Something’s rotten in Denmark.
Last year, Kim and I released our first book together – Office of the Lost. It sold amazingly. For three months, there wasn’t a single day without a book sold, and often it was two or three or five. In the year since it released, it has sold almost 1,500 copies, which by trad publishing standards isn’t huge. But for an indie author like me, it was quite a ride. And the reviews were almost universally glowing.
Flash forward to October 2026 and the release of the sequel, Search for the Lost. While follow-ups almost always sell less than the original book in the series, this one faded way too quickly. It started with only twenty-eight preorders, and sales halved every day, until by day six it had its first day with no sales. In the month since it came out, it has sold just eighty-five copies, just seven in November.
So what happened?
I have to believe that a lot of the folks who read Office of the Lost and loved it would also like to read book two. But for some reason they’re not finding it. Which means they must not be seeing our promo, notifications, or newsletters.
What’s strange is that we’ve done almost exactly the same things that worked for OotL for Search for the Lost, and yet the result this time around seems to be vastly different. Why?
I have theories.
First, social media algorithms have gotten worse and worse over the last few years. I haven’t had a post go viral in probably a decade, and every year it seems to get worse. Whatever might have worked last year seems to have lost its potency entirely this time around.
Second, it’s gotten harder and harder to get folks onto my newsletter mailing list, and to keep them there. They seem to drop off almost as quickly as I can add them, especially because I run a clean list and stop sending to subscribers if they don’t open a newsletter or click a link for six months. So it’s harder to get the word out there too.
But the biggest likely culprit? Amazon. While you almost have to be on their platform – they’re the biggest bookseller in the world – they have gradually and consistently made it harder for folks to find our titles, especially for small authors like me and Kim. And while she has Author Karma like you wouldn’t believe, even her mojo didn’t work this time.
I’ve heard reports from a number of authors that their sales on Amazon have dropped off dramatically in the last few months.
Anyone who’s been on the internet as long as I have has seen this movie before. Marco and I started an internet business, catering to the LGBTQ+ community with a number of directories, back in 1997 (yes, I am that old LOL). For a while, our business grew like crazy, and for fifteen years it was everything we dreamed of.
And then our search ranking started to drop, many of our pages were no longer indexed, and bit by bit our information was taken from us and presented on the search engine page, so no one had to click through to our pages anymore to get it anymore. It destroyed our original sites, the last of which we shut down this year.
What happened to us has a name. It’s called enshittification – a term famously coined by Corey Doctorow – and it goes like this: First a platform ropes in users, offering them an experience they can’t get anywhere else. Then it pulls in businesses and makes itself indispensable to them. Finally it starts extracting value – think the boiling frogs metaphor. The platform gets worse and worse for the users and businesses on it, while the shareholders become richer.
So what can we do about it?
Eventually these platforms will become useless enough that they will be abandoned, or they will crash and burn, and something new (and hopefully better) will arise in their place. Or so I can hope.
One of the huge themes of the US election was pushback against the tech overlords who are trying to push us into an AI-run world where none of us has a job.
I have to believe that it’s not inevitable. That things can change. That there’s a better path forward than the one we are on.
In the meantime, what can I do as an author?
Most months, I sell more books in person than I do on all the online platforms combined, and the margins are much better. I have steadily increased the number of in-person events I attend to sell books, and this has helped.
I’m also making as many person-to-person connections in the industry as I can, hoping to finally make the leap to whatever the next level might be.
And I keep writing, and being thankful for my fans.
There are things you can do to help, too, especially right now.
If you liked Office of the Lost and haven’t picked up Search for the Lost yet, you can give it a try here:
https://www.jscottcoatsworth.com/book/search-for-the-lost/
If you did read it, please post a review on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Search-Lost-Chaos-Order-Book/dp/B0HD32N2RF/
Or on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256454471
And if you have friends who you think would like the book, please recommend it to them. The only thing that can beat the inhumanity of these platforms is the human touch.
More generally, search out and read human-written books. Reject books written by AI, with covers created by AI, or narrated by AI. Celebrate the uniquely human craft of creative writing and the people who work their asses off to bring it to you.
The world shifted on its axis last week, and I am much more hopeful for the world than I was a couple months ago.
Maybe I’m hopelessly naïve. But I still believe, if we work together, we make it a better place for all of us.