27th May, 2008
The Last Word on Bookhabit (Honest)
Tuesday, 10:38 am in Books & Comics
You know, the more I think about this whole Bookhabit thing the more annoyed with it I get. My opinions on the subject have been slowly growing in the comments of the last post, but I think I’m going to summarise them here, for posterity’s sake.
Non-Transparent Process
As a bureaucrat, this is the one that pisses me off the most. I remember back in between Round 1 and Round 2 I got an email from Claire that very obtusely hinted at the voting system for Round 2 being ‘weighted’ in some way. It wasn’t any more explicit than that, and it never became any more explicit than that; at no time in the last two weeks were any of the authors ever informed about the specifics of the ranking system. In fact – as mentioned to me in the email – Bookhabit was deliberately obfuscating the process in an effort to “prevent gaming of the system”.
Fair enough? Well, no, not really. Because the site essentially changed the rules of the game not half-way through play, but after all the goals had been scored. “Bad” votes weren’t eliminated as the contest progressed, but were deliberately left in right until the end. Why do this?
Misrepresentation
(This goes for the “vote weighting” thing, too.)
Here’s the deal; the system as it progressed was set up to allow people with more dedicated fans to pull a higher rank. The system at the end was set up to specifically disadvantage books that had become popular extraneous to the Bookhabit site.
To me, this is Bookhabit essentially wanting to have its cake and eat it too. It wanted the extra hits and Google traffic bought in by the ‘popular’ authors but it didn’t want any of these actually popular books getting into its Top 10. Why? The official reasons for the vote-changing at the end of the competition hinged on what I suppose you’d call “site users” versus “book fans”. Rankings by “site users” – user that ranked more than one book, signed up before the contest, downloaded more books and so forth – were weighted more than rankings by fans who’d been brought in by individual authors to support their book in particular. More on that in a minute, but…
Do I have a problem with that? Well, no. Not if the site had been flat-out honest about that throughout the competition. But it wasn’t. It was pitching Round 2 as a “popular vote” and so that’s what authors like 
randomredux and I treated it like.
You know what the fourth and fifth Google hits for the search term ‘bookhabit’ are? I'll give you one guess.1
This is what bothers me. That we put in all this effort with promotion – and yeah, it was effort – and in the end the site essentially turns around and says, “Oh sorry, we didn’t tell you before but that’s not how it works.” Would we have bothered to promote the site as hard as we did if we’d know that to start with? Hell no.
Disrespect to the Fans
This one was originally pointed out by randomredux but I agree with him wholeheartedly.
Bookhabit disrespected you. Our fans; the people who took time out to show your support for us. Because they downranked your vote. Because you’re apparently not the “right” people for their site. And this pisses me off. This really pisses me off, because as I’ve mentioned before, it’s all about the fans. Fans are everything, our most precious currency. I spend a lot of time trying to interface with the fen – both new and old – because I know you guys are important.
Bookhabit, apparently, doesn’t. And that’s just bad for business.
Time and time again, whenever anyone looks at success in the long tail or micropayments market, it’s constantly shown that success comes from fans. It’s the viral market at its rawest and yeah, it’s about popular appeal. Hell, it’s not just the long tail. Economics works like this. You can be lauded by critics all you like, but you only get to be J.K. Rowling if people like you.2
This is where I think Bookhabit’s dropped the ball; they’re trying to seem ‘literary’ rather than popular. And seriously, I don’t have a problem with that. I think it’s a crappy business move, but I don’t have a problem with it.
I have a problem with them implying otherwise.
The Cheating Thing
Since I’m talking about fans, I’m going to talk about cheating. And let’s be honest, here; Chainbreaker dropped from 5th place to 24th. That’s a hell of a lot of votes taken out, and there’s nothing about that that doesn’t make us look like we were playing dirty (book) pool.
Were we?
Well, I don’t know. I’ve tried to keep it a bit don’t-ask-don’t-tell but I can say with a (mostly) clear conscience3 that if there was cheating, it didn’t come from any official source.
It came from our fans.
And you know what? That’s fucking awesome! Because that’s exactly the kind of fan we’re looking for; the sort of people who are prepared to go above and beyond the call to support us. It’s a dog-eat-fucking-dog world out there and you don’t win by playing nice. Bookhabit calls it ‘cheating’. I call it “dedication”.
So thank you, whoever you were (no no, don’t tell me; it’s your secret). You fucking rock my world.
A Bad Deal for Authors
Since we’re out of the comp, I guess I can finally say what I’ve been thinking from the start, and it’s up there in the subheading. I’ve given them a run, and at the end of the day, I don’t think Bookhabit is a good deal for aspiring authors sitting in the long tail. I just can’t shake the feeling that they’ve essentially – consciously or not – set themselves up as the modern version of a vanity press.
Vanity press; the thing every aspiring author is warning about. Essentially, you pay a truck load of money up front, get printed copies of your book and then it’s up to you, the author, to sell it. Vanity press is expensive, at the very least, and is notorious for making big promises and delivering crappy products.
Bookhabit’s pricing model makes it feel like a vanity press. Is it reasonable for them to take a 60% cut? Okay, they have to cover site costs somehow, but their rates just aren’t competitive.
Lulu, for example, takes a 25% commission on top of royalties. So for the ‘equivalent’ price of a Bookhabit book, $2.50, you the author are making $2 as opposed to Bookhabit’s $1. And at Lulu – indeed, all other distribution sites I’ve found thus far – you’re free to set your own pricing structure. If you want to give your ebook away for free, go nuts. If you want to sell it for $100, you can go nuts on that, too.
So 60% is a lot, and Bookhabit’s author pay-out model is deliberately structured to keep most of those royalties within the site itself. When signing up, you the author agrees that Bookhabit doesn’t have to pay you until you’ve earned a stored total of $50 in revenue. That’s a sale of 42 books, and if you look at the site I don’t think there’s a single book (at least, not one that I could find) that’s yet hit that mark. Bookhabit, in fact, encourages its authors to use their pre-$50 revenue to buy other books from the site. In other words, the whole place is essentially set up like one big pyramid scheme with Bookhabit itself the only one ever really making any money.
The fact of the long tail is that almost no-one is ever going to hit that magical $50 margin; randomredux and I have, for example, $6 in “royalties” that we are never ever going to see again. In essence, Bookhabit ‘owes’ us $6 but because they’re never going to have to pay it out, they’re free to – in effect – use that $6 as if it were site profit. There’s actually a financial term for this kind of trading off unactualised liabilities that I’m sure I’d be able to remember if I were an economist rather than a writer, but if I’m not mistaken it’s considered really bad practice and has, in fact, sent not just a few businesses bankrupt.
Dodgy accounting and huge royalties aside, Bookhabit also just doesn’t offer any value-add services to authors. Okay, they have a blog they occasionally use to promote some of their authors in. Well, you know what? I have a blog I occasionally use to promote authors in4 and a) I’m pretty sure I have a higher readership than they do, and b) I don’t charge a 60% commission.
For an unpublished author looking for a distribution service there are much better choices out there. For all its problems, the aforementioned Lulu will sell you an ISBN and get your book listed on Amazon. Plus, of course, they do PoD printing. Mobipocket also has links to Amazon and other ebook distribution services. And if you’re a US citizen you can go straight to the source and distribute your book for the Kindle. All of these services have higher royalties, larger markets and more flexible pricing structures.
All of which is why randomredux and I pulled Chainbreaker from the site. We’re still struggling through our long tail, but we’ll struggle through it without supporting a site I don’t think is set up to do anything other than exploit aspiring authors.
- For the record, because it will change long before this post does. ^
- And, indeed, “critical acclaim” and “popular appeal” more often than not have an inverse relationship. ^
- Okay okay, I registered twice. Forgive me! ^
- Got an ebook you think I might like? Drop me a line! ^
- « Previous
- Next »
Related Posts
Comments
-
Their DKP system is full of massive fail.
-
I bet they wouldn’t even let me wear two hats!
-
Pingback
Pingback to this post.
-
Bookhabit
Reading this leaves me thinking there is a further explanation required, as we obviously didn’t achieve the transparency our email at the end of Round 2 we set out to give. We were not weighting the competition against a popular author - for all of the reasons you point out – that would be counter-productive. I think you did a great job and thank you for your promotional efforts.
I’m at a loss to see how we were disrespecting your fan base or our fan base. A book ranked 1st in a list of one did not get weighted as highly as a book that was #1 in a longer list - that is not about disrespecting a fan base and I’ve just not been able to come up with a reason of how it could be disrespectful? One writer did contact me thinking that we had wiped out all of her friend’s rankings, so maybe the way I wrote the email confused what actually happened. No rankings were removed unless the user had created multiple usernames. I was trying to reassure the writers that it didn’t come down to seeing who could round up the most friends. When we did some computer modeling we found out that the results barely changed if we removed the #1’s. That strengthens the argument that the writers who had managed to round up a big fan base had a big fan base for a reason and were good beyond that - other people were now appreciating that having read their work, as their ranking didn’t change, and they were voted highly on other people’s lists too. We were congratulating you and your fan base!
We wanted people who appreciate a reading to see some new authors. Fantastic that your friends, family and fans ranked your book number one. Beyond that, the very transparent idea was to get everyone to take a look at the other books entered. All of the writers are then connected with new readers. You included. The competition was weighted towards the rankings of people who had taken the time to read more of the books entered. It didn’t make a scrap of difference where they came from. A book ranked 1st in a list of one did not get weighted as highly as a book that was #1 in a longer list of e.g. 10 books – that’s not obfuscating, I thought we were obvious about that – it was a ranking, not a first past the post voting system. We said in the Round 2 email to remember that getting more people to read more books was the goal. We just weren’t going to tell you exactly the formula as you would have ended up in a novel competition for people who could each create the most usernames and manipulate the outcome. All of your fans could have read and ranked more books – we would have loved it. Being popular was never a disadvantage.
The email you are referring to related to your question of whether you were disadvantaged against people who had more than one book in Round 2. Your question: “I was just wondering, with Round 2, how will you be treated the authors who have two or even three or more books in the round?” My answer: “We’ve tried to make the ranking cater for as many eventualities as we could think of, not to advantage or disadvantage any book. [You can read manipulation of the rankings here or that an author had 2 books or people who voted books down just because they were high up, but not that popularity was going to be punished] Keeping our methods quiet will obviously help that. We’d like to believe that the best 10 books will get through on merit, but there are obviously promotional aspects to it. Having one or more books in the competition won’t change that. I can’t really say too much more than that, other than good luck!” I even told you that promotional aspects would help, and they did – we didn’t build a formula around merit – that was the privilege of the users!
Bad votes were left in until the end – and the reason explained. If rankings were genuine it wouldn’t matter when they were pulled out. If people knew they were being caught then they would get sneakier. If you had been 11th and found out that the 10 books above you had computer experts manipulating the voting, then you wouldn’t have wanted us to keep their rankings live. Most of the cheating occurred in the last 24 hours and especially the last hour. We needed time to review that, so the biggest change because of cheating was always going to happen at the end. As you have guessed you did have quite a few people ranking you who created more than one user name. Again, if you found out that you weren’t in the Top 10 because other people had their friends doing that I can guess your reaction.
You also dropped down for a couple of other reasons explained in the email – the ranking was close, and other people who had created multiple user logins had ranked your book highly. When their multiple rankings were removed it also affected you. Some people had their book go up because of that. Again if it wasn’t genuine then there isn’t an issue.
Your business model complaints don’t go unheard, although it helps when they are addressed directly to us. We are a new site, and our pricing model is a relatively new idea (price increases with popularity). We are looking to give our writers help to make them successful. Strangely, this costs us money. As we say on our website – we make around 40% once Paypal’s charges are deducted. At $1 a book, we are hardly striking it rich. Vanity press charges you to print your book. We don’t charge you anything – we only get 40% if together we do the work to get people to the site and our writers are successful. In my book that’s a win-win.
We are also more than happy for you to put up your book for free and sent you an email confirming this when you first uploaded your book, but it just couldn’t happen while you were in the competition to keep things fair between all the books. I guess you forgot this.
I thought reading your blog on the long tail that you understood what we were trying to do. We encourage authors to put their work up where they can to be noticed and celebrate that. You’d made me a fan through that alone. Good luck out there.
-
Re: Bookhabit
Well, thank you for taking the time to respond to this. It’s always interesting to read the other side of the story, as it were, though I think you’ve misconstrued a few of the points I’ve made.
With regards to the book rankings, I’m not annoyed that you changed the system, I’m annoyed that it was changed after voting had closed. You were obviously watching things closely and I guess what I’m struggling to understand is why you didn’t fess up two, three, fourteen days ago with how things were going to work behind the scenes. We have this motto of sorts at work,
Technical problems require technical solutions
, and it seemed to me that you were trying to solve a technical problem (the system allowing gaming of the voting system) using a social engineering solution (we just won’t tell people what the formulae is until after the fact).No matter how you want to spin or or what your reasoning is, that bothers me. Because you’ve essentially changed the rules of the game after the last goal has been scored. If I did that at work – broadcast a policy change after it’d been implemented – I’d get raked across the coals all the way up to senior management. It’s not about what you did or why, it’s about when and how.
You’re also being a bit contrary; saying removing votes didn’t affect users when obviously it did, and we’re a case in point. From this end, we had no way of knowing what was going on; we thought we were doing well, because your system was set up to trick us into thinking that. What was the point of having a leaderboard if you knew you were going to completely restructure the voting? Look, I’m sure you didn’t have any malicious intent but from this angle it looks like either massive incompetence (to let the ‘bad’ votes in in the first place when you obviously knew you were going to get rid of them and had a way of filtering them out) or deliberate shifty behaviour (cue conspiracy theories).
The fact that you obviously don’t see why this bothers me (
If rankings were genuine it wouldn’t matter when they were pulled out.
)… well, bothers me. Because it does matter when they were pulled out; they should’ve been pulled out live to give authors a truthful indication of their positions. And I’m sorry you can’t see why that is.We are looking to give our writers help to make them successful. Strangely, this costs us money.
I have to say, that as someone who’s been involved in fandom a lot I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy here, I’m afraid. I know a lot of people who run fanfic archives – ones much bigger than Bookhabit – who do it all out of their own pocket. And sure, that’s not a business model (because fandom’s not about money), but even still; I know you can provide a comparative service on the sort of pocket change earned by a high school student. (And if you think you can’t; I’d suggest investigating a bit more…)
We are also more than happy for you to put up your book for free and sent you an email confirming this when you first uploaded your book, but it just couldn’t happen while you were in the competition to keep things fair between all the books. I guess you forgot this.
No I didn’t, but that’s also not really what I’m talking about.
I thought reading your blog on the long tail that you understood what we were trying to do.
I do understand. I just don’t think the way you’re doing it is beneficial to me personally as an author. And it’s my prerogative to make that call in an open market. /shrugs
-
Re: Bookhabit
The only real thing that this whole process showed was feigned naivety. Take any structure with defined boundaries and apply a liberal dose of human nature and the result is usually quite predictable. Particularly for those running the competition. I just can’t accept that they didn’t see this issue from the start.
As an outsider looking in on this whole issue (not an author, haven’t read any of the books in question) I just can’t believe that people making money off books and a liberal dose of “the internets” didn’t “get it” in about 10 seconds flat. So I really do think that the whole idea here was “quick lets offer a cash reward and convert all of those author’s fan bases into our fan bases”, and it was quite cynically applied.
Then the problem occurred, its a little bit like non targeted web advertising (which by the way doesn’t make money and is part of the reason why google dominates this space). People were looking for a way to fan squee all over their favourite authors, and your page rank was getting boosted beyond all your expectations. Incoming links abound and your member count soared! But you didn’t benefit…they didn’t buy anything. They “searched” for “rabid fandom promotion” and you offered them not merchandise for a fandom, but unrelated books by unrelated authors. All of a sudden your $0.25/user/month business model with which you got your startup money from your generous friend with the cats is blown out of the water. You’ve tripled your member based but your revenue per member ratio has died!
Lets recap.
1. You created a system that hugely encouraged people to signup just vote just for their fan author.
2. You place no restrictions on signups and votes either in the rules or in the mechanics of your site.
3. You pretend to be surprised when people “game” your system. Game is awarded inverted commas in this instance because given that you created both the physical restrictions (coding) and the moral restrictions (game rules), both of the above really are entirely valid.
And in regards to point three. I believe that you operate from NZ.
Not that I care, I’ve got other legal battles to fight at the moment, but you might want to check the probity portions of the Fair Trading Act 1986 sections 17 (a)(b), 22(1)(2)(b).
Your real problem here is that because you are in a standing commercial arrangement with each of the contestants and money is changing hands they now have tortial remedies available to them.
As a general precedent in Aus (admittedly this potentially differs in NZ) courts won’t award damages for losing the “chance” to win a prize unless it is a defined % win chance. However deceptive or misleading conduct will still stick, and given the staggered nature of the contest you might also be less protected.
But opening a web shop, dealing with matters like copyright and cash prizes I’m sure you’ve already spoken to a lawyer, just like you saw exactly what the outcome of your competition was going to be with regards to thousands of one time member/voters….right?
-
Royalties
Forgot to say: On our site it also says that we pay out when an account is cancelled. (I can see the email now.) It wouldn’t work out economically to to be paying out every sale. If you are a published author and have managed to earn royalties then you are likely to receive the publisher’s cheque after 6 months. All of a sudden $50 doesn’t sound so bad. Lulu also has much higher sales prices if that is what you decide, so they can wear that cost, but they also have a minimum for their services not just a % to cover when the sale price is low.
We do offer value added services - none of which we charge for - podcast interviews that go out through web networks is one thing we do for our authors to increase their visibility on the web.
We went live on our website with the competition launch. And it takes time to grow.
-
Firstly, I would always support a decision to go anywhere in the free market.
We didn’t change the system at any point. I’m not sure what you expected us to point out was going on behind the scenes – that we were looking out for cheaters? that the books were really close? that ranking one book 10th of 10 didn’t give it the same weight as a book ranking 10th out of 20? Most of these were either an obvious conclusion or something we emailed you about.
Removing cheating is not changing the system or gaming. I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing when we talk about gaming, so that’s one that could go back and forth for a while.
The system helped us work out cheating, but we still went through it all manually to ensure that it was all working correctly and that there was not a human explanation. At the end, when the cheating was not isolated to the previous few books it had been, it would have been very hard to keep up so there was always going to be a delay. The majority of the cheating on your book was within the last 24 hours. If you had known that you were further down the leaderboard, would you have cheated more? That is a conclusion that could easily be reached from your statement, so I guess we’ll not be able to agree on that one either.
The problem is not that we couldn’t find the people who were cheating, the problem becomes how to stop the cheating. The cleverer the software companies get, the cleverer the hackers get. We would have to employ a dedicated team of hundreds to solve this problem, but maybe they would all work for free too?
Mat – We unashamedly tried to get traffic to our website and to read what the writers had produced. From what people have said I’m pretty sure that is one of the main reasons people put their book in the competition. Sure you will get the people who are not interested in reading more than their friend’s book, but you also get people who are interested in reading more widely.
In regards to your point 1: The design of Round 2 of the competition included ranking as a way to get people reading other books, not just their own. We knew that there were going to be a lot of different genres, styles, etc. That’s like any bookstore. Plenty of people browse in a bookstore too. It’s chicken and egg. We need readers and writers and without one, we don’t get the other, so we need to consider ways to stimulate that. People aren’t just going to stumble across the writers, we are trying to generate interest in them. I’m not sure why that’s strange.
Your point 2: The rules of the competition included a person being only allowed one user name.
How do the admittances here of cheating come into any law suits?
I guess you can always apply cynicism, but we genuinely saw this as a benefit to the writers. They also received feedback from other writers that they never would have connected with. And you could cynically say that that wasn’t worth anything, but that’s up to you.
-
If you had known that you were further down the leaderboard, would you have cheated more?
I’m sorry, but quite frankly I take offence to that. I was honest in what I said above in my post. Obviously I don’t control the actions of my fans, but – an offhand “vote early vote often” joke aside –I never seriously encouraged anyone to participate in the competition dishonestly. Maybe it’s you who needs to look at the so-called modelling you’ve been using to detect “cheating”. I know my co-author, for example, has five people living in his house; they all would’ve voted for us, and those five votes would’ve all originated from the same IP. Were they discounted?
For the record, the usernames I did register were
alisdeeandesia. Both their ratings were filed on the first day. I believe I made it quite clear above that if I knew our position wasn’t “close” much earlier on in the competition, I would’ve pulled our campaign, not “cheated more”; that was rather one of my whole points.Clare, I have to admit that I’m a little confused as to what you’re trying to achieve by arguing here, other than making me doubt your grasp of PR. You’re a public site now; you’re going to get criticism. I respect your right to respond but, as a hint: Arguing endlessly with me isn’t helping your site’s professional image any.
-
Pingback
Pingback to this post.
-
1 computer 1 reader??
Good point there, I have to agree with Dee - just how wealthy are you guys in NZ? Does every last family member who wants to read the book and say their say, have to have their own separate computer and ISP? Here in SA, if a family has a computer they are well-off and if they have a functional internet connection, they are considered quite rich! But we are all literate, therefore, if my sister, my father and my mother all used the same internet connection to vote for me and post comments, each with their own separate username and password, you’d consider that CHEATING? I.e. DISHONESTY if your sister and your mother both want a vote?
Dishonesty -??? for bringing 3 users instead of 1? (I have to add that almost all of my family members went and actually bought a copy of the ebook! Although 3 of the 5 already had a copy I had emailed them! That’s support!) Or have I also misunderstood? Have none of my votes been removed?
All in all, Clare, I’m still waiting for that broad random readership you told me about. In my math, if I brought 60 clicks and there were 60 authors in the competition, 60 x 60 = 3600, not the 2400 you quoted me… of which most, yeah most were really only interested in Their Own Author’s books, because life’s tough and there are not all that many bored people around. From that angle, a weird little competition!
Whatever, it’s a funny fishbowl this life. I think I spot a pattern.