This interesting thing happened the week I released my book “The Lost Piece”: I got a mail from an author friend asking “How did you do this?”
He wasn’t talking about writing the book, rather the email he’d received from Amazon recommending the book, which they had also reduced from £8.49 to £8.01 for the paperback at their cost (this discount wasn’t coming out of my royalties).
In answer to his question, I don’t know!
I hadn’t selected any marketing offer or paid for promotion. This was just a regular (zero cost) placing of a debut novel by an unknown author.
I have a couple of theories though.
Firstly, and probably, my name and his had been linked somewhere in the vast mass of data big tech collects from us. This would be no surprise as I’ve edited his book and we’ve had plenty of emails and video calls, WeTransfers, etc.. So maybe Amazon got the data and the chance of name recognition and a purchase made the email worthwhile.
It may also be that Amazon had picked up that I had print on demand paperbacks via KDP but also via Ingram Spark, and so wanted to increase the probability that my friends and family sales wave (and let’s be honest, that’s the only sales wave many self published books ever catch) went through them.
But the second theory is more interesting, and that’s that in some way what I uploaded to Amazon got liked by an algorithm.
There’s no way to investigate this beyond a point because the algorithms Amazon use to promote the best quality books that come through their platform are top secret, as they have to be to stop every fast-profit-and-damn-the-quality-merchant out there exploiting the heck out of it.
But back up a sec there: “Amazon [promotes] the best quality books”?! No cynic could let that go by unchallenged.
I believe it though, because it makes business sense.
Do you get annoyed when you search Amazon for a specific thing and have to scroll through half a dozen cheap Chinese rip-offs before you find the product you actually want? Does it sometimes make you go look elsewhere? Do you think Amazon wants that?
If no, then why would they want their site to have the reputation of pushing junk AI-assisted novels churned out by the worst kind of mercenary hacks and using eg. Indian review farms to game the system? Routinely disappointed readers leave, and Barnes & Noble, Rakuten and Apple are all there eagerly waiting to gather them up and take them somewhere cosier so they never come back.
So yes, I believe Amazon puts effort into searching for and promoting new quality.
On this basis, where there’s an algorithm now there will very soon be AI. In fact there may well be already, and either way it’s going to get exponentially better at its job.
And there’s perhaps some evidence.
When you upload your eBook epub file it gets spell checked (I know this because the same author friend told me he only got a handful of errors flagged in his manuscript). Mine in fact passed first time with nothing flagged (I’m a decent copy editor, what can I say?!), and if a full spell check was done on the manuscript then that’s hugely impressive. As well as character and place names I’ve got idiosyncratic and accented speech in there. Word flagged all sorts, wrongly as usual (how does the world’s leading word processing software have so many clear errors in its dictionary?!) How did Amazon not trip up on this stuff? Maybe it’s a low bar and excludes everything within quotes, etc., but the other possibility is AI. Impressively good AI.
Whether AI is there as gatekeeper/selector is moot: it surely soon will be.
And then it gets more interesting. WAY more interesting!
My wife and I frequently drone at our children about how there were only 3 / 4 (Sweden / UK) TV channels when we were young, AND you had to be there in front of the TV at the time your programme was on. They, of course, blank us and return to turbo-navigating Netflix.
And when they finally go to bed and we bag the TV for half an hour before we crash…we can’t find a damn thing and frequently waste the whole half hour trying!
Why? Too much choice and no idea what’s any good.
Back in the 80s, you see, commissioners and editors had made the selection for us.
Do you ever miss that?
Certainly. And that’s why Richard and Judy or Oprah Winfrey can do so well out of a “book club”. Life’s a lot easier with trusted guidance to something we’ll fairly reliably like.
So imagine you’re off for a well-deserved holiday. What to read from all these millions of novels on Amazon? If only someone who knew your tastes could read every page of all of them (or at least scour the internet for all reviews and amalgamate then cross-reference them with your known tastes based on reviews left and ebook pages read) and recommend, just for you, that perfect book. A better version of this (screen grabbed from Amazon):
I suspect that very soon AI, armed with Amazon’s intimate knowledge of you and what you like, will be able to. And there will be a strong business case for making it do so.
Is it happening already? Perhaps.
Did my book rank well? Maybe so!
Yay!
But more important is that if I’m right then the future of publishing/literature may involve a new generation of AI gatekeepers.
…so spare a thought for the poor agents and commissioning editors of publishing houses, because they may be living on borrowed time, alas.
But for the self-published, the playing field may be about to get levelled.
And the key will be, purely and simply, quality.
(So if I hadn’t already decided to self-publish, this would have decided me).