Kindle Sales Rank

Sales rank fluctuates depending on how many books are available and how many books have sold. For example, if on a given day one thousand books are uploaded to the system, that will change the rankings more than, say, ten books being added that day. They are updated hourly and can vary widely from hour to hour. It also depends on how often books are bought. Rankings stay fairly consistent if sales are about the same number each day, but if you have ten sales one day and no sales for a week, that will affect your ranking. I watch them, but do not pay too much attention to them unless my books are in the one thousand or less rankings.

The algorithm Amazon uses is a carefully held secret.

However, in your case, what probably happened is that several people bought the second book within a short period of time, raising the ranking. Unless sales remain at that level, the ranking will quickly drop.

The only time an Amazon ranking means anything worth getting excited about is when it's no more than three figures and stays that way for days or weeks. Beyond that, the only real effect your Amazon rankings will have on you is crazy-making.

On the first day I had my book out, I sold 21 total and my rankings ended up:

Historical Fantasy - #39
Overall Paid - #4200-ish

Likely this means that in Amazon's given sampling period 39 other titles in historical fantasies sold more copies than me, and 4200 books across the board sold more than me. That was with just 21 copies, to put everything into perspective.

As with all these things the top ten in each genre and overall probably account for 90% of the sales. Well, maybe the top 100 or so overall. But in historical fantasy, I'd bet the top ten are the big sellers.

As noted, the exact calculation is a secret, but the basics are more titles sold more recently.

So right now a book that sold 10 copies in the last day and none for the previous 29 will rank higher than a book that sold 1 copy every day for the past 30.

So it's not at all about the total books sold. That doesn't figure in at all.

stray said:

Thanks people. That makes more sense. If we knew the time periods they used we could probably do the math.
Thanks.

Click to expand...

Not really. It's a complicated algorithm, and I've even heard speculation that it includes 'searches' as well as 'purchases' (but let me stress that that's speculation). And as far as time periods, it seems to be several times an hour, so it wouldn't really help much.

As I said above, trying to find meaning in Amazon rankings is an exercise in author-crazy-making.