Lost Better Together and Also Bought Missing
One of the great things about the Amazon platform is that they reward success. The more books you sell, the more books they help you sell. A large part of this is driven by their search results sorting books by bestselling, but even more important are the persistent relationships built up between books based on sales records. Of these, the most important is the Better Together relation.
In short, if you find a book on Amazon, which we'll call Title A, it will normally display another book, Title B, as it's Better Together. Normally, Title B is simply the top book on the Also Bought list, which is no more than a list of books that customers who bought Title A also purchased, ranked by the order of the number of purchases. That's how it works when everything is going well in Amazon software land and nobody has purchased the Better Together slot to promote a new book.
A day or two ago, Amazon lost a large number of Better Together relationships, and not in the usual way of simply dropping titles from the lists all together when they go out of print or otherwise have a problem with their ISBN. The hard earned Also Bought positions of many books are Also Missing (couldn't resist). Depending on the popularity of Title A, it can contribute greatly to the sales of Title B, and even boost the sales of Titles C, D, E and F in the Also Bought list.
Anybody who's watched the Amazon platform over a long period of time recognizes that it temporarily loses some of its marbles from time to time. Better all of these peripheral issues like sales ranks and relationships get lost than sales records and customers. But it's still very irksome to the authors and publishers, waiting for the next update cycle to see if the relationships are restored, or the if the loss is made permanent. Don't forget that Better Together relations and Also Bought lists change naturally over time, but these sudden system wide changes are obvious if you're paying attention on a continual basis.
I'm not sure what caused the latest wipe-out of many of my titles relations, and those of some friends. I think it may be partially due to confusion over Lightning Source ebooks being removed from the Amazon system. When the ebook version of a title gets into the "remove" queue, maybe the relationships for the print versions are lost as well. Maybe it only happens when an e-book sale was part of the relationship. In any case, I know at least one publisher with no Lightning Source ebooks who lost dozens of Better Together and Also Bought relations this week, so maybe it's just a major glitch.
The only thing you can do, not that it will necessarily help, is gather evidence that your titles really were the Better Together yesterday and lost to view today. I do this with the aid of Google cache. Just Google "Buy this book with YOUR TITLE HERE" and save a copy of the results to your hard drive. Then click on the cached link in the Google results for each page, which will show Google's last visit to the page, and hopefully it will show the relationships you remember. Save the page, and move onto the next one. You can do the same thing with Also Bought lists books, but it's a little more work to find the Amazon results on Google, you need to know the titles already.
Once you have all of your evidence, hurry up and wait. Amazon usually works these things out by themselves, but if they don't you can include a couple of screen shots from your saves when you write them, and at least you may avoid the bedbug letter:-)
In short, if you find a book on Amazon, which we'll call Title A, it will normally display another book, Title B, as it's Better Together. Normally, Title B is simply the top book on the Also Bought list, which is no more than a list of books that customers who bought Title A also purchased, ranked by the order of the number of purchases. That's how it works when everything is going well in Amazon software land and nobody has purchased the Better Together slot to promote a new book.
A day or two ago, Amazon lost a large number of Better Together relationships, and not in the usual way of simply dropping titles from the lists all together when they go out of print or otherwise have a problem with their ISBN. The hard earned Also Bought positions of many books are Also Missing (couldn't resist). Depending on the popularity of Title A, it can contribute greatly to the sales of Title B, and even boost the sales of Titles C, D, E and F in the Also Bought list.
Anybody who's watched the Amazon platform over a long period of time recognizes that it temporarily loses some of its marbles from time to time. Better all of these peripheral issues like sales ranks and relationships get lost than sales records and customers. But it's still very irksome to the authors and publishers, waiting for the next update cycle to see if the relationships are restored, or the if the loss is made permanent. Don't forget that Better Together relations and Also Bought lists change naturally over time, but these sudden system wide changes are obvious if you're paying attention on a continual basis.
I'm not sure what caused the latest wipe-out of many of my titles relations, and those of some friends. I think it may be partially due to confusion over Lightning Source ebooks being removed from the Amazon system. When the ebook version of a title gets into the "remove" queue, maybe the relationships for the print versions are lost as well. Maybe it only happens when an e-book sale was part of the relationship. In any case, I know at least one publisher with no Lightning Source ebooks who lost dozens of Better Together and Also Bought relations this week, so maybe it's just a major glitch.
The only thing you can do, not that it will necessarily help, is gather evidence that your titles really were the Better Together yesterday and lost to view today. I do this with the aid of Google cache. Just Google "Buy this book with YOUR TITLE HERE" and save a copy of the results to your hard drive. Then click on the cached link in the Google results for each page, which will show Google's last visit to the page, and hopefully it will show the relationships you remember. Save the page, and move onto the next one. You can do the same thing with Also Bought lists books, but it's a little more work to find the Amazon results on Google, you need to know the titles already.
Once you have all of your evidence, hurry up and wait. Amazon usually works these things out by themselves, but if they don't you can include a couple of screen shots from your saves when you write them, and at least you may avoid the bedbug letter:-)
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