I mean who in the Year of Our Lord 2022 is going to disagree with a blog post that says “Reject the Algorithm” — but Nick Maggiuli still offers a nice read w/r/t the case for rejecting the algorithm. I mean it’s absolutely a return to the sort of “cream rises to the top” magical thinking that, on average, works for nobody; but social media also works for nobody on average, it’s just that the people it’s working for are by definition the people who get noticed. Anyway, the Parable of Jani Lane is worth the price of admission, and it’s right at the beginning.
Maggiuli’s argument is of course a variation on Cory Doctorow’s in “The Memex Method,” which long-time readers will recall is what got me back to blogging after 7 years, but it’s also relevant to one of the themes Joanna Penn and others have been pushing in the indie author space, namely direct sales. Ebook sales platforms like Amazon KDP, Kobo Writing Life, Nook Press, &c more or less created the contemporary indie author business model, where you publish for “free” but the platform takes a 30-70% cut. But authors can now create their own powerful e-commerce platforms at low cost. In that regime, the case for sticking with the platforms is the algorithm: Give us our cut of your sales and, if you do well, the platform will promote your book!
And this has worked, and will continue to work… but not for every book, and 30-70% is a big cut. Depending on the platform, it tends to be on the higher end with very low prices, which means reducing a book’s price from $4.99 to $0.99 is slashing your unit revenue by a factor of, not 5, but almost 12. But effective promotions usually involve a $0.99 sale, so…
… anyway, direct isn’t a magic bullet — because those promotions on the platforms do work, and if you don’t have a big audience, that may be the way you get one. But it will create a bit more space for authors to do better on books that don’t fare well on the algorithm.
If this is at all interesting to you, I definitely recommend listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast episodes on the topic: #628, #639, #640.