A hundred thousand a week

OK so I track my ratings, one could say, obsessively. Every Saturday I write out all my books - I have thirty-two, though a couple are not technically mine, and I track overall kindle rating, category rating, paperback rating, and paperback category rating, also acx rating if I have an acx for that title. It's a page full of numbers that I compile as carefully as I can. It's not that I market all that much, or all that well, but because I do my own marketing, I at least feel like I should know where everything stands regularly. I'm on Amazon dot com, by the way, but I also do the others, just less regularly.

It's because of this that I know that things have changed rapidly in the Amazon rating world, and they are not going back. In the paperback column an Amazon rating now loses (increases) over a hundred thousand points in a week, and that's even when it's stable. Ratings can shoot to a low (better) number after a sale and then lose a couple hundred thousand a week until they reach that stable point, but at their stable number they never used to lose that much, never. And the ACX ratings are doing the same thing!

With the ACX ratings, the change is actually more remarkable, because for as long as I can remember they would only change by about three thousand a week, and now suddenly they are changing over a hundred thousand a week.

Both changes are due to AI, I figure. ACX/Amazon began order virtual voice about a month ago, and I figure that those titles are just now showing up and making a difference. When your title loses (increases) by a hundred thousand, that means that a hundred thousand titles shot up or into the picture in that last week. There is no way to know what percentage of those hundred thousand are brand new, virtual voice, or older ones that just got a sale. But one way or the other they vaulted in front of yours, moving it down. By the way, I have no idea whether virtual voice is any good; I'm considering trying it on one or two of my titles, but haven't yet.

In the paperback world one can only assume the same thing is happening. In the paperback world if one person buys at least one, that title gets a nice low (good) rating for at least a week until it starts (pretty quickly) picking up thousands of points a day as other titles pass it up. In order to stay high in the ratings (with as low numbers as possible) you have to keep getting sales or downloads (in the case of kindle versions) relatively constantly. There are probably people who do like me only they watch that dashboard constantly, because they can. I would only get depressed. After all, the vast majority of the action is the huge downward tug on all the numbers.

Amazon dealt with this, in ACX anyway, but just wiping out the numbers where nothing has sold over a year or two. I don't know the exact numbers but I know that some of my titles will fall off the cliff, i.e. lose any rating at all, if they are not read over a certain long period. This clears the board a little and helps them hide the problem of basically having a huge market with way higher numbers than everything used to have.

It's bloated; it's swollen; it's like the rising floodwaters of the rivers.

The question is whether the free market is going to sort out any of this excess AI junk or whether it will find a legitimate place in the market where it can survive and flourish.

So where are all these AI books that are taking up so much of this space? I'd like to know. But I'll tell you my suspicion. If you were to use AI to do all your thinking/organizing, and just create useful books all the time, what would you do?

First would be the self-help books. I can easily see telling AI to go compile all the tax-advice books into a single book; this is something AI can do. It doesn't even sound like AI because that's how those books sound anyway.

I would think biography would also be a lucrative market. Call up a wikipedia page, sic AI on all the newspapers, tell it to write it out; I think AI can do that.

So I can tell you what I would do, but have no idea what's actually happening. Something is, though, because the water's rising.