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.

So maybe this is just a zon thing, nothing to worry about, but the site advertising my new paperback doesn't exist. It says "Live" on my dashboard, as if it has it, and there is a paperback, but when I click it, it's "sorry this. page doesn't exist."

My first thought, paranoid as it is, is that it's been flagged for copyright violations. I did after all put song lyrics in it - the title itself is a song lyric. Can Disney sue for that? Does anyone own the expression "Be Our Guest?" Perhaps the zon censors have to determine that. I thought what I did was ok, or I wouldn't have done it, and they might prove me otherwise but surely I'm not the first one to make such wrong assumptions.

The secood possibility is that it's malfunctioning for some much more random reason. Soomebody typed a 0 instead of an O, or. something like that? I have been. known to do such things so wouldn't be surprised. But it has been a dead site for two days now and the paperback link is therefore dead in all the other zons, FR, ES, DE, IT, AU, CA, JP, wherever zon is sold. Dead! Non-existo.

Which brings me to the final question. Here I am, at the edge of my chair, waiting to publicize, not wanting to publicize a dead link. Should I ask them? They don't seem to be telling me anything though I could check again. Should I push my luck? Will time heal this wound? I generally let their machinery work - if it's in some censor's backed up line, just let time move it to the front. But if they're not even telling me what's happening, I'm leaning toward the second possibility. Hmmm.

The trials & tribulations of a writer, I guess.

Be Our Guest

Be Our Guest
A retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Now available on Amazon:
Paperback $7.39 + shipping
Kindle $2.99
Free on Kindle Unlimited
(paperback link not working temporarily for some reason)

This tale is part of the Global Beasts Series in which every book features a different country. This one is set in Thailand, against the government shutdown of Tiger Temple, a famous tourist theme park in Kanchanaburi. It's a tale as old as time, but it can be seen in many ways, with a wide variety of characters. The original tale was written in 1740, and this one brings the original to light against the traditional ideas of karma, reincarnation, and animism that have been in Thailand since before Buddhism ever arrived.

check-in

My wife has been nagging me about clearing out the junk. I don't do it, because frankly, it makes me angry. I tend to save useful stuff: old pots and pans, random tools, four-legged nightstands, etc. Lots of books. The problem is, we always need this kind of stuff later. And "later" in our case might be when we have no money. It's one thing to get angry and say, ok, next time you need a pan, you can just buy one, they're only a few bucks. But I can already sense the time when even that will make me angry. What fun is it saying "I told you so?" Less fun every time.

Almost done with my fairy tale, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set, if that's possible, in Thailand at the time of the forced closing of Tiger Temple. Does that make any sense? You might be able to sense who the Beast is. But I'm not giving it away and besides there could be more than one.

The problem is, I've kind of lost track of my other writers - those who wrote one set in each interesting country. We had a bunch of communal agreements and I lost track of those too. It was exceedingly difficult to finish, mostly because of time pressure here. I was working and we spend a lot of time just shuttling kids around. Turns out it's really difficult for kids to get started these days - get a car, get a job, get a life. And we have several we're watching out for.

Keep your eye out for the fairy tale, tentatively called Be Our Guest. Working on the covers and the before-TOC-stuff. Not to mention TOC itself. It won't be too long. It's just a fairy tale!

OK so here's my problem. I have agreed to write a retelling of Beauty and the Beast and am feeling some pressure to finish. That's partly because I don't really find much time to write. I sit down, turn on this old clunker of a computer, which is actually better than the one I used to use, and sometimes by the time I have it even on and set up to write, I am interrupted to do something or other or drive someone somewhere. It turns out that if you deal in teenagers, you have many many places to go long before they have the capability of actually getting there themselves legally.

Well anyway I have to get my mind in the mood for fantasy and folk tales, which used to be easy; I'd read folk tales all the time back when I was teaching. Now it's much harder. For one thing I read the news and the news has a way of hitting me with a sledgehammer over reality. But even Facebook is doing that. It draws my eyes down to Reels and the reels are all of torrential water shooting the banks of various Texas and New Mexico rivers. I know some of these rivers, especially the Rio Ruidoso in New Mexico, so sometimes it's a matter of seeing if I can find places I know getting inundated with water.

So I'm horrified but also dulled into clicking on reel after reel and these days for me almost two thirds of them are one flood or another. By the time I'm done I've had a tour of swollen rivers all over the place.

Now of course I can't do folk tales so I play the bog for a while. My sister and I occasionally play web boggle (here), one of the three best things about the internet (which are: Google, Blogger, Boggle). It's fantastic! And addictive! And though I limit myself to three at least after ten minutes my mind is clear.

But alas, I get interrupted again. Happens every time.

My problem is that my anger against the social media empires hasn't gone away. With every day of Trump's turning the army agianst its own people, yanking people out of their lives, creating terrorists by destroying families, etc., I just find it that much harder to say to people, hey, come to Amazon! Get on Facebook! See my pop-art ads on Twitter! Of course Elon has already turned against him. Too late! You put millions into putting him there, and now I don't want to be in the same room.

So what's left? Well there are these blogs, although even they are owned by Google and represent the same kind of benevolent self-publishing industry that I enjoy with Createspace. I'll defend a democratic, you-publish-it free speech kind of operation - and I'm sure both Google and Amazon are benefiting plenty, in their own way - still, they at least provide a public marketplace for me to speak my mind. Yet I feel like with my own energy and money, I should be setting up more of a you-print-it you-distribute-it kind of operation.

Recently I had to raise all my prices for Amazon paperbacks. According to Amazon it's become more expensive to print them. Apparenty it's become way more expensive in Australia and Poland, for whatever reason - though I'm not sure they've ever printed one for me in Poland. Nevertheless I had to cover their expenses, and in the process ask myself if it's really worth it to sell books when I'm getting less than a dollar each. Probably the answer is no, it's not. Raise them a little more. I've always had the Warhol strategy - volume over price - but I'm not generating the volume. I'm not flooding the market. That's partly because I'm shunning social media.

I wonder what other writers experience this (probably most). And what kind of solutions there are. Now my writing time - the one time I have to concentrate, Sunday morning (now), I have to concentrate on giving a ride. I forgot last week! Ouch. As the last of twelve children grind through their final years I'm left with a desk of unfinished projects, half-written books, like promises unfulfilled. But it's Father's Day, and my daughter wrote me a poem.

Time to celebrate, and possibly publish.

I've been somewhat paralyzed on the writing front. I have about eight ongoing things I'm writing, one urgent, and have done very little on any of them. Sometimes I write on the blogs. Sometimes I write in a personal journal that documents the trials of bringing up a violent kid come-of-age. But mostly I'm paralyzed; I write very little.

The fascist coup is mostly to blame. I always wrote to interpret American culture to people who are interested in it; the stories have gentle humor and love of the small town in all its twisted glory. Those days are over. The US has gone fascist, and that makes almost everything I've written hollow and pointless. Should I write novels of the resistance? Of survival during a fascist era, as are the spy novels I've been reading? It seems a retooling is being called for yet I am not quite sure on the strategy.

For example, the other day I decided to start with the pop art. If I want to get back on Facebook, the way to do it is to have lots of pop art, a different one for every page. To that end the best book to push is e pluribus haiku anthology, a rambling 3487-haiku tribute to the US but written from a point of view of a traveler in 1975 or thereabouts. What is that now? There is no hitchhiking, there is no generous populace, there is no easy-life-on-the-road. It's a historical thing but who wants to read history when a fascist is going on the march? Better to put my energy into creating something useful. But what would that be?

So in the end I did nothing. I have biography, family books, lots of poetry, short stories of American life, Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Disney. They are good and reputable but I don't feel like hustling them. The Quaker ones sell well and are picking up in popularity and my inclination is to go that direction even if those are harder to write and take more background.

The urgent one is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast which is mired in my own difficulty getting into fantasy when reality is so crushing. I want to use reality to fight reality, if that makes any sense. I'm a little leery of relying on shifting, beasts, and sex to get me through the tough times. But that one has a deadline, and the hard thing is, I'm not even clear on how bad the pressure is, but I know I have to get moving.

Meanwhile, the bond market is crashing. The farmers are screwed and angry. The economy is upset and people will stop their panic buying, and just concentrate on surviving. And me among them, though I have no money to wonder where to hide it. All my friends waiting on retirement have just seen 30k, 40k, 50k disappear. Uncle Elon saw 30 trillion or something disappear, and that didn't stop him. Blown up in the skies over Florida, maybe. Put all the government resources into a space company that doesn't have a CEO, and make the fleet all Teslas. That'll show 'em. We writers will sit here doing what, observing? Better than fantasy, I suppose.