Major Rant to Mr. Marketing Guru.

Hello, Mr. Sales Marketing Guru. (I’ve got a bone to pick with you).

Since you continually besiege me with your adverts, I thought it was time I responded to your claims and declarations.

As an opening salvo, I will tell you right now that I’m not interested in any pay-for-review services. No matter how you disguise or slice it with claims of guaranteed reviews and sales, you cannot convince me that your costly services are worth these extravagant amounts you are asking for. Calling it “fast-tracking”, “special social media services” or individualized marketing plans, will not alter the fact that what you are proposing is a cost-for-service advertisement which preys on gullible and desperate authors.  

You will have to convince me that eager reviewers are alive and well out there, ready to review books. After 1,650 personalized and custom book review requests (pitches), I received 160 requests for my recent release. Out of that acceptance total, I have, so far, received 34 Amazon (foreign and domestic) reviews, and this has been over a five-month period, soliciting for eight hours a day, 24-7, with no let up. BTW, a great percentage of reviewers are buried, quit or have rebranded themselves. You’ll see that notation on their contact or review request page. Most of these listings are not currently tagged as such.    

Simply listing a book as available for review on a database or promo site (for one day in most cases), is GROSSLY ineffective at the present. The one-week or one-month programs are equally ineffective if you lack precise targeting. We are experiencing a swarm/glut of new books in numbers that have never been reached in the history of this industry. If there are willing reviewers out there, I have had to seek them out and then go on a TBR pile that is higher than K-2--backed up two, three and four months or more.

There is no way you can guarantee one review, let alone several, for any book at this time. The last bastion of hope is to give away books to accumulate a half-way decent rank on Amazon, and those are not sales—those are freebies—not deserving of a “Best Selling” connotation. All of these listed (*) below companies have failed in click-throughs for my book when it was priced from $4.99 to a drop of $2.99. After trying again, I garnered no better results at my current KU and .99 cent stage. I can attest to the fact that my book has a great title, cover and hook/blurb—AllAuthor stats are through the roof at over 3,040 views and about 550 clicks in four months, and a first place contest win. Not too shabby, considering it is the first in a series. I’ve had 18 full-length interviews and several guest spots—more ink than a dozen octopi.

Supply has eclipsed demand, plain and simple. AMT is on a southern slide, FB and Twitter booster ads are completely glossed over by readers and ineffective, while the Amazon, FB and Twitter book clubs and genre sites are flooded with the same solicitations—a “buy my book” barrage from thousands upon thousands of members. It is even difficult for GoodReads to keep up with such a relentless showcase of author’s books, stories, series and collections. GRs is for readers anyway.  

People are not buying reading devices like they are buying books, as you so stated. The only way readers can make room for new book purchases (or freebies) is to wipe their inventory of accumulated books they will never get around to reading anyway. Unfortunately, this also seems to be a standard practice for many reviewers who need to “clean house” so they can choose titles for the next year. Out with the old, in with the new.   

I am the owner/poster of Guerrilla Warfare For Writers, an advocacy writer’s/blog site aimed at watching the industry, and I have been doing this type of analysis for 14 years, out of my 30-year career. Roughly (35%) of the current listed review site/blogs are now refusing to review self-published authors. They profess to be swamped. This was not the case two-three years ago. I'm not even an indie author (only a hybrid), but this trend has come around to bite all those who believe that writing to market with quick release has always been the answer to garnering sales and a reader base. I blame not the Indies. I’m upset with a program that allows the world to publish, when we don’t have a world to read the published material.  

The largest feature and most expensive ads on BookBub, are now showing a slow decline in conversions because of a traffic jam to gain access into the program. Albeit, BB still seems to show returns on investment, which is astonishing in itself. Other ad groups have raised their prices and modified their guidelines. Some of these major marketing sites do work—all is not completely lost—but you have to find them first.  

SOME OF THE PROMO AND REVIEW SITES I INVESTIGATED AND USED:

(Forgive my misspellings).

Fiverr*

Fussy Librarian*

Bargain Booksie*

Robin Reads

Kindlebooks Review

Book Barbarian*

Booksends*

BookDealio

Ebook Discovery

E-Reader IQ

Ent

Book Reader Magazine*

Just Kindle Books*

Pretty Hot Books*

Those sites marked with a "*" brought zero results to me—hundreds/thousands of engagements and NO conversions, prompting two of them to refund me in full. Out of pocket loss = aprox $550 before refunds which were in the neighborhood of $70.00. Granted that my price was a straight $2.99, and I was told this was the reason for the lack of interest/response. However, when implementing the Kindle Unlimited and .99 cent strategy and applying it again to several sites, there was zero change in rank and reviews. My sales continued on a flat line. I’m not alone in this festering no-man’s-land.

Why are book tours collapsing now?—Just recently I had two tours cancel on me. There was a time when book tours were popular and worked.  Answer: there doesn’t seem to be enough tour participants to carry an author through an extended promotion period, and that was the reason I was given for the failures. Sure, it depends upon who you are using. But you better have a long gap between appearances with any one given site because you can’t sell to the same readers who’ve already picked you up.

The largest book tour sites are not only expensive and claim to garner successful results, but express the opinion that nothing is really wrong in this slow market, it’s just that the timing and individual book may be the culprit for the lack of sales and reviews. This blanket statement is tired, worn and continuously used as an excuse. Blame the cover, the blurb and the sample pages, or even the author for that matter. That’s much easier to say than we’ve overpopulated the system. What was next on the hit list? “NO SALES? YOUR KEY WORDS ARE RESPONSIBLE!” So now we have apps to hunt down super-selling keywords, guaranteed to get that lost audience you somehow missed. Or was that eager-to-buy audience really there to begin with?   

I hired a promotion manager/PR director who has tried everything humanly possible for sales, but has come up with limited results—prompting us to change our tactics and come into social media circles from a different angle. BTW, this is no fault of the manger whatsoever—she is fighting it out with her own competitors. Again, the problem is glut.

The author population has grown by the millions and the number of books listed with just Amazon are staggering and increasing every month. This is a saturation issue that will not go away and only get worse. We have NOW reached the tipping point.

 Personal reading devices across the board (globally) are overloaded with free books (hundreds or thousands) per device and there is just no room for new books even with the most severe low-cost offers. (Readers jammed up their devices when the freebie gold rush hit—this begat the age of Indie superstars, and this constant rotation has never stopped). Now authors are currently offering complete books for .99 cents and lower for an entire series. Many of the A-list Indie superstars and high-ranking mid-listers are reporting 50% cuts in revenue in the past few years. If this is happening to the best-selling brand name authors, what is happening to the rest of us? In the day, Wall-Mart was cursed for providing loss-leaders. Now we understand their reasoning. Sacrifice. For profit.  

There are so many books listed for free (no gimmicks), via the small trade publishers and Indies, that it is not necessary to purchase a high quality read or audio book anymore—the reader has only to put themselves on a waiting list when the book hits a free or discounted status. This desperation is playing out full-tilt in front of us, forcing authors to compete with each other for even the slightest name brand exposure. We never had a world of “Permafree” before this massive influx. Welcome to costless books, the wave of the future.  

Giving away free books is the surest way to dilute and saturate your reading fan base. And yet you claim this is the ideal strategy. Those who might have bought your book already have it because of free and borrow offers. Your solution: pick another loss leader until you’ve run through your entire inventory. Then what? Write to market with faster releases. Really? Call novellas that are 20.000 40,000 words long, “books.” Give away as many books as you can to draw some type of word of mouth or organic sales. This strategy gives legit Indie authors a bad rap. They can’t sell their books for true value. Small trade publishes can’t recoup their investments on give-away prices.  

Mr. Marketing Expert, I sincerely hope that you address this problem and make some type of arrangements and/or policies that will show some, or any type of success, regarding the horrid situation we are (collectively) encountering at the moment.

I am not a crepe hanger or doom peddler. These are indicators which cannot be swept under the carpet or displaced by claiming this is a cycle or a normal glitch in the book sales industry. If you would like to discuss this matter with me, I would be happy to engage in a truthful and honest disclosure. I feel terrible when I see my fellow authors wallowing in despair because they have no sales or reviews for their midlist or even new titles.

The real crime is author/writers spending money on worthless campaigns that produce zeros on a royalty invoice or check. The newest, debut authors are the worst hit. Their despair is tangible when they express their desperation in the writing groups and forums.   

Sincerely,

CJB