Well, New York Magazine published an article about Ellora’s Cave founder Tina Engler (aka Jaid Black), titled “Did Amazon Sink the Queen of Online Erotica?” A copy of that article can be found here.
The article made me laugh out loud—and not always in ways the article’s author, Phoebe Reilly, intended. Though there were some intentional laugh-worthy lines in there. Tina says, in a blog post about the article, “I’m Done with the Media.” (I was startled at one claim that Tina says is untrue.)
The Real Sinking of Ellora’s Cave’s Amazon Revenue
First, I realized I used a buzzword a couple of times, and I want to define it: “organic” search means search results based solely and only on relevancy rankings. The opposite is “paid” search, e.g., the right side of Google pages.
One of the things that determines organic search at Amazon is keywords. These keywords aren’t shown to buyers, but they drive the search box. This is something the indie crowd has taken to heart and excelled at, but it’s alleged that EC doesn’t do anything with keywords at Amazon.
Rick and I were talking about this last night, and he’s a smart guy. He’d just read the following in the article:
It wasn’t until late 2013 that she noticed a plummet in sales via Amazon, the company’s biggest distributor. It had been pulling in roughly half a million dollars a month, but suddenly that figure dropped 60 percent.
He said, “You know, a sudden shift implies a technology change. If it were gradual, over a period of six months, it would be a market change.”
He’s right.
If your competitors gradually got better than you, it would be a change over time, but if Amazon suddenly figured out that keywords should be weighted more heavily, those using them poorly—or not at all—would have their organic search visibility tank at Amazon.
And, btw, only at Amazon, as they are the the only book vendor who drive search via keywords.
If one’s writing erotica, keywords can (and should be) what real people would use to describe what they want to read, not code phrases writers use. Given what sells from indies on Kindle, I’m guessing there’s a lot of fucking going on in those keywords of successful authors.
That said, I’m not sure organic search and technology shifts explain the phenomenon (mentioned in the article) where the top hits for a search on “Jaid Black” are different authors (and not even ones published by Ellora’s Cave).
There is a prohibited keyword practice of using other authors’ names in keywords. Several authors have been banned for that, and some books have just been taken off the market.
Which I’m not saying is a factor, just that it’s theoretically possible.
On the Bright Side, There May Be Buoyancy
If my hypothesis about keywords is correct, then it’s relatively easy to fix. It takes a whole lot of time, because keyword research is not simple. It’s not a fast skill to acquire, and insight into Amazon keywords takes practice.
Obviously, a house with as many books as Ellora’s Cave has would have to triage the project into phases and stages, and it’d make the biggest difference to authors who were selling well before but who lost more market share relative to other EC authors.
I Also Can’t Let This Slide
Queen of Online Erotica my ass.
Did she help break through the market? Absolutely. Queen? NFW.
Need to Do Keywords Yourself, But Feel Overwhelmed?
I know a lot of people reading here are writers, and many of you indie publish, too. Your ears may have perked up at the mention of keywords.
Stay tuned, it’ll be a day or two yet.
I don’t understand why they don’t have a dedicated person who … oh, I dunno… knows how to maximize search results and keeps up with Amazon’s rules and system. Like the keywords and adult filters on cover art? That’s a whole position, not just something each editor should keep up with on their own… however many editors they have left.
I guess it’s all Darwinian though. Evolve or perish.
Absolutely, I worked temporarily at a graphics company assisting a couple of full time keyworders. I can see this for a large pub or company.
They have enough titles for vendor integration to be a full-time position.
Like why don’t they sell on iBooks except through ARe? That seems like a gimme, leaving cash on the table.
Frankly, I’m astonished that she’s objecting to what seemed to me to be an astonishingly her-side-of-the-story-and-nothing-else piece.
Also, what’s she doing giving interviews where the suit is discussed at all?
Because the rules are always for other people when Jaid Black is involved.
I thought it was fairly even-handed. I can understand about being angry for saying one bought Amazon reviews if one didn’t, though.
So this is two for two Ellora’s Cave principals talking with the media about the lawsuit, despite the gag order, and to NATIONAL MEDIA no less.
Yet Jane Litte does not talk about pending litigation.
Gee, who do we think is the professional and who the liar?
Way to go, EC, way to go.
On JB rant…THE world’s top fitness expert, yet I’ve never heard of him? Which world are we talking about here? And what exactly are Patty Marks qualifications again?
Oh lordy so much to mock and bemoan–people who read that article will take it as given that all erotic romance is written by pieces of work just like Jaid Black, who lacks even a semblance of class. As if romance weren’t the butt of all the jokes already.
“So this is two for two Ellora’s Cave principals talking with the media about the lawsuit, despite the gag order, and to NATIONAL MEDIA no less.”
Thank you! Can someone please, please explain to me why this is repeatedly allowed to happen?
Courtney Milan covers this one, and she has a better sense of the procedural rules than I do.
http://www.courtneymilan.com/ramblings/2015/02/24/motion-to-quash-gag-orders-notchilled/
All the rest of EC’s problems aside (and there are many), it’s amazing how many companies/organizations get complacent once they’re making money hand over fist. Then they wonder what happens when it all goes to hell. It’s like the ’49er who scooped up gold out of the water not being able to make a profit digging in a mine. When it’s “easy”, in EC’s case simply because there was a strong market that wasn’t being served sufficiently yet, you can make all sorts of stupid mistakes and still make huge profits. But once it gets competitive, those mistakes come home to roost.
As you say, evolve or die.
This seems to be exactly the kind of problem we’re looking at. (With the caveat that appearances can be deceiving and I have no inside information.)
Near the end, EC was allowing the editors more say over keywords, but prior to that, we had no say at all. The people who uploaded the books just put them into the erotica category–and it’s not really their fault, since they had no way of knowing how to optimize each book individually.
We were finally asked for keyword input, but we were just given a list of keywords and told to pick the applicable ones–which means most of the ones we were using didn’t help that much at all.
Keywords, blurbs and covers–those three things explain a ton about the plummeting sales. The books are not optimized for search, and the covers and blurbs (we were always being told to make the blurbs more explicit) make it an almost certainty that the books will be tossed into the “adult dungeon.”
So many of EC’s woes are their own fault. They could fix this and increase their Amazon earnings, but they don’t seem willing to actually do it. Much easier to just shade Amazon in as the bad guy and blame them for everything, I guess.
Also–could the adult filter be keeping Jaid’s books from appearing higher in searches?
I don’t recall seeing any of her books being adult filtered, though I’ve only done a spot check.
Sporked in Time just seems not to be tied to her author page (a simple matter of claiming the book). That seems to be fairly common with EC’s authors: one or more books are unclaimed.
You can search adult filters on http://www.salesrankexpress.com.
I tried repeatedly to get them to add my author name to one of my books, so that I could list it on my author page. They were ‘too busy for such nonsense.’
I’m so sorry. That’s no way for a publisher to treat an author.
Oh, there are so many stories that could be told about staff to contractor (freelancer, author) disrespect :/
Urgh. 🙁
I’ve thankfully never worked at a company that toxic.
This–so true! I don’t think we (well, at least I can speak for myself) really understood which keywords would best benefit the authors. There was a feeling of frustration that I couldn’t do more to help position my authors’ works.
There was such a shift in the early days from “sexy stories that kept the bedroom door open.” to “bigger, better, more controversial. MORRREE!!!” and some great stories were compromised as a result.
The fact is, the sex fades, the characters are what connects the author with the reader.
“The fact is, the sex fades, the characters are what connects the author with the reader.”
Wonderfully put–and so true.
It was VERY frustrating, especially when authors contacted me with ideas for optimizing their Amazon placement, and I had to tell them that it was out of my hands (and theirs).
I’m so sorry that you weren’t able to help the authors. The sad thing is, they may have had a really good sense of what to do.
In order to really take advantage of Amazon keywords, EC would really need someone full time doing nothing but SEO-related tasks (because Amazon search is an SEO task), and that person would truly need to be an expert on internet marketing, specifically SEO.
That person should also handle the SEO-related issues of their website.
Here are some of those issues:
Just to bring the point home: I’m a single person who doesn’t have 900+ authors I’m paying to help backlink to me, and my Alexa rating is under 1M (meaning, there are less than a million websites worldwide that have better ranking than I do). EC’s at 418,069.
Looking at someone who takes this whole web and marketing thing more seriously, Tor.com has an Alexa rating of 20,375, more popular than their parent Macmillan’s 42,599.
And now you know the true reason I’ve been spending so much time in webinar hell. I had three today, couldn’t sleep, then slept through two of them, then had a three-hour one that melted my damn brain.
But you know what? I learned a lot. Not in any of the above stuff, which I already knew, but in other stuff—because learning more about Amazon keywords made me realize how much critical stuff I didn’t know, and I’ve been catching up.
Admittedly, there is so much I don’t know, so my hat is off to you. And you’re absolutely right–EC should have had a marketing team (Two, three, whatever individuals) to take advantage of what was needed to keep active in the industry and at the bleeding edge of it all. They were at one point before complacency kicked in.
Something that has been bothering me about the article: both Jaid Black and the writer make it seem as if amazon has it against Ellora’s Cave titles. The truth is, this happens more often than not.
If you search for Suzanne Brockmann books, depending on factors I am not privy to, sometimes the very first search result if for some unknown self published author and the book is FREE.
Not quite blatantly (sometimes it’s the fourth or fifth result) but I have had the same happen when just searching for Nora Roberts.
And by ‘search’ I mean NOT going to their authors pages, just typing the name and selecting ‘books’ in the department drop down.
With all respect to good writers who publishe/published with Ellora’s Cave, Nora Roberts and Suzanne Brockmann are HUGE–if it happens in their amazon searches, I’m not too terribly surprised it happens with anyone else.
That’s a good point, Azteclady. I’ve had that same kind of experience with Amazon many times.
Plus it’s worth mentioning again, I NEVER search by publisher. Wasn’t until EC called up the Streisand Effect that I paid any attention to publishers or noticed that some books were self-published at all. After hearing about Julaine’s experience, when EC refused to lift a finger to help her after she lost $5k in EC books, that I realized how much difference a particular publisher could make.
If Amazon could shrug off Hachette and other Big Five publishers for many months, I can’t imagine them taking the time to single out EC for special treatment. Like so many aspects of the whole debacle, EC’s claim of persecution just doesn’t hold up.
There are several reasons for that, I think, though I’m not privy to any of Amazon’s reasons for this happening.
Here are my hypotheses:
Where there isn’t a particularly new book from S to show, they show a book that’s new from an author (Let’s call her K) who’s got a lot of sellthrough to S’s readers.
People who are in Kindle Unlimited get more visibility in various ways. One of them is that you get sales rank credit for a sale when someone borrows your book, even if the borrower never reads the book. Of course, you only get paid if they read at least 10%, but the sales rank bump can be huge, particularly in the first month. (So, anytime anyone wants to borrow any of my KU books, feel free….) Thus, K, as an indie author, knows it makes financial sense (alas) to put her books in KU for the first three months.
There are also other possibilities involving similarities of keywords and/or blurbs.
I have never thought amazon has its customers’ best interest at heart any more than any other corporation–they are in there to make money, nothing more and nothing less.
So it should come as no surprise to anyone that they would manipulate their internal search in whichever way favors them the most. It does make all the sense to put more recent books in the search for author B when she has nothing new for customers to buy–and more so when those recent books are by author K who publishes through amazon.
It behooves publishers–particularly small publishers who benefit from the exposure amazon gives them (i.e., on par with that of any of the Big Five, as amazon will not hide Bell Bridge Books’ titles in order to favor MacMillans’ books, for example). So it’s on the small publisher to keep track of what amazon is doing and play the game on amazon’s turf, on amazon’s terms.
/rant
Amazon is in business to make money, and one of the ways they’ve determined that they make money is by fiddling with the search results.
You’re right, though: it’s Amazon’s turf and you’ve got to play the game Amazon’s way.
There’s no mystery here. In mid-2013, Amazon adjusted their search algorithms to favor new releases and to weight more recent sales stronger than sales in the past. EC had a large catalog of titles that were published five or even ten years ago and those titles would have taken a relatively significant hit.
Amazon also started to more aggressively police cover art and non-consent blurbs and I know that many of EC’s books were affected by that. Just looking quickly, one of Black’s own titles has the dreaded “filter” on it and won’t be found in regular search results due to nudity on the cover.
These are not mysteries. They’re something that every serious indie publisher of erotica or erotic romance is aware of.
I knew it had happened when I wasn’t paying attention, and that describes much of 2012/2013 when I had my head hunkered down at Apple.
This book of Jaid’s is dungeoned for no apparent reason. That’s the only one I happened to notice.
curious about this: From the vulture.com article: For a best-selling author like Laurann Dohner, whose popular “New Species” series explores lust amid nefarious scientific experimentation, this could mean revenue in the ballpark of $100,000 per month.
Do they mean revenue for EC or earnings of Laurann Dohner?
I took that to mean EC’s take, before the author’s royalties are parceled off.
Thanks. I read that Laurann signed a 75 book deal with EC. Anyone have insight, thoughts, speculation, pie-in-the-sky spit-balling as to why?
What would that be worth to the author (especially since EC doesn’t pay advances, or so I read), what would that be worth to EC?
I don’t know why anyone would sign a 75-book deal like ever. Why would you?
And yes, EC’s always insisted that they don’t pay advances. To anyone.
Therefore, a 75-book deal strikes me as all of the downside and none of the upside.
The LAD contract was announced some maybe four years ago at their convention. I remember wondering what was the benefit to her. For all intents and purposes, the amount of sales she appeared to be making put her in the prime bargaining position, not EC.
I don’t think anyone outside of the contract process ever came up with any reasonable or even coherent theories as to why someone who was making enough money elsewhere would sigh with Ellora’s Cave, particularly such a ridiculous number of books.
Karen has some fun with it over here, and there was speculation that EC has paid Ms Dohner a large–as in, millions large–advance, in order to convince her to sign.
I could see something like that with a big advance, which makes me wonder why EC would lie about it. Advances are common, so why not say so?
That’s exactly what I thought, too. Only thing I’ve come up with is wild speculation.