AuthorTrade.com: A unique way to waste $50 a month … and more!

AuthorTrade.com claims to level “the publishing playing field for all authors.” It does this by coming up with a somewhat unique method of making any author’s book supposedly climb up the rankings at Amazon.com: it gets other authors to buy your book.

Here’s how things work over there: you sign up and pay them $50 a month for each book you’d want to put in the program. Mind you, that book currently has to retail for 99 cents. (You also have to have a US Amazon account and a Paypal account.) That $50 gives you access to their “groundbreaking software which automatically matches you with other authors who want to buy your book.” Or, I guess, other authors who just want to raise their own rankings as well.

Once you pay, each day you decide how many books you want to swap: You can swap three, six, or none each day. Once you decide, AuthorTrade sends you a list of books to buy from other authors, and other authors will be told to buy yours as well, all of which is to be completed within 24 hours. Yeah, that’s right: I said “buy.” What, you thought that $50 was the only cost? BWAHAHAHA! You so funny!

Let’s say you pick to swap three books a day for twenty days. That means you’ll be paying $59.40 out of pocket, on top of that $50 fee for the allegedly groundbreaking software. That’s nearly $110. If you chose to do the whole nine yards, six books-a-day for thirty-one days, that would cost you $184.14, for a grand total of $234.14 for this particular promotion. True, you would sell, assuming everyone cooperated, 186 books, netting you a hefty royalty of … umm … about $65.00. Hmm. Well.

AuthorTrade “encourages legit daily sales” and nothing more, it says. That’s well and good, but since with all the variables in both sales and Amazon logarithms, there’s no way to really know how much those sales would impact your rankings. If other books in your categories happen to sell better or at the right time, your book stays stagnant. And a $65 return on an outlay of $234 doesn’t exactly make the proverbial nut in my book.

And I think we all know that ranking doesn’t answer the whole question to success on Amazon. Visibility is one thing, but reviews and ratings are another big part of the equation. There’s no requirement in the rules at AuthorTrade for users to review and rate the books they buy. Hell, you know most of them are just going to end up on their Manage Your Kindle page and float away into etheric oblivion. If you’d rather see high numbers on your book, rather than reviews from people who read and enjoyed what you worked so hard to create, hey, more power to you. You’re a braver man than I, Gunga Din.

This entire concept is regrettably insular and dependent on the luck of the cards. Like any advertisement you buy, you’re hoping new people see your book. If you buy an ad with one of the big (or not so big) e-book sites (ENT, POI, etc.), you have the chance of a lot of people seeing your book and getting intrigued. If your ranking goes up on Amazon, sure more folks MIGHT see your book. But 186 sales is not going to push it up to the Top 100 unless it’s a very very bad month for every traditionally published author on the planet who has a fan base. That ranking’s great, but only if someone’s searching in your category, or with one of your keywords, or mistypes your last name into the search box.

Last week, I compared Bookarma to Amway, the much-reviled pyramid merchandising scheme of the sixties and seventies. I should have waited on that analogy, but who could’ve known that a true Amway of the E-Book World would arise in the form of AuthorTrade?

Another point to consider is if you are planning to enter this system more than one month in a row, I wonder if AuthorTrade guarantees there will be another 186 fresh-faced authors who haven’t already purchased your book? I don’t see any real information on how many users AuthorTrade currently has, but there is a big ol’ note there that if you’ve already purchased one of the books you’re told to buy, you have to delete it and repurchase it. Unless AuthorTrade has the traffic to justify it, or you simply like to read a lot of 99-cent books, I can’t see much of an upside to this system.