private Investigator (who can be a retired police detective), and Women Sleuths.

• Click on each subcategory. Books that are bestsellers in each one will pop up. Click on several books and examine them closely. Read the descriptions, look at the covers, and read the reviews. Which books in which subcategories are most like yours? That’s where your book belongs. You can also research the requirements for each genre and subgenre using Google or any search engine, but examining the actual books is a great starting point. Reading some of those books is even better.

• Here’s where it gets a bit confusing: When you set up your book in Amazon, you are allowed to list it under two categories or subcategories. But if you have an Amazon Author’s Account (highly recommended), you can email customer service and ask for eight more. The more slots it fits into, the more exposure your book gets. However, don’t use them all if they aren’t a genuine fit. Readers search for books by category, and will be mightily disappointed if they pay for a book that doesn’t meet their expectations. They’ll let you know about their dissatisfaction in reviews.

3: Most important is that you find the right subgenre fit and therefore market your book to the right readers.

4: However, after all that research, what if you still aren’t sure of the subgenre you prefer for writing mysteries? You could experiment with short stories or blog posts. Try different POVs. Practice. (I know, you just want to publish and make money. For most of us, it doesn’t work that way. We need to work on honing our craft.) As you write, be aware of which type of story you most enjoy working on. What you enjoy is going to produce your best book.

5: Don’t be afraid to be a genre-switcher or to write different books in different genres and subgenres. Again, if each book sticks to its category’s requirements and is marketed to the right audience, it has a better chance of success. That certainly has worked for Nora Roberts, known for her romance novels, who also writes mysteries under the pen name J. D. Robb. A pen name is optional, as today’s contemporary readers are quite accepting of genre-switching, as long as they know what they’re getting.

6: Lastly, consider the possibility that you need to learn more about how to write a good story that is marketable. There are countless resources available to help you learn about good writing and about managing the business of writing. The annual Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference is an excellent place to start. Whether you’re an aspiring or established writer, this gathering offers not only education and inspiration, but camaraderie, as well. It’s my favorite writers’ conference every year. Here’s the link: https://killernashville.com/killer-nashville-writers-conference/

Finding your niche as a writer means you’re willing to explore and ready to enjoy the craft of writing. As writers, we work hard – that’s true – but we also revel in the experience. So explore, learn, do the work, and write that great story that brings you joy. (And may it bring you a bundle of cash, too!)

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Linda Hughes is a #1 bestselling co-author and award-winning author of twenty books and three screenplays. She loves to genre-switch amongst mysteries, historical romantic suspense, and family saga. Her latest is a romantic novella, Lilac Island. Find her on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Linda-Hughes/e/B000APKVGI