How Authors and Publishers quickly determine if a book is selling well on Amazon.
A trick to help buyers pick the highest rated book.
Everyone knows that Amazon is an easy place to go browsing for books. But once there, how can readers determine whether book number 1 or book number 5 on the page has the highest ranking in the three categories under which it is listed?
When you go on Amazon, type your favorite author’s name into the search bar in the Kindle Store up comes a list of their books. You click on their latest book title, and up comes the detail page for that book.
If you scroll down the page a little bit more, you come to the heading called Product details. Here you’ll find the ASIN, Publisher, Publication date, and at the very bottom, the Best Sellers Rank for that book in 3 categories.
Here’s an example of where my first book, Vengeance, currently is ranked.
So, this is telling us that there are 1,704,146 books that rank higher than Vengeance on Amazon at this point in time. Amazon issues new ranking numbers every 60 - 90 minutes. In the Private Investigator Mysteries (Kindle Store) sub-category there are only 12,182 books that rank higher.
To give these numbers some perspective, here is a chart I put together that shows the ballpark numbers of Amazon Sales Ranking to the number of eBook Copies Sold.
So, if an author sells 5 books on Wednesday, and 4 the following Tuesday their ranking won’t be that high, but averaged out over the entire month they’ll make some coffee money.
An author or publisher could spend their entire week analyzing ways to get a better rank on the Amazon site. But why would they do that, you ask?
Because once a book reaches a high enough ranking, then Amazon’s Algorithms kick in and they start advertising the book on the site to help it sell more copies. One tool that authors and publishers use to try and reach a higher rank is to pick sub categories that have less competition in them. By doing this their book will have a higher ranking and it will hopefully get to a high enough level that Amazon starts advertising it for free.
But why would Amazon spend their money advertising books for free when they sell their own ads on their site? Because they earn 30% - 65% off of every book that sells on their site so it’s in there best interest financially to pump up the books that are hitting the highest rankings.
Here’s an example of a less competitive category. Pulp Thrillers.
What is a Pulp Thriller, you ask?
When we think of Pulp fiction we think of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, or The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.
But in today’s world Pulp fiction isn’t as well defined as a style of writing, and to make matters worse when you search under this category on Amazon you find books that are clearly not Pulp at all.
So, tomorrow is Halloween. Do you have candy ready for the tricker treaters? Or, are you like the other 25% of folks that simply turn off their porch lights, pour themself and their partner a good glass of wine, and watch a horror movie down in the basement?
Until next time. Take care + Happy Halloween.