Get ready authors, I’m about to blame The Algorithm.

If you have read articles or watched videos or see any analysis of just about anything right now, someone is blaming something on The Algorithm. If you’re not sure what The Algorithm is, it was first invented in 1996 by former Vice President Al Gore when he discovered rap music. He began to drop phat beats using one rhythm that continue to resonate today…

What is The Algorithm Really?

The Algorithm is the blanket term for recommendation engines that drive what content you see on YouTube, all forms of Social Media, Amazon, smart TVs, etc. At it’s heart, it’s a great concept: if you like X, you will probably like things that are similar to X. For instance, I like Star Trek: The Next Generation, so it’s likely I will enjoy Star Trek: Deep Space 9 or Star Trek: Picard.

The problem with The Algorithm is that when it decides you like X, it also decides you don’t like A, B, or C. (For example, I like Star Trek, so the Algorithm decides I don’t like Star Wars and so I never see any content for it. This is not true. I like them both.) The problem becomes you stop being exposed to ideas A, B, or C so you never get to know them and eventually end up in the dreaded Echo Chamber.

The Algorithm Happens

Still, if we’re smart, we’ll accept The Algorithm happens and use it to our advantage. I have been stuck in a bit of a LitRPG rut recently. ALL of these books feature male first-person POVs who go from zeros to heroes, the women are impossibly beautiful and the whole thing feels like something I should have stopped reading when I was 16.

Amazon Promotes Similarity

And Amazon will not stop recommending more of them. When I go to Amazon to shop for say…trash bags it recommends the next book in the Halls of Magic series. When I log into Kindle, I see Book 1 of eight to ten more series that all fit that same pattern and are maybe 5% different.

And that’s fine because I keep downloading which reinforces the pattern. Amazon decides I really like X so it sends me more and more X and less and less Y.

My advice: take advantage of this trend. Find a genre you love to read. Find your 5% difference and write. Your book will be more discoverable and you already know the audience. Once you get into your reader’s Echo Chamber, you will sell more books.

Give it a try and let’s see what happens?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay