
To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm - denzil_correa
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal
======
rpeden
From the article:

 _Valderrama allegedly said that she organized newsletter swaps, in which
authors would promote each other’s books to their respective mailing lists._

Funnily enough, I've seen this same behavior from developers, freelancers, and
authors who are "internet famous" on HN and Reddit. I've signed up for quite a
few newsletters from these people because they often provide useful
information.

But since I signed up for so many, I started noticing that fairly often,
they'd recommend each others' products. I realize it's entirely possible that
these endorsements are authentic, but after a while, it starts to look like
it's an interconnected web of people that met at conferences and agreed to
cross-promote each each other on their respective newsletters. And so it ends
up feeling like each recommendation isn't really authentic, but is instead
more of a quid pro quo in exchange for a reciprocal recommendation.

And it's possible that I'm completely wrong and just imagining all of this.
It's just one of my pet peeves, so perhaps I'm exaggerating how prevalent it
is. And don't even get me started on developers who have resorted to hokey
long-form sales copy to sell their books and services... :)

~~~
ageitgey
I'm a person with a mailing list in this space who has recommended other
people's products, so I can maybe offer some insight on how this world works.

The typical person working in this niche is a solo creator who maybe splits
there time creating free content and doing paid consulting projects. The
business model is usually something like "write a lot of regular free content
to build up a giant mailing list and then occasionally sell something to your
mailing list to pay the bills".

The problem is that it takes a lot of time and effort to create good content.
You are often so drained creating your "free" content that you don't have
enough time or energy left to create enough "paid" content regularly enough to
pay the bills. So you find friends who have created great stuff that you
really like and you help each other out by cross-promoting.

In almost every case, it's a direct business relationship. The typical deal in
this niche for reselling electronic content is a 50/50 split. So you help your
friend sell extra copies (which is just free income to them) while you also
make decent money to sustain your work.

Of course once you get "magic internet money" coming in this way, it's very
tempting to abuse your audience and oversell. But then you lose subscribers
quickly. Some people are very cynical about this and literally have
spreadsheets to maximize how much they can sell while minimizing user
attribution, but I'm not a fan of that. It just feels gross.

So yes, it is indeed a small, interconnected web of people who agreed to
cross-promote each other. And sometimes the recommendation isn't authentic,
but often it is. But in almost case, it's not an exchange of free
recommendations, but it's literally an affiliate split between the authors.

As far as long-form sales copy to sell books, it is definitely very hokey. But
the counterpoint is that most other approaches just don't convert. A cold lead
who finds you via Google needs to be convinced that your stuff is worth money
and long-form sales copy is one way to do that. I also hate it and completely
avoid it, but I understand why people do it.

~~~
rpeden
Thanks for providing some perspective! I appreciate it.

And I completely understand that long form sales copy is often what converts
visitors into customers. It just doesn't convert _me_. But it would be totally
irrational for content creators to waste time on landing pages that'll convert
anti-long-form grumps like me. :)

~~~
ageitgey
As a fellow grump, I _totally_ agree - even to my own financial detriment.

But you are exactly right - that ad page isn't for you at all. The mailing
list and free content is for you. You hopefully buy based on your relationship
with the author and aren't going to be convinced by any ad copy anyway. They
just hope you'll ignore or forgive them for the annoying ad copy and not
unsubscribe.

That ad copy is aimed at the less-engaged customer - say a project manager at
a large nameless consulting company somewhere in Germany or whatever who
doesn't really care about topic X but was told by their boss to research topic
X and has a training budget to buy a book on the topic (which they may or may
not even read).

Notice also how every one of these pages will have an absurdly priced $800
bundle option. First, some people at companies who have training budgets will
buy it because to them $800 vs. $100 is a rounding error when it's all just
free money anyway. And second, having an $800 option makes the $100 option
seem incredibly reasonable (when you are essentially asking someone to pay
$100 to download a PDF).

------
ryandrake
If you run a platform and its algorithms can be gamed by “partners” for profit
at your’s or the user’s expense you should expect that it is or will be gamed.
An important part of designing tech products that scale is sitting down and
anticipating all the various ways you are incentivizing cheating and gaming,
and then closing the holes as bugs. It’s like doing a security audit, with the
attackers being your partners rather than hackers.

It’s best to fix the gaming via technical means, but if you can’t, it’s still
important to spell out unacceptable behavior in the terms of use. Even if it’s
something you can’t enforce at scale (for instance: enforcement requires
manual review by humans) you still need the policy so you can do one-off
enforcements against egregious cases. Otherwise you sit around in these
meetings going, “well we know they are gaming the system but we can’t do
anything about it because it’s not against the rules!”

~~~
josephjrobison
I could be wrong but I wonder if they want to leave the loopholes open a bit
to see where they get exploited and then slowly roll out updates. Not that
they’re intentionally creating bugs but perhaps seeing how they get exploited
and where so that the authors are doing the work for them rather than internal
engineers.

~~~
gfo
In a perfect world, maybe. It's hard to tell with Amazon now. Fraud and
counterfeiting have become rampant on the platform since they opened up third-
party selling to all foreign nations 18 months ago and despite the negative
press and angry consumers, they've said and done very little to combat these
issues. It's difficult to find other reasons why nothing has done beyond their
bottom line numbers growing significantly.

Generally speaking a business should find flaws and fix them before releasing.
Iterative development is okay, but when issues like this become commonplace
and nothing is done to combat it, that's when there's a problem. I have no
solutions to offer.

------
guitarbill
The Kindle store is already garbage for any kind of discovery, and Unlimited
makes it worse being just more marketing BS to hide the real price and
displace good content. Their suggestion algorithms are terrible, and only
really work if you want something from the same author.

Steam has exactly the same problem, although ar least they‘re trying to solve
it in various ways.

~~~
gfo
Are there examples of businesses out there which have done product
recommendation correctly?

Amazon is notorious for trying to sell you the same kind of product after
you've already purchased it (e.g. I bought a ladder and now all of my
recommendations are for more ladders). How hard can it be to uncover which
items are more likely to be one-time buys and recommend the products people
buy with those items instead (ex. show me painting supplies when I buy a
ladder)?

~~~
mattbierner
Slightly different but spotify’s algorithmic recommendations have been great.
I’ve found some really amazing stuff through “discover weekly”, “new
releases”, and “related artists”. Same with Bandcamp. (Maybe the problem is
easier for music?)

For content, I also find that user curated lists can be far better than
automated systems. They give me an upfront sense of the curator’s tastes and
define niches that algorithms would never recognize

~~~
rhizome
Are the categories you mention sorted by confidence? That is, is any part of
what you like about them oriented around not having to scroll for the stuff
you like the best?

~~~
mattbierner
"Discovery weekly" and "new releases" are not sorted as far as I know, but
related artists may be. A key factor at play here may be that there is no
"best", the variety of the recommendations feels like a positive for music
whereas it could be a negative for a larger commitment like novel or for a
consumer product. Even Spotify's objectively terrible recommendations (such as
once recommending an album called "Music of Lorestan 1" for the synthwave
artist "Saffari") turned out to be nice discoveries

------
FussyZeus
The fight to win over algorithms instead of creating worthwhile content
continues to compel all media, books included, in a race to the bottom. I
really don't think this is a problem tech can solve.

~~~
kanox
I don't see the problem here, algorithms are just helping satisfy the thirst
for novels with cocky shirtless males.

~~~
FussyZeus
Humanity has never been furthered by what the masses were itching to get. In
fact it's almost always the exact opposite.

I'm not saying there's something intrinsically good about being contrarian,
I'm just saying it feels like a whole lot of products, especially but not
exclusively in tech, feel so "samey". It's all the same crap just differently
branded in different colors, and I feel like algorithms are possibly to blame
for that.

Going to stores in the old days used to be exciting, you'd always find
something new and interesting, especially in Radioshack n such. Now it's just
the same old bullshit every single time.

~~~
avgDev
I think when you refer to going to stores in the "old days" and finding new
and exciting stuff basically means things were new for you at the time. The
more you learn about world and the older you get things begin to excite you
less.

The more you know the less excited you get about marketing because you can
actually see through the bullshit.

~~~
FussyZeus
I have to disagree. Products were just more interesting in the 90s and even
early 2000s. Tech is the line going through the big-suck right now but cars
did the same thing from the 1970's to the 2000's: where once you had different
models and styles sporting different looks, different and novel features, etc.
you see things slowly boil down to a few good exceptions and the rest of it
might as well be all the same thing (and with the example of cars, often is,
what with manufacturers selling to each other and re-badging for different
markets.)

Not long ago, shopping for a laptop was interesting. Did you want the one with
the swiveling screen, or the one that was liquid cooled? The one with the
super HD screen or the one with the built-in fold-out legs to angle the
keyboard better? Thick keys or thin keys? Optical or no? A novel visual design
or just as-thin-as-can-be? What were the pros and cons to all this? On and on.

Now all laptops practically look identical, even something with a somewhat
novel design becomes 2-3 times the price for no additional power, and all of
them are designed to overheat and die within a couple of years, with the
exception possibly of Macbooks, which cost a King's ransom. There's no novelty
or interesting ideas, just the same old things.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Now all laptops practically look identical

No, they don't. Most of the options you point to from “not long ago" (and many
more) are still available. Okay, I don't see liquid cooled or fold-out legs
much, and swivel screens seem to have been displaced with the 360-degree
hinges.

------
Sujan
Fascinating that Kindle's still don't track which pages actually were "read"
(as in "skipping from page 1 to page 100, doesn't meant 2-99 have been read).
Basing the author payout system of Kindle Unlimited on that metric is the
(technical) root cause here.

~~~
asmosoinio
The OP seems to disagree with you, mentioning that Amazon has some algorithms
to determine actually read pages? Or do you have other information?

~~~
Sujan
What part of the text are you referring to exactly?

There was a sentence that Amazon's metric isn't influenced by big fonts or
other formatting choices (they probably just use a plain text version of the
text to define what a "page" is) and 'that the KENPC system (Kindle Edition
Normalized Page Count) recorded pages read with “high precision”' \- which
doesn't actually mean that much.

Did I miss the interesting part?

My point was mostly based that I know it was that way for a long time, and
that things like stuffing or those newsletter signups or competition in the
back of the book wouldn't have any influence if it still wouldn't be this way.

~~~
asmosoinio
This sentence, mentioning "pages read":

A June blog post by the Kindle Direct Publishing Team assured authors that the
KENPC system (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count) recorded pages read with
“high precision” and that the company was constantly working to improve its
“fidelity.”

~~~
Sujan
Yeah, as far as I know this has always been the official wording.

What makes me skeptical here is the use of "high precision" and what there
could be to improve... a page was either viewed for the time necessary to read
it or not. Over all readers of a book, it should not be too hard to find out
the distribution of valid read times of a page.

Unless, of course, you don't have that data, but only some snapshots of which
page is opened (e.g. when a sync to the cloud servers happens).

Shame the Kindle APIs are undocumented :/

------
sago
I have a feeling that the whole Erom genre is where porn videos were 10 years
ago. Low quality, keyword-stuffed, fad-following, repetitive content is so
ubiquitous (and all that's needed to get someone off) that someone will come
along and be the Erom Hub and swipe the legs out from under the market.

The interesting question, that the article raises but does not answer, is how
far Erom is demonstrating a pattern that'll be followed by other genres. There
is a lot of similar self published genre fiction, but it is still a different
order of magnitude to KU contemporary romance.

------
zeristor
Do you think _Her Cocky Software Developer_ would be a big seller?

This is the real issue

~~~
allwein
I know you made this comment as a joke, but there actually is an entire sub-
genre of geek-related romance novels.

~~~
zeristor
These lot seem sweet and charming:

[http://twincitiesgeek.com/2017/07/24-romance-novels-for-
geek...](http://twincitiesgeek.com/2017/07/24-romance-novels-for-geeks-of-all-
kinds/)

