All About Amazon Rankings

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Puzzled by all these rankings on Amazon?  You are not alone!  Author ranking, bestseller ranking, sales ranking, popularity lists… Here are the most important rankings and what they mean. One thing for all rankings: they are valid only in one specific country.  Your ranking on Amazon.com maybe totally different from the one in Germany or the UK.

 

  • The author ranking shows how the author compares to other authors who sell books.
  • The sales ranking shows how well your book ranks in sales out of millions of other books.
  • Bestseller Rank is calculated once per day (if your ranking is more than 10,000 – otherwise hourly) with “current projections as well as historic sales information playing a key role in Amazon’s calculations”.
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Rankings are different in every country’s Amazon store, as Amazon sorts the world’s nations into different markets.  This way a book can get a wide variety of rankings – depending on the country.  A #1 rank means this book has recently sold more than any other product in that category, in this specific country.
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The Rank is Based on Sales, not Reviews or Ratings.
Certainly do reviews and rankings help your sales, and in turn your sales rank.  Jim Kukral, founder of the author marketing club explains: “You will never be able to sustain a top ranked, top-selling book on Amazon without sales. And there’s no way to “game” sales except to spend the money and buy more books. Sure, you could price your book $.99 and then take hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money and buy your own books in an attempt to boost your sales ranking. But Amazon will only count sales in small increments.”

“For example, you can’t go and order 1,000 of your books at once and expect it to jump your sales rank.  It will only count as a few sales.  This is of course to stop people from doing that exact thing.”

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Buying into Bestseller Lists
“Some have tried to get around this by funnelling their seed money to “best-seller” outlets who will, for a fee, take your money and have their network of people around the world buy one or two copies of your book at a time, which can and does work. This is how many NY Times best-sellers are allegedly produced.”

10 sales each day for a week get you higher than 100 sales one day and none on the other day. KindleUnlimited is not as bad a deal as one might think and: you get an immediate boost if someone borrows your book.  For your sales ranking all borrows count immediately.

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One More Rank: Bestseller
Only the top 10,000 books are calculated hourly, while books with a ranking of 10,000+ are calculated once per day with ‘current projections as well as historic sales information playing a key role in Amazon’s calculations’. Paid and free books on Amazon are weighted the same when it comes to the Amazon Bestsellers rank, but are published in different bestseller lists. To increase your bestseller rank, your book must sell more units than other books in the same category.

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Amazon’s Predictive Analytics
Author Phoenix Sullivan explains how Amazon algorithm works. Here is a short listing he extracted and which is explained in length in his article How those Algorithms work.
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Differences between the popularity and bestseller lists:

  • The popularity list includes freebies. The bestseller list does not.
  • The popularity list does not include borrows. The bestseller list does.
  • The popularity list has a price bias. The bestseller list does not.
  • The popularity list influences the bestseller list more than the bestseller list influences popularity.
  • The popularity list includes sales (and sales-equivalents) over the last 30 days. The bestseller list weights sales history, but not to the extent the popularity list does.
  • The popularity list re-submits about once per day. The bestseller list re-crunches hourly.
  • The popularity list has a lag time of about 2 days. The bestseller list has about an hour lag time.
  • The popularity list rank does not display anywhere except in the list itself. The bestseller rank is the rank you find on a book’s product page.

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Rob Nightingale Wrote a Great Explanation about Amazon’s Predictions:
“Recent sales alone are not all that’s taken into account.  Amazon also has predictive features built into the Bestsellers Rank, which are likely to be based on historical data of a title.  This is how a newly released book can have a higher ranking than a book released three years ago, even when the latter has more cumulative sales – Amazon can predict that the new release will overtake that book in a given period of time.”
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“A book that’s ranked 800,000 can see it’s rankings skyrocket to 200,000 just with a couple of sales. As you move up the ladder, however, Amazon’s complex algorithm kicks in soon thereafter making it harder for you to break through the 100,000 milestone, and even harder to get past 10,000.  This is because these higher rated products have historical data to back them up, so a lull in sales for them won’t result in as dramatic a drop in rankings as it would for a new title with less data to draw on. In all, the ranking seems to be somewhat logarithmic.”
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See also a Video:
Amazon Keywords & other Tips by Jason Matthews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC8lD9EaGOQ

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Want to be successful selling Kindle books?  Write more high-quality books so that it can get more high-quality reviews to be placed onto wish lists and “also-bought lists”.  Write better descriptions for your books, test new covers, new prices and place your book into a different category to try out how it fares there.  Most important: find ways to get more people to leave high-quality reviews.

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If you would like to get a mentor and support in all things publishing, have your book intensively promoted and learn how to navigate social media sites – or to learn how you can make yourself a name as an author through content writing: We offer for three months all this and more for only $179 – or less than $2 per day!
Learn more about our customized Online Seminar / Consulting for writers: http://www.111Publishing.com/Seminars

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