Discovery of eBooks Will Never Improve Until Retailers and Publishers Learn to Speak Like Customers
From Dear Author:
When readers talk to other readers about books, they speak in a language of tropes, character types, and hot button issues. They ask for spoilers and in depth details. They want to know if a character in book B is like the character in book A that they love.
A quick run down of forum topics at a popular romance gathering includes:
- Fight club
- Shy awkward / alpha
- Books where heroine almost dies
When I gather books for the DA New Releases site, Calibre pulls down the metadata for a book including the “category” a book is placed in. Categories, generally speaking, are the BISAC codes assigned by the publisher (whether it be a publishing house or author). A BISAC is a classification system that “BISG develops and maintains a number of classification systems for both physical and digital products.
. . . .
Online discovery isn’t happening at the retailers, like it happens in the bookstore, because retailer sites aren’t set up for discovery beyond the front page. BN’s romance page has featured 50 Shades above the scroll for months. Scrolling down, you get horizontal scrollbars for things like “Coming Soon”, “Bestsellers”, “New releases” but a quick scroll through both and you begin to see repetitive titles. This is not hand curated like a table in the retail store (or if it is, the curation is poor because the constant repetitive nature of the titles reduce visibility of other titles). Further, little information is imparted about the book unless the reader can guess from the title and the cover exactly what the genre or subgenre is on it. No wonder romance cover artists rely so heavily on the naked chest. BN offers no advanced search function.
Amazon hews closely to the BISAC codes, as does BN. Amazon does offer an advanced search wherein you can filter by subject matter and keyword as well as publisher and date published. However, how many users realize that a) it is available and b) can figure out how to use it.
. . . .
None of the three major retailers allow you to exclude titles. For instance, maybe I want to see all contemporary romances but none with a title of billionaire. But these complaints address just the existing flawed search functions.
Beyond how rudimentary and unhelpful the search features are at these retailers is the fact that the search terms are designed to speak to readers. Amazon has tried to address this by allowing readers to add “tags” to books but the tag feature has been sorely abused. Many of the books at AllRomance have no tags either.
Link to the rest at Dear Author and thanks to Matthew for the tip.
Passive Guy comes to computer-based searching with past work experience at LexisNexis, the company which pioneered computerized legal research and, later, computerized business and political information research.
For legal research, you can’t miss anything. Even a single court opinion can blow up your case or, if used well, blow up the opposing party’s case. On the other hand, a search that generates a list of 200 case opinions averaging 15 pages each doesn’t help because you’re swamped with case opinions that are not really relevant to the legal issue you’re looking at.
If you know what you’re doing, you can use the Lexis search engine with great precision to pull needles from haystacks comprised of collections of cases and statutes or millions of academic papers. It’s miles more powerful than Google. Unfortunately, it’s also very expensive to use and PG was sad when his Lexis password eventually expired several years after he left the company.
PG thinks that one of Amazon’s big advantages over other etailers is more sophisticated methods of discovery. That said, he agrees with Dear Author that, given the range of possibilities for computer-based searching, Amazon is far from ideal for discovery. He also thinks that BISAC codes are primitive holdovers from a mainframe world that work much better for bookstores than they do for readers.
Given the rapid proliferation of new genres and sub-genres, rigid categories such as BISAC are always going to be outdated and of marginal value. A category comprised of 200,000 books is essentially useless for a reader. She usually wants a category comprised of something like 25 books she hasn’t already read. And the 25 best-selling romance books is not the kind of subjective category that is useful for most romance readers. Romance readers recognize many more categories of books than BISAC or Amazon do.
If anybody at Amazon asked PG for advice (they haven’t and he doesn’t expect them to do so), he would tell them to develop their search function to be much more dynamic, flexible and accessible to customers.
Amazon has the data to provide Frequently Bought Together and Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought information for a particular book and should expose more levers to allow customers to use these tools. If a customer is so inclined, allow him/her to perfect a search or multiple searches that bring up the kind of books he/she wants.
At LexisNexis, gobs of legal case opinions swarm into the computers every day. For purposes of gathering cases into useful libraries – criminal law, real estate law, entertainment law, etc., etc., the computers perform content analysis and automatically sort the opinions into many different libraries. Then, an attorney can limit searches to opinions that reside in the real estate library without seeing irrelevant criminal cases. As the law changes, the case-sorting algorithms change.
Another way of helping an Amazon customer to find books to purchase would be to permit the customer to list his/her 25 favorite books, then ask Amazon’s search engine to generate a list that applies the Frequently Bought Together and Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought data to those books and create a list of five or ten or twenty-five other books that are most similar to the 25 favorite books. Give the customer a lever that allows him/her to limit the list to books published in the last two years or five years to remove moldy oldies.
Then allow the customer to save that search and ask Amazon to send an email that includes updated search results every couple of weeks. Since Amazon knows what books the customer has purchased, screen out books the customer already owns from the search results and give the customer a button to indicate that she’s already read a recommended book. The fact that a customer already owns or has already read a book is an important fact that should be rolled into the suggestion algorithm. If a customer buys a book from the recommended list, that fact similarly provides information for the suggestion algorithm. Amazon could also include a button the customer could click on for a listed book that was definitely not what the customer was looking for and that negative rating would be further information for the suggestion algorithm.
If PG were playing with Amazon’s data, he would take advantage of the fact that the company has the full text of every ebook it sells sitting on its hard drives and use artificial intelligence techniques to derive data from that text. For non-fiction books, full-text search could be valuable to customers on its own as another way to sell them more books – allow a customer to perform a search of the text of all information systems books for the terms, “denial of service attacks” and “foreign intelligence services” then provide a list of books that include those terms.
However, full-text search is old stuff that LexisNexis and its competitors have been doing for ages. It would be much more interesting to use full-text to conduct content analysis of fiction books to help group similar books together into new genres regardless of BISAC categories or author-provided tags.
Mix sales data in with content analysis, you’ll make it more likely that customers will find books they’ll enjoy – Viking vampire romances or Jane Austen look-alikes. As an additional benefit, this kind of information would give Amazon unparalleled insight into emerging book trends. Among other beneficiaries, the folks at Amazon Publishing could use this kind of information for acquisition strategies.
PG will stop now because he knows very few people get turned on by the many possibilities presented by mining large data sets or enjoy discussions of computerized search and artificial intelligence.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases. 
I’d love to see better search functions at all the major retailers… but I’d also love to see more people educating themselves about search functions. (Though, definitely they need clearer advance search functions, particularly for ebooks.)
For example, in her mention of ‘not being able to exclude ‘billionaire’ from her search results’… it can be done, but it requires a knowledge of boolean searches. (and it does work, at least on Amazon, where I just tried.)
All I can say is…. SOMEBODY GETS IT!
The problem with this approach to genre, unfortunately, is that it is incompatible with the exclusivity mode of the old paradigm. That is, the ability to define what is current in a genre, the shape and touch. To say “This year, hot pink is in and mauve is out.”
Camille – yes, I agree! I think there’s also an exclusivity mode re. individual books – deciding what the next hot thing will be – as well as genre, i.e. promoting certain books, and leaving others to fend for themselves.
That’s why the customers of all the current ebook retailers, including Amazon and its might, are ripe for the picking. There’s a huge opening for someone to step in and make ebook discoverability work better. Will someone do it? Can someone? I don’t know, but I hope so.
I hope so, too. Improved granularity in categories/searching is a sweet ripe fruit waiting for some smart retailer to pluck it.
And PG, you didn’t need to stop – this stuff floats a lot of our boats.
I think the author here makes excellent points. Even Amazon, probably the best in terms of serachability, can be cumbersome and awkward.
There is no question the system could be significantly improved.
I have no doubt it will be. Discoverability is the new hot topic. Lots of solutions are going to be tested.
Amazon has tried to address this by allowing readers to add “tags” to books but the tag feature has been sorely abused.
As far as I can tell, Amazon has completely removed the tagging feature.
yep, tags are gone – except for tags you previously put on books, which are only visible from your own computer…
Hmm… I hadn’t noticed that! And just when I thought I had something figured out and could move on. Not the first time that has happened!
I was wondering where they went! Their “help” pages say tags are still visible, but you have to tag something first, then click on the tag to see who else tagged it.
I am, personally, not terribly thrilled by this turn of events.
Someone rather high up at Amazon (it wasn’t a public conversation so I’m not sure I should say) told someone I know that every word in the search inside goes into the search engine. I know PG would like the whole book, but they’re getting there.
As for BISAC, yes, very limiting, if you sweet talk them at KDP support they will put in a request for a new category.
No one was prepared for digital. Amazon is the only company managing pretty well.
The fanfic world figured this out a long time ago. There are content warnings before each fic that tell you what you can expect, and even though they’re ostensibly meant to warn you away from content you don’t want to deal with (like BDSM, if that bothers you), what authors discovered is that the content warnings were essentially “selling” the fics. As a reader, I didn’t read blurbs or titles. I went straight to the content warnings and looked for the stuff I wanted to read about!
I agree. I can find exactly what I’m looking for in a fanfic in less than a minute. The sorting & tagging system at Archive of Our Own (http://archiveofourown.org/) is particularly impressive.
You can sort by any of the following after using a search for terms:
-Genre
-Length
-Pairing
-Pairing Type (Fluffy chick-lit, or serious tragedy, hurt-comfort, adorakable, etc.)
-Characters Featured
-Rating
-Specific Content Warnings
-Series (Book 1 of 3 in the series, etc.).
Heck, the custom tags even tend to get down to the specific subject matter (this book has: androids, monsters, gender-bending, etc.) if the author is particularly diligent about it.
If I want a 20,000 word, horror, that features *insert pairing*, takes place in a super market, and is rated PG, I can narrow down every single work that fits that description on the website in a minute & find exactly what I want from the Story Summaries in the next 4 or 5 minutes.
I would beg and plead on my knees for that type of sorting for novels. I’ll repeat that: I am desperate for that level of searching capability for novels. The closest I can think of is ‘bookshelves’ on Goodreads, but even that falls short.
It’s standard database level sorting when you get down to it. It really shouldn’t be that hard to implement. *sigh*
AO3 manages with a team of volunteers and a firm commitment to author-directed tagging, with the understanding that the line between “authors” and “readers” is fairly thin. I’m not sure that a bookstore would be able to have the volunteers, and publisher-directed tagging is likely to be a nightmare for readers.
But yes, I’d love to see bookstores at least have a few dozen tags, and to sort by the data they *do* have at hand: price, length, published date, series, etc.
Yes, this would be absolutely wonderful. Fanfic has been dealing with the “how do I find what I want out of this ridiculously huge volume of material” problem for a long time. I wish the profic world would study the solutions fanfic has already come up with, because they are good ones and FAR SUPERIOR to what Amazon and Goodreads have produced.
An example–say I want to find romance novels featuring amputee heroes. In the profic world, this can’t be done with existing tools. The best you can do is hope someone has assembled, by hand, a list of such novels, and it is certain to be incomplete, and it will become out of date as new novels are published. But a proper tagging system would allow readers to instantly find every novel with an amputee hero.
Additionally, fanfic genres are totally different: hurt/comfort, angst, romance, action/adventure, family, friendship, etc. and are used in limitless combinations.
Someone needs to bring natural language input to search functions, along with suggestions from the search database, i.e., intelligent feedback. So you ask natural questions like you would to Apple’s Siri or Google’s (much better) voice search. This could be voice or keyboard, but the analysis would function much the way PG describes.
That way if you say you want to read a Viking vampire romance the search function might ask in return whether you want a specific publication range, whether you care about male or female authors, etc.
You’re just never going to get an average Joe or Jane to figure out (or at least be comfortable with) Boolean searches.
Some sort of tagging functionality is ideal here.
(1) Let readers tag books on whatever criteria they like. I might tag Lee Child’s Persuader with “jack reacher,” “new england,” “guns,” “drowning,” etc.
(2) Promote tags within categories. So whoever’s in charge of the Mysteries section might decide that, on February 10th, Amazon will promote mysteries set in New England. They sift through the tags, find the most popular or interesting books tagged “new england,” and feature them on the Mysteries front page.
There’s potential for mis-tagging, obviously, but when you’re dealing with the huge volume of users that Amazon has that’s less of a risk.
I suspect that hostile tagging was one of Amazon’s reason for discontinuing tags. It only takes a few hundred interested people to inflict a lot of hostile tags on a book. (Deserved or not; I’ve been involved in tagging books I thought were poorly researched or otherwise misrepresenting themselves.)
The combination of and author’s friends/blog readers all tagging his book with “awesome” and “best ghost story ever,” and the author’s rivals tagging it with “badly-written” or “cliche’d tripe”, and random trolls tagging things with obscenities make it hard to manage. The larger the userbase, the more direct management is required for user-generated content, especially content that connects to other people’s products.
I, for one, will never get tired of discussions about semi-curated metadata systems. (I, um. May spend substantial amounts of my professional life processing documents for e-discovery. And trying to explain to clients why “only process the Excel files” is easy and “only process the sales reports” is not going to happen unless they’ve given us a folder called “all the sales reports.”) (Otherwise, we have to process everything to find out what the sales reports are.)
I do understand the problems with setting up a good search function for books and ebooks. I miss Fictionwise–it wasn’t perfect, didn’t have all the subgenres I’d love to see–but it had several features that more modern bookstores seem to have bypassed in favor of scrolling sets of cover-thumbnails: Search by length, by price, by publication date, by format (lost cause in today’s stores), by award category.
I don’t think a single ebookstore active today has a “list of all Hugo winning ebooks” search function.
There is *plenty* of metadata available for good, reader-friendly search functions without getting into obscure subgenres and full content search & analysis requirements. A dozen or so categories of search, and *exclusion* ability (When I’m looking at Book 2 in a series, I don’t need to see Books 1, 3, 4 and 5 as recommendations. I already know about those.), could rocket a bookstore to dominate the online sales market.
Ability to look for “romance where one character was formerly engaged to the other’s sibling” or “pirate adventure with ghosts, not zombies” or “children’s books with kangaroos” would be great, too, but we’re used to not having those options. Just being able to search for “pagan nonfic over 60,000 words” would be a terrific help.
So would “mysteries under $5.” Of course, they believe they do better not allowing a sort-by-price option, rather than believing they’re bleeding customers to other media.
I know the work would be extensive, but I would love to see a “Literary Genome Project” akin to Pandora for book recommendations.
I stumbled across one a bit ago — because I LOVE pandora.
http://www.booklamp.org/
They need more titles, but it’s a start.
Pandora is great!
Good suggestion.
Sweet merciful heavens. I came here to leave my one lone comment, only to discover that we’re all geeks on this bus.
I’m with @kr1l3y: Literary Genome Project.
I’m with PG, too, but that goes without saying (or, not, apparently.)
I wish that Amazon had a feature that worked something like Netfix. My “queue” would be a list of authors. As in, when this author puts out new material, email me.
Amazon does sometimes email about books they think I will like or by authors I have purchased before, however if I find an author at the library or as a gift, Amazon doesn’t know I like that author.
A Netflix type system solves this.
Authors or series. I think series might be more useful for me, since I’m rather picky. But either one would certainly be handy.
I’ve been meaning to suggest something similar to Smashwords, since they’re supposed to be adding series support sometime this year.
Goodreads notifies you of new releases by authors on your shelves.
Another way of helping an Amazon customer to find books to purchase would be to permit the customer to list his/her 25 favorite books, then ask Amazon’s search engine to generate a list…
This! Oh, yes, this! I want it right now!
Wow! Amazon should consult you. I like all your ideas!
“Another way of helping an Amazon customer to find books to purchase would be to permit the customer to list his/her 25 favorite books, then ask Amazon’s search engine to generate a list…”
Doesn’t Goodreads sort of do this? I haven’t played with it much but it seems to be one of the first things it encourages you to do.
What I found broken with Goodreads’ implementation of this idea is that after a point the algorithm was giving me no new interesting titles.
For instance, I have read a lot of Science Fiction; maybe not the latest & greatest titles — the last new title I read was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash — but enough to know what I like & don’t like. After going thru their suggestions a few iterations, the titles suggested for me were… well, meh. Some classics that I might read some day, a few I’m not interested in, & some that just didn’t interest me.
One of my complaints with Amazon’s system of recommendations is that it appears to be based on the last X number of purchases I made — or looked at. As a result, since I’ve been buying a lot of classical music over the last 10 months there, I get a lot of classical music recommendations — not books, but CDs. What would make the recommendation experience better for me is if the software looked at my earlier history & threw in the occasional one or two titles from earlier moments in my purchase history. Something to add variety instead of best sellers in whatever I happen to buy over the last 3 months. (And Christmas does lead to a lot of atypical purchases, which only confuse the algorithm even more.)
Maybe that’s why human recommendations will never be replaced by computing algorithms. Frequently someone will say (or write) that book A reminds them of book B — where there is no obvious metatag that connects the two — & a curious mind follows the association to find another book & writer worth reading.
Yeah, and even for books it’s a problem. If I buy an Agatha Christie, it doesn’t recommend books like Christie. It recommends more Christie. And though I don’t own every Christie… I have HEARD of Christie. I don’t need to be told about her books. I’ll buy them later anyway.
It drives me nuts. They used to tell me about things I didn’t know about, but not any more.
I was thinking this, and I just went to Goodreads to look at the “recommendations” thing, but my favorites shelf is not available as an option. I can, however, look at recommendations based on my sci-fi shelf, my currently-reading shelf (which, oddly enough, is giving me a Spanish-language version of Game of Thrones), my fantasy shelf, my 2012 shelf, my best-of-2013 shelf…
I would offer that the main problem with current tag and search methods is that they are hierarchical. So to use a prior example, if you are interested in Viking Romances, you pretty much have to decide if you want Romances with a Viking twist or Viking stories with a Romance twist. This was necessary when you need to find books on shelves in libraries and stores, but is pretty much detrimental when working with digital bookshelves.
Books really are a blend of many attributes. You could argue that Twilight is x% romance, y% supernatural, z% teen and a host of other things. Limiting it to Teen Fiction -> Supernatural -> Romance with just 3 BISAC codes to define it is going to greatly limit ability to liken it to other books. Legacy strikes again!
Not a trivial problem to solve, but progress is being made. Booklamp is interesting and I’ve seen a few other things brewing that will try to attack this problem from different angles. But I expect that the solutions will probably come first from small, agile startups rather than from the entrenched retailers. What happens next is a whole other story (non-fiction -> business -> publishing).
No one will ever solve the book discovery problem. It’s not a real problem. If you are a reader, you believe that there is a discovery problem because it’s hard to find a good book to read. It is hard to find a good book, but it’s not because there is book discovery problem.
What you really have are two separate problems. First, you are stressed from too many choices. All available evidence suggests that you are finding more books, more to your liking, but the endless array of choices stresses you out. Twenty years ago, it was easy for me to go into my local bookstore and find every book there that I would like. It was a manageable problem. Nowadays, I keep finding books that I love but never knew existed and it is a bit frustrating to know that there might be even better ones out there.
The second problem is a trust issue. There are very few trustworthy mechanisms for book recommendations. You are actually discovering dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of books and you don’t have any good ways to know which ones you will like.
If you are in traditional publishing, you know there is a discovery problem, because, well, Amazon. While it is true that before Amazon, people “discovered” books that you placed in bookstores, you don’t have a discovery problem, you have a “in the middle of an industry disruption” problem.
If you are a writer, you believe that there is a discovery problem because you know that there are hundreds of thousands of people who would buy your book if they knew how good it was. This is also true (if you can tell a good story), but not because there is book discovery problem.
How can this be? Because the book business is hit-driven. All the profits come from the top sellers. If you add up all the 2012 profits from traditional publishers in the U.S., what percentage of those profits came from the “50 Shades of Grey” trilogy? I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is 100% or more (meaning that the publishing business may have lost money over all, if you exclude the top seller). Now, look at how book reading in the U.S. breaks down by “number of books read in the last year (including “reading” audio books):
25% – didn’t even start to read a single book
7% – 1 book (read all or part of)
14% – 2-3 books
12% – 4-5 books [57% of the U.S. population reads <6 books/year and last year 3 of those books were 50 Shades of Grey]
15% read 6-10 books
13% read 11-20 books
14% read 20+ books
The number of slots for a huge seller is really small and there are literally thousands of books that could be huge sellers under the right circumstances. You have a sparse network problem. The people you need to sell to aren't out there looking for your book or any other book. Someone has to tell them to buy your book. The bigger your target audience is, the harder it is to get word of mouth.
I absolutely agree that there is no real book discovery problem — for readers.
I disagree with your analysis that readers have two other problems related to book discovery. Seriously? They are not stressed out about too many choices, and their inability to trust sales mechanisms is not a problem for them either.
Readers simply don’t use those methods. They don’t need to. (More below.)
The people with the book discovery problem are WRITERS, and also publishers and booksellers.
We have a problem getting our books before readers for the reasons you cited: there is no trustworthy way to push a book out that is not stressful and overloaded with spam for the reader. (And I’m using the word “spam” in the original sense of “stuff you don’t want.”)
Word of mouth works exactly like it used to work, only now it’s more powerful because of search engines. Sure people don’t go looking for books they don’t know about. They go looking for things they DO know about, out of simple interest unrelated to shopping. They find blogs and forums and groups of people with similar interests, and by golly those people talk about books they like, and then they go to Amazon and search on the exact title/author and don’t bother with the algorithms at all.
The problem is that people in publishing, especially writers, spend all their time socializing with each other. So they have a limited circle of “word of mouth.” When they do hang out with “real readers” they tend to spam and make themselves unwelcome.
So writers? Yeah, they don’t get good word of mouth recommendations. And they look in all the wrong places, and with all the wrong motives. So it seems like there is a problem, but really it’s not a reader problem.
But as the conversation above about fanfic shows, fans are perfectly capable of creating their own search criteria. And since the dawn of the internet, there have been enthusiasts who have been cataloging and talking about their small areas of expertise.
The mechanism is out there, and the readers know about it. It’s just that it can’t be gamed, and you have to earn your way into it.
I disagree. It’s sometimes hard to find a specific, known book because store search engines are so bad. It’s hard to find “all the works by Author X.”
As a reader, it’s hard for me to find good books to read. Part of that is indeed the needle-in-haystack problem; when my choices were “5000 books available at this bookstore,” and there were only perhaps 50 books of interest to me, they were relatively easy to find. When the choices are “50,000 books at this ebookstore,” and there are perhaps 500 of interest to me… same percentage; very different search problem.
But part of the problem is that online bookstores, unlike physical ones, don’t arrange themselves according to readers’ searching methods. Setting aside the fact that there’s no “staff picks for our local readers” section, there is no “browse alphabetically by author in this genre.”
Of course, with 20,000 books in a genre, that might be ridiculous. (Certainly, at 10 titles per page it is.) But a lot of us would love a plain text list of titles and authors; would like the option to sort all of our searches by the criteria most important to us–author, or published date, or price.
This is not a *huge* impediment to me–there’s a new Avengers novel at AO3 approximately every week, and swarms of shorter fics–but authors and publishers are both missing out on my money because they haven’t figured out how to get their books in front of me. And I’m missing out on reading some great books because I’m not willing to spend several hours wading through atrocious search-engine results.
Um. The linked post talks about the problem from the perspective of a reader. Many of the comments here describe the problem from a reader’s perspective. Surely you’re not suggesting they’re all mistaken?
But those “readers” are also writers and publishing people and people who follow writing blogs.
What I’m saying is that writers who are readers have a problem even when they are searching as readers. And I mentioned why — they are stuck in a paradigm where they are looking in all the wrong places. Writers, and people in the publishing community, tend to look for places where books are pushed.
Which is exactly the wrong place to look for good book recommendations.
So they’re trying to solve the wrong problem, even when they are looking for books “as readers.” The fact is, their view is skewed by the fact that they hang around publishing too much.
But when you go into purely reader communities, places where writers aren’t welcome, you won’t find the same discussion going on. Sure, they talk about creating the perfect index, or the perfect recommendation system, but they don’t look to retailers to do it. (And for the very reasons William mentioned.)
And they don’t have trouble finding something good to read. Sure, they are indeed always seeking more and better and newer, but every one has a huge TBR pile. And also a huge “wants” list of out of print books they are looking for.
The other thing that is a problem is that if you have trouble finding books you like… the problem may not be discovery. It may be that there AREN’T any books of the sort you like being written any more.
If your tastes are that rare, retail discovery systems just aren’t going to help you. You need to find an enthusiast group for what you like, and talk to those people. (Or maybe you need to do what many of us did to start writing in the first place: you write what you can’t find to read.)
No. I had this problem, as a reader, before I ever self-published, before I was familiar with publishing. My familiarity has made it *easier* for me to find books, but not easy. It is really incredibly arrogant to tell people who are reporting that book discovery is a problem that it’s just because they’re looking at it a writers/publishers/not the correct kind of reader. Did you not read the linked post? I just…
Maybe readers who have found “purely reader communities where writers aren’t welcome” have no problems finding plenty to read. (Hell, I have no problem finding plenty to read–but that’s because I can always enjoy 50000 words of Holmes/Watson when I can’t find my first six genres of choice. Long TBR lists don’t indicate a lack of a discovery problem.) There’s an insulting implication in the claim that “real readers” have no problem finding what they want to read.
If you really believe there are plenty of these reader-focused communities, how about naming some of them. Name the ones for science fiction readers, and the ones for mystery readers, and the ones for westerns, and the ones for books about political activism in the modern era, and the ones about woodworking, and the ones for m/m erotica (there are plenty of forums for m/m erotica; I don’t think I’ve run across any that are reader-focused rather than being host to at least a handful of authors), and the ones for fantasy series that aren’t like LotR clones, and so on.
Are these forums all publicly available? Do they work for people not on Facebook? If you find one, are the others all easy to find?
I am not doubting that such communities exist–I am doubting that they are obvious and easy to find. And if they’re hidden away in odd corners of the internet, eight pages down on a Google search for some vaguely-related keyword… that’s part of the discovery problem.
Discovery becomes a problem when it causes sales to fall. A problem for authors does not mean it’s a problem for Amazon.
And readers? They just keep on hitting the BUY button.
I think there’s absolutely a discovery problem for readers. I’m a reader, and I sometimes have trouble finding the books I want. For example, I cannot for the life of me find a fantasy novel that’s to my taste anymore. I love Game of Thrones, older Barbara Hambly, some other stuff, and what the recommendation sites keep suggesting to me are two very popular books I won’t name, both of which I have already read and disliked. Every year I read 5-6 fantasy novels, searching for something that is right for me. And every year I dislike all of them. I find it hard to believe that the fantasy novels I would enjoy are not being written/published at all. But I am not finding them.
That’s what happens when you read self-published novels.
Snappy, but too obvious. I give it a 6.
lol, Marc.
barbarahambly.com has some of her short story sequels, if you haven’t found that yet. (And Barbara Hamilton, in the Mystery section, is her pen name for Abigail Adams mysteries (3 so far).)
And, in the spirit of Word Of Mouth… Do you have a “tag” that you’d apply to the Stuff You Like? (I haven’t read Game of Thrones, though I’ve read lots of Hambly, so I don’t know enough about the similarities… Maybe Bujold’s Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, & The Hallowed Hunt?)
I don’t have an obvious tag to apply–I’m really searching for some unquantifiable “X” factor–but if I were going to pick a tag to search on it would be “feminist.” I like strong, three-dimensional female characters. I don’t think I’d call Game of Thrones feminist, but what it does have in common with the early Hambly books I liked is very strong character work. I would also like to use tags to find fantasy novels that are not set in the Middle Ages. I’d love to find more Bronze Age fantasy, more Renaissance-era fantasy, etc. Generally I have found the world building to be better in fantasy novels not set in the Middle Ages (perhaps because the author doesn’t have the option of just copying the same old stuff that’s in all the other fantasy novels).
re: Bujold, I’ve read them and liked them, but I didn’t fall in love with them the way I did the Vorkosigan saga. Not sure why.
Agree – lol, Marc.
Amy – book recommendation – try Brandon Sanderson, if you haven’t yet. Start with the Mistborn Trilogy. Top quality fantasy, truly amazing plotter.
Haven’t read Sanderson. I’ll take a look.
Yeap. I would give my left arm for a set of proper recommendations. So far the closest is a bookstore downtown. And they have a hit rate of about 10% (that I at least enjoy, or consider worth finishing). Always thought a proper search function would be amazing for online, but so far nothing. Amazon probably has the most data to do this, and yet… so far nothing (their recommended ones etc haven’t been much help. Less than 1% hit rate, I’d say…). Truth be told, as long as their moving books as well as they are they won’t see a reason to improve (or I don’t see it since everyone else seems so much worse at it than them).
Maybe someone will improve it. If they do.. they’ll have a great many thanks from me…
Also, PG’s recs seem spot on. Perhaps picking people’s books you like and going from there?
Side note: movie picks are also at this level of failure rates for my tastes.
It absolutely amazes me that you can’t just browse alphabetically by title or author at Amazon, the way you can at Project Gutenberg. Or at any libraray.
Or, heck, at a bookstore…
That way, you’d at least have some kind of starting point.
As it is now, I just feel like I’m fumbling around when I go there, and I don’t like that feeling.
Reminds me of the old days of unimaginative media database handling. My old radio station (in the 80s) would order recordings through wholesalers who provided narrow fanfold paper to order from instead of catalogues.
The data fields were rigid and tight. If you wanted Wagner opera, you had about 4 characters to distinguish between “Der…”, “Das…”, and “Die…”
True story.
Your analysis PG, is cogent and to the points. Thanks for the time you took to do the analyses.
Book Matchers is an interesting site that addresses the discoverability question. Seems pretty good.
http://www.bookmatchers.com/
I think Amazon may be working on something for full text search. I was asked for my last paper book to provide the digital text.
Rob’s fantasy scenario:
Amazon: PG, we love your ideas. You’re hired!
PG: I accept.
Alas, I won’t hold my breath.