Journeys

Staying afloat as an author is a struggle. Every day, I devote hours to ensuring eyes find my work. But If I turn away from my book-selling efforts for a moment, everything goes to hell. My sales, rankings, placements, social media numbers, everything plummets. Amazon has technical glitches, my ads don’t show, my website has issues, and Facebook flags my posts as spam. It’s a constant battle to claw to the periphery, and if I let up, even for a moment, I am right back to being unknown and unnoticed again. But sometimes, I need a break even if I know I will lose months of work.

As many of you know, my in-laws are visiting from China. To keep them stimulated and to keep us all from going insane, we decided to take a few days’ vacation to Vermont. My wife had only been there once and briefly, and my in-laws had never been. I spent some time there in my youth but had forgotten many of those experiences. It was a short jaunt- we left around 8:30 on Monday and came back Thursday night.

Our first stop was Burlington, about a four-hour drive from Boston. We spent some time at Church Street Marketplace, did some exploring, and had maple-flavored ice cream overlooking Lake Champlain. We then drove about 45 minutes to the Smuggler’s Notch region and stayed in Jeffersonville (population: 762). We had some Chinese take-out for dinner (if my in-laws don’t get Chinese food every few days, they start to wilt) and went to bed.

Day two included a trip through Smuggler’s Notch, a visit to Stowe, a long walk on the Stowe Recreation Path, and various stops to pick up maple syrup, cider donuts, cheese, and various other specialties. We finished off the day with a walk to get ice cream and got caught in a thunderstorm—we got a little wet but had plenty of laughs.

On day three, we explored the center of Jeffersonville (which took about a half hour on foot), hiked to a waterfall, visited some covered bridges, and then took another long walk on the Lamoille Rail Trail (image above). At 93 miles long, it is the longest rail trail in New England. We walked about 8 miles round trip through forests and quaint farms. It was gorgeous, the bugs weren’t bad, and we even got a handful of wild blackberries. We then took a drive to enjoy the scenery before dinner.

On our last day, we decided to take the slow route home- and I mean very slow. We cut through New Hampshire on the way up, accounting for half the drive. On the way back, we followed Route 100 all the way to the Massachusetts border, making a few little stops along the way. Ultimately, the drive now ranks in my top three- comparable to the Hudson River Valley in New York and Route 1 along the California coast. We then took route 2 home, cutting across much of northern Massachusetts and seeing towns I had never heard of even after growing up in the state. After an 8-hour haul, I can safely say I showed my in-laws Vermont. With traffic and a thunderstorm, I was exhausted by the time we got home and eager for a hard-earned beer, although first, I needed to wash mud from our rental car, the product of some very messy construction. I then sat down to see how my sales did while away. Mind you, it had only been two days away, as I checked my numbers the morning we left. Everything was as I feared.

July started as a dismal month, which I equate to a bit of the summer slump. When this happens, I get worried and begin to explore strategies to boost sales. A week before our trip, I took a free online course on Amazon Advertising (Kindlepreneur) and decided to give the clunky and confusing platform another shot. I had very little success using it before and always paid much more than I made back in sales. But with my charts flatlining, I decided to invest a little time and money. If anything, when you use Amazon ads, you get a bump in numbers from the increased traffic.

I ran a campaign for Dawn of the Lightbearer. It started off slow, but I was pleased to see it turned my mouth around in just over a week and made July my best-selling month ever! It was exhilarating. But, of course, the little puff of air into my sail of hubris would be shortlived. Just when I thought it was finally happening, something broke the day before we left for Vermont. My impressions fell to zero (which also means my clicks and sales dropped to zero), and nothing I tried alleviated the problem. This seemed very strange. I did all I could to troubleshoot and scoured the internet looking for a solution. I dreaded contacting customer service knowing they often make things worse, but I bit the bullet. Now, for any author out there, you know how frustrating this was about to become.

I used their chat function because I didn’t feel like waiting 20 minutes on hold and emailing them often leads to a form response without an answer to your question. I chatted with someone in India who told me a known backend issue was preventing ads from showing for many authors. He thanked me for my patience and told me to rest assured that their engineering team was working on the issue.

As a self-published author, I’ve had plenty of run-ins with Amazon customer service and knew this was a copy-and-paste response. I had my suspicions that when they said “authors,” they really meant indie authors, so I did a quick search and confirmed that the only sponsored ads showing were for the big publishing houses like HarperCollins. I then checked the Amazon ads status page. It was all in the green and indicated no issues. Hmm, this seems strange if a known problem was impacting many authors.

I was upset. I had wasted hours trying to figure out the issue before contacting customer service, assuming it was my error. I wanted to yell, scream, and complain about this injustice, but I knew from past experience that any conflict would lead to a retaliatory response. Their customer service agents have a lot of power to make things difficult for you, like making your book disappear. I politely suggested they post something on their status page so people don’t waste time troubleshooting a problem outside their control. They thanked me and said they would forward my suggestion, that my ticket would remain open, and that they would notify me when the assigned team fixed the issue. Four days passed, and the problem persisted- no update and the status page remained all in the green. My ad showed as delivering on the dashboard, but I did not receive a single impression the entire time I was in Vermont.

On my return, I accessed my ticket and reported to them that the issue continued. I got basically the same response. Meanwhile, I lost all the progress and momentum I made with the ad. Sales flatlined, and my numbers went back to the pre-ad levels. Amazon ads is working for me today, but I’m getting nowhere near the impressions I was getting before the glitch- and you guessed it, I have yet to receive the promised update that the service was back online, and I don’t expect to. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect my ad was doing too well, so they throttled it back. I imagine the ad will start costing me more than I make again, and whatever they “fixed” is for their benefit, not mine.

I’ve kept meticulous records of my journey, and I have evidence that Amazon goes to great lengths to keep indie authors from becoming too successful and competing with the big publishing houses. When you make a sale, you will first dip in your rankings to absorb the bump you’ll get from the sale. Immediately after the bump, you will dip again to correct its impact. It then returns you back to your presale ranking and the slow decline. Only if you make several sales in a row will you see lasting effects. I’ve been tracking this for three years, and the pattern never fails.

I try not to let it get to me, but it’s tough. Us authors have little to no recourse. We are stuck with a trillion-dollar Goliath that treats us like dirt. Amazon accounts for 83% of all ebook sales in the US (and 50% of paperback). If you want to sell books, you need to use them, and they know it. They invest just enough resources into their platforms to get our money and then stack all the cards against us with AI and algorithms. If you want to promote your book to readers, you have to pay them, which eats into your royalties. It is very much run like a casino- the house always wins. We get minimal sympathy, too. Many view indie authors as not legitimate, and assume being able to sell via Amazon KDP is a privilege, not realizing that the traditionally published world is even worse.

Anyway, I’m getting whiny, and that is not my intention. I use this blog to document my writing journey as much for me as for you, and that means I need to capture the hiccups. Much like the drive back from Vermont, most of my writing journey has been breathtaking and a joy, but there have still been bumps, dead ends, bad drivers, construction, traffic, and inclement weather. Such is the essence of a journey. It requires difficulties to make it interesting and makes the destination all that more special. If you could teleport from here to there without the struggle, it would lose all its luster. My journey is felt and the destination earned, and that is just how I like it.

Cheers!