Plug Your Book!, Steve Weber [the unexpected everything TXT] 📗

Because so many sales can result from Amazon recommendations, it's worth spending a few minutes looking under the hood. Here's a shortcut to your Amazon recommendations:

On the left, click Books to filter out other types of products. Now, directly below each of the recommended books, you'll see the reason it's being recommended, such as: #Recommended because you purchased [TITLE].#

For each book recommended, you can refine the system by indicating:

Whether you own the book.

Whether you're just "not interested" in the recommended book.

Your rating for the book on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 meaning "I love it."

Few Amazon customers take the time to confirm this raw data in Amazon's recommendations engine, and as a result it can spit out some wacky suggestions. If you've purchased books for children or friends that you wouldn't read yourself, the result is faulty recommendations.

In some cases, Amazon will guess correctly which of your purchases are gifts--for example, when you ship a book to a different address--and excludes them from recommendations.

Here's how to exclude other inappropriate books from your recommendations:

Near the top of your recommendations list is the text, "These recommendations are based on items you own and more."

Clicking you own shows the list of books Amazon knows you've purchased.

To exclude books from the recommendations system, uncheck the box labeled #Use to make recommendations#.

You can also improve your recommendations by letting Amazon know about books you've purchased elsewhere.

The star ratings you assign to books on this list won't be visible to other Amazon users, but the ratings can affect which books get recommended to whom and how often.

As you scroll through the list of books, be on the lookout for quality books you've read that are complementary to your book. When you find one, check the box #Use to make recommendations# and assign it a 5-star rating. This will encourage Amazon to recommend your book to other users with your same buying and rating history. This will help seed Amazon's recommendation system for your book.

Here's a way to further jump-start your book in Amazon's recommendation system: Buy other books published in your niche, along with your own book. Ask your friends and family to buy them also. This will inject your title into the recommendation engine. It won't dictate the long-term position of your book; that will depend on the independent actions of many thousands of customers. But those paired purchases, if relevant, can surface your title in Amazon recommendations weeks earlier than might otherwise occur.

Much of your exposure on Amazon depends on how many sales you rack up. The more sales, the more often Amazon gives your book free exposure in its Also-Bought lists, Better-Together spots, and recommendations on its Web site and in e-mails. It's a virtuous cycle, one that can make a successful book even more successful.

For most of Amazon's history, this system has been neutral--your exposure was determined purely by sales. The playing field was level. It didn't matter whether a book was by a famous author or an unknown, or published in New York or in your neighbor's basement. It didn't matter whether the book was a pocket-sized paperback or a leather-bound collector's edition. Amazon's customers voted by buying, and books with the best sales got the most exposure.

In mid-2006, however, Amazon changed this system, perhaps with an eye toward improving its quarterly financial statements. Amazon boosted exposure of expensive books and those with big wholesale discounts. Meanwhile, it cut exposure for books with lower prices and so-called "short" discounts. In other words, Amazon began showing customers not necessarily the _best _recommendation--the book most popular among similar buyers--but recommendations filtered according to how profitable the books are for Amazon to sell.

It's unclear exactly what formula Amazon is using to filter its recommendations. Some publishers believe a book's list price is the more important factor, while others believe the wholesale discount matters more. Whatever the formula is, apparently it's a secret. In fact, at least one Amazon executive has flatly denied the company is filtering recommendations at all, although the effects of the practice have become clear to many publishers who track their Amazon sales closely. Many of those publishers are irritated that Amazon seems to be favoring publishers who give bigger wholesale discounts than the 40 percent they have traditionally given to brick-and-mortar bookstores.

It's also unclear whether Amazon's practice of recommendation filtering is a wise long-term strategy. Some customers may begin ignoring recommendations and buy fewer books if they realize that certain books are being recommended mainly because they're expensive. After all, buyers who pay close attention to Amazon's book recommendations tend to be the company's most profitable customers.

In any case, it seems that publishers who want to boost exposure of their titles on Amazon should consider raising their list price and offering generous wholesale discounts of perhaps 55 percent, instead of short discounts, such as 25 percent.

In the mid 1990s, Yahoo, the first popular Web portal, guided most Internet traffic with a simple hand-picked menu of sites. Yahoo's editors decided which Web sites were worth pointing to, and that's where the traffic went. At the time, it seemed like a good system, and much more efficient than search engines, which tended to spit out mountains of irrelevant results. Back then, it sometimes seemed easier to find a needle in a haystack than to find anything with a search engine.

Then Google built a better mousetrap. Instead of relying on humans to figure out which content is best, Google's computers determined relevance and authority. Google's PageRank system considers not only the words contained on a Web page, but also how many related sites link in. Each incoming link is a vote on a page's importance, helping it rise to the top of Google's search results.

As good as Google's system is, however, it can't always deliver relevant results, particularly for specialized content. Sometimes providing good search results requires direct human brainpower, something provided by social search tools. Social search works best in deep niches, where people who truly understand the content render judgments. In these cases, social search can be more accurate than Google's algorithmic search, which counts links only.

Why should authors care about social search? Because more and more people are using it to find the exact content they want.

Here's what can happen if your book's Web site or blog is mentioned favorably on a social search service--a flood of 5,000 to 10,000 visitors can come to your site within hours. This crowd can include thousands of folks highly passionate about your topic, and those nearly impossible to reach through traditional advertising or publicity.

Dozens of popular sites have emerged in the past few years providing tools for search, social networking, and social bookmarking:

For example, a student writing a dissertation might use del.icio.us to track all their source materials and commentary. Instead of having a hard-to-read list of bookmarks in a drop-down menu on their Web browser, users just consult their del.icio.us page to view their favorite Web resources, along with their own annotations.

To organize their bookmarks, del.icio.us users tag them with personalized keywords, like a folksonomy, instead of using a hierarchical taxonomy or set categories.