Has Kindle Unlimited cooked my Also Boughts?

I've become obsessed with Amazon's Also Boughts, mostly because the ones appearing for Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed have been so random/nonsensical recently. I posted about this last month, when the first three books appearing were cookbooks. At that time, none of the Also Boughts that I clicked on linked back to my book. Not good, right? I mean, the point of the Also Boughts is, "Hey, you there, shopping for books, if you like this book, you might want to check out this other, somewhat similar, book." But if these relationships are a) broken, and b) only flow in one direction, there goes one of the most valuable discovery tools in book-selling.

I strongly suspect I'm paying the price for not being more active about marketing my books last year. I was seeing less and less return on the pay-per-click ads I had up on Amazon, so I gave up on them early in 2018 and figured I'd wait until I was ready to release The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo in the fall before investing any more. More books = more bang for the buck, at least in theory. If a reader clicks an ad and buys a book and enjoys it, maybe they'll seek out another of an author's titles.

So I waited it out as my sales shriveled, with as much as 50 percent of my Amazon revenue coming through KDP Select, the program where Kindle Unlimited subscribers can download your book for free, and you get paid for the number of pages they read. And even that wasn't anywhere near what it was a couple of years ago. It was so lame, in fact, I decided to drop out of KDP Select in the fall. I removed my first three books by November, and never enlisted First World Problems.

And now that I'm digging into these Also Boughts, I'm even more convinced leaving KDP Select was the right move. Because I suspect most of these shitty Also Boughts that have nothing whatsoever to do with my novel came about because of indiscriminate Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

My also boughts are cooking

One, potentially, helpful mechanism for selling books on Amazon is the Also Boughts. As in, "Customers who bought this item also bought" all this other stuff. As an author, you're hoping your book gets linked up with some other similar titles so readers might find your book while they're browsing selections in your same genre.

At the moment, my also boughts for Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed are not really what I need. The top three are cookbooks.

This mystifies me a little. I first noticed the cookbooks there a month or so ago. Admittedly, I had somewhat given up on my sales last year while I was working to get The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo ready to release. These days, to generate much in the way of sales on Amazon, you have to play around with Pay Per Click ads. I've had mixed success at best in the past with those, and by early last year they were no longer cost effective. So I stopped advertising for most of 2018 and my sales swirled the toilet bowl.

I found a helpful blog post on Amazon PPC ads a few months back and gave them another go in November. I've had better luck than I did previously, at least with Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed. It does much better than my other books, probably because it's reaching into a more vibrant readership band, where fans of Jonathan Tropper, Matthew Norman, Jess Walter, and others hang out. Ideally, those would be the books that show up in my also boughts.

And maybe if my sales keep growing over the next couple of months as they have in December and January, we'll start to see those associations taking root--as opposed to the Mediterranean Diet Cookbook and Fruit Pies. Which are probably lovely books. But not really what I need.

Of course, what I really need are enough sales for my books to show up on their also boughts, so their readers see mine. But that's two steps down the road. At the moment, I'll settle for the first step of booting the cookbooks out of my kitchen.

A little bit of everything on my 2017 reading list

For a few years, earlier this decade, I read baseball books almost exclusively. I reviewed them both for my own blog and for Baseball America. I cranked through baseball biographies, season recaps, offbeat observations, novels, and minor-league-chasing-the-dream tales. Some of them were quite good; most, in the grand scheme of things, were somewhat forgettable. Inevitably, I got burned out on baseball books. In looking back on my reading list for 2017, there's not a single one in the bunch.

There's not really much of a theme to this year's list at all. I had a few re-reads, especially early, a couple of which were prompted by the political dystopia we were plunged into after the catastrophic 2016 election. Others I plucked off the shelf on a whim, some of which had been sitting for years, never read, waiting for the moment I would finally get to them. Here they are, roughly in chronological reading order.