How Amazon did everything wrong (but I still got to #1) | Hacker News Reader

How Amazon did everything wrong (but I still got to #1)

artymiak.com

43 pointssurfingdino15 comments

The whole process described here sounds like a series of book promotion and sales hacks, some of which Amazon missed, and others of which they caught on to.

I think this article is also part of that.

I think Amazon got to #1 by giving a crap about exactly one thing alone: customer experience. Getting an email about a non-critical update to a random purchase I made 2 months ago? Not a good customer experience.

I feel for you, artymiak, for being treated like a disposable piece of rubbish. Fact is, Amazon has their priorities straight, and helping every snubbed author feel better about their life's work isn't really part of it.

I got the strangest feeling reading this, it reads like the author is trying to hack a 'freemium' model into the Kindle experience and Amazon is thwarting his efforts. Is that what is going on here?

The punchline at the end is you can buy the PDF for $20? His counter example 'porn for housewives' is $10.

And there is the complaint about not being able to publish in Polish (ok so its a strange restriction I agree but ...)

Is it that hard to sell an epub version of the book from a web site for Kindle and others? O'reilly seems to do that successfully.

Left with more questions than answers.

For me, this is the most important takeaway: "But how do you let over 24,000+ readers know there is an update available? Amazon does not give publishers access to the customers’ email addresses so you cannot get in touch with them directly."

Amazon may have disintermediated publishers in the author -> publisher -> retailer -> reader chain but there is still opportunity to remove the retailer and have a direct author -> reader relationship.

To be honest, I don't care that there's an update available. I'm not interested in getting spam from authors of the books I buy. I buy a lot of books for Kindle, but the day Amazon lets authors spam me is the day I stop buying at Amazon.

I understand that an author's book is important to them, but most of their readers just aren't that interested. If I was really interested in new editions of the Vim tips book, I'd already be following the author online.

Seconded. Like most customers, I'd like my book purchase to be a simple one-off transaction. I load it on my kindle and then I read it and then I don't want to be bugged about it. Unless it is a reference book (which to be fair this book might be for some readers) I don't really give a hoot that there's another version.

The most I would be OK with Amazon doing is sticking a "There is an update available" link in my menu while reading. More than that is too intrusive, no matter how much the author thinks he deserves warm fuzzies for performing a good service.

Yes, that's what I'd like to see too. A simple notification that an update is available would be all that's needed.

It doesn't have to be one-size-fits-all. There could be a 'receive updates about this book' checkbox when purchasing the book.

The last thing I want is my email address in the hands of every author of every book I've ever bought. Amazon has it right. They can notify me if there's an "important" update (hard to imagine for most books); if not, leave me alone.

One way to get around this is to offer an incentive to people who've purchased your book to give you their email address, for example, a workbook; and link to the email signup landing page within the book.

I can't see any point in this where Amazon didn't take the right steps.

Your readers are not eagerly awaiting the advertisement for your new book that you want to send to them.

Disclaimer: This is all assuming the entry is factually correct. Considering the authors mindset I'm not too sure about that.

a) When they told readers they are working with the publisher while they don't b) They are asking the author of a book if he has the copyright required for the updated version? What? c) They should at the very least tell reviewers that there is an update when the review is below 5 stars.

I still think Amazon is doing the right thing. a) THey put out a note and then contacted the publisher eventually after a day. Given their scale, I would assume it would be necessary to validate the customer complaints before handing off to the publishers. b) Again, they are just being extra careful about copyrights to the book contents. c) Do it right and give the best reading experience the first time, otherwise customer are right to complain. I kind of don't like the publish quickly, update frequently model that the author is trying to do. It breaks the book reading experience.

I'm working on a platform that can make things like this easier to deal with. Docverter[1] is an online document conversion system, and one of the things that I plan on offering is sending a converted document to an email address, which very well could be a kindle address. It's in active beta right now, if you'd like an invite send me an email (in my profile).

[1]: http://www.docverter.com

Hi,

Maybe try to publish with http://leanpub.com platform?

Maybe this is a solution for your problem.

All the best Tom

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