My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.
My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.
My guess is that Amazon gives new books some visibility if they manage to score a dozen sales within a few days of release. So the author probably bought a few copies as soon as his listing appeared on the store. It’s a very old tactic that plagues the best seller’s list and Amazon is plagued by the same issue.
Amazon book discoverability has kind of always been terrible, at least from a reader perspective. I basically never use genre filters because they seem to return random results and sometimes my favorite books are ‘top sellers’ in totally weird categories like ‘Chemistry Textbooks’ for a fantasy novel (not involving chemistry at all). It’s clear that there’s been some sort of ever escalating SEO war that has turned search and basic categorization functions into drivel, just like what’s happened to Google Search.