Amazon Rankings

Irysangel said:

Novelrank is pretty inaccurate, as well. I put one of my self-published books up to see what it would show as 'sold' and compared it to the reports of ACTUAL sales I can pull up on the KDP website. Yeah. Novelrank is more than 50% off of the actual number of sales.

I wouldn't pay much attention to it either. The only thing it tracks is how often your sales rank dips. It might be a sale (or seven!) but you have no way of knowing.

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Thanks for posting this. It's good to know.

Irysangel said:

Novelrank is pretty inaccurate, as well. I put one of my self-published books up to see what it would show as 'sold' and compared it to the reports of ACTUAL sales I can pull up on the KDP website. Yeah. Novelrank is more than 50% off of the actual number of sales.

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I agree. A very supportive family member bought 10 books of mine, at once, to give away as as gifts, from Amazon, and those sales never appeared on novelrank. Nor did I see any bump, even momentarily, on my Amazon rankings.

Amazon's Author Central, however, gives you access to Bookscan numbers which track anywhere from 70-80 % of all sales, (depending on type of book and where it's sold) including Amazon. They're a fairly accurate gauge of actual sales, imo.

It sucks that they are not tracking e book sales from e pubs.

For tracking I use: Titlez it only gives ranking (not numbers) but as mentioned the sales numbers on NovelRank mean absoultely nothing.

I'll even provide numbers, just to be totally accurate.

Novella: Mirrorlight (the one in my sig)
Novelrank shows: 89 sales
Actual sales: 182

So...it's close. And mine hovers between 6k-9k on Amazon, sales-ranking wise(may it continue to be so) so I can only imagine the gross fluctuations at even better sales ranks.

That Amazon raking is still a secret for me. You can jump up very fastly, if you just sell one book. As already said, for example from rank 500000 to 50000. There is a page that has listed a lot of Amazon books, and you can take a look at your sellings.

http://www.novelrank.com

You jump so fast in the lower sales brackets because there are so many people with the same number of sales (1, 2, 3 sales, etc.). If 500,000 people have no sales, just one sale would jump you up past all those people in one move.

Alexandermerow said:

That Amazon raking is still a secret for me. You can jump up very fastly, if you just sell one book. As already said, for example from rank 500000 to 50000. There is a page that has listed a lot of Amazon books, and you can take a look at your sellings.

http://www.novelrank.com

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It's not accurate.

Irysangel said:

I'll even provide numbers, just to be totally accurate.

Novella: Mirrorlight (the one in my sig)
Novelrank shows: 89 sales
Actual sales: 182

So...it's close. And mine hovers between 6k-9k on Amazon, sales-ranking wise(may it continue to be so) so I can only imagine the gross fluctuations at even better sales ranks.

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WOW! That is quite the difference.

I've also noticed that sometimes my rank 'improves' for an hour and I didn't actually sell anything. But because my rank bumped down a notch, Novelrank would count that (erroneously) as a sale. So it's an interesting tool, but not an accurate one.

Wow, I just went to check mine (was all interested for a minute because of this thread) and the rank on the paperback version went down from 26K to 33K in, like, five seconds (the time it took to check the Kindle version rank -- which was 50K, and is now probably 75K ).

That's kind of depressing. I think I'll stop looking at my Amazon rank now.

It's all become meaningless to me, so I don't check much anymore.
The Banishing was listed at the 11,000 rank here on Amazon UK, and had dropped to 30,000 within an hour.

Don't understand how it works at all.