Amazon and Sales Rankings
Do you watch your sales rank every day, every hour, every MINUTE? Then you are not alone. Many authors are obsessed with their sales rankings, even though they may not really understand how they work. Here's a litte info:
1. Amazon updates sales rank on all books every hour.
2. Sales rank goes up and down based on sales within a short time period.
3. If you use CreateSpace, you can track sales rank by watching the sales rank throughout the day, and running a report the next day, when most of the sakes are posted; but the sales of all the books on Amazon affect everyone's sales rank (once again, Sales Rank not a great indicator of sales)
4. I sold ten copies of a book yesterday, according to my sales reports. The sales rank varied throughout the day from 6,000 down to 39,000, with the lowest numbers posting late at night. Usually I don't pay much attention to sales rank, but I did because of this blog post. I'm one of those people who doesn't think that artificial methods to inflate a book's sales ranking helps.
In fact, I think it might hurt sales in the future because the buyers aren't really "buyers" that want the book.
Amazon has proven that using buyer information from past sales is the best way to find buyers for future books on similar subject matter or a similar genre. Aaron Shepard does an analysis on this in his excellent book, "Aiming at Amazon."
Amazon collects buyer information to promote more book sales. For example, if Sue Smith bought 10 mystery novels last year, then Sue is going to get e-mails and alerts about mystery novels. When Sue Smith logs in to her Amazon account, mystery novels will pop up in her profile as "More Items to Consider."
Cross promotion and tags are the key-- not artificially inflating the sales rank, which says almost nothing about a book's real success. My most successful book earns about 5K-10K in royalties every month. The sales rank is all over the place-- ranging from 4,000 all the way down to 450,000. Sometimes I will have 10 sales in one day, and sometimes I won't have a single sale in any given day. It varies.
But the same book has been increasing in sales steadily-- because Amazon is now promoting it with other, similar books. It's the "better together" phenomenon. Amazon will automatically start promoting your book with similar books once your sales start to create a pattern.
A few months ago, I even got an e-mail promoting my own book. It was sent to me because I purchase lots of tax and bookkeeping books on Amazon, and my new release was about promoting a tax practice.
I personally think that the best promotion is a heavy front-end promotion to people that really enjoy the genre and then Amazon will take over from there.
I reiterate that I don't think manipulating sales rank helps sales very much. But you could ask everyone who buys your book to leave a starred review-- reviews that are marked "Amazon Verified Purchase" help sales tremendously if they are positive and. Those reviews are cross-posted to the paper edition if you tell Amazon to link the e-book and p-book.
1. Amazon updates sales rank on all books every hour.
2. Sales rank goes up and down based on sales within a short time period.
3. If you use CreateSpace, you can track sales rank by watching the sales rank throughout the day, and running a report the next day, when most of the sakes are posted; but the sales of all the books on Amazon affect everyone's sales rank (once again, Sales Rank not a great indicator of sales)
4. I sold ten copies of a book yesterday, according to my sales reports. The sales rank varied throughout the day from 6,000 down to 39,000, with the lowest numbers posting late at night. Usually I don't pay much attention to sales rank, but I did because of this blog post. I'm one of those people who doesn't think that artificial methods to inflate a book's sales ranking helps.
In fact, I think it might hurt sales in the future because the buyers aren't really "buyers" that want the book.
Amazon has proven that using buyer information from past sales is the best way to find buyers for future books on similar subject matter or a similar genre. Aaron Shepard does an analysis on this in his excellent book, "Aiming at Amazon."
Amazon collects buyer information to promote more book sales. For example, if Sue Smith bought 10 mystery novels last year, then Sue is going to get e-mails and alerts about mystery novels. When Sue Smith logs in to her Amazon account, mystery novels will pop up in her profile as "More Items to Consider."
Cross promotion and tags are the key-- not artificially inflating the sales rank, which says almost nothing about a book's real success. My most successful book earns about 5K-10K in royalties every month. The sales rank is all over the place-- ranging from 4,000 all the way down to 450,000. Sometimes I will have 10 sales in one day, and sometimes I won't have a single sale in any given day. It varies.
But the same book has been increasing in sales steadily-- because Amazon is now promoting it with other, similar books. It's the "better together" phenomenon. Amazon will automatically start promoting your book with similar books once your sales start to create a pattern.
A few months ago, I even got an e-mail promoting my own book. It was sent to me because I purchase lots of tax and bookkeeping books on Amazon, and my new release was about promoting a tax practice.
I personally think that the best promotion is a heavy front-end promotion to people that really enjoy the genre and then Amazon will take over from there.
I reiterate that I don't think manipulating sales rank helps sales very much. But you could ask everyone who buys your book to leave a starred review-- reviews that are marked "Amazon Verified Purchase" help sales tremendously if they are positive and. Those reviews are cross-posted to the paper edition if you tell Amazon to link the e-book and p-book.
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