Okay, I'm on the short path to insanity if I don't learn more about something

Please stop watching your Amazon "ranking."

PLEASE.

It means nothing. You're probably talking about no more than a few hundred copies sold in any given week -- if that.

Trust me, Amazon numbers aren't even a sales blip in the bigger picture.

Stop making yourself crazy. Stop watching. Wait until your publisher has real numbers to discuss with you.

That will make you crazy enough.

Disconnect the computer and go on vacation.

But, yeah, new authors watch that all the time. I haven't really looked at my rank lately.

Amazon ranks don't really mean much -- it's a relative number. If 4000 books sold more than yours, then you're #4001. Generally, under 1000 means you're selling pretty well (at least 100 books a week). If you're not selling any for a while, you're probably in the million range. The top ranks (1-100) are measured in # sold per day.

http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm

But seriously, don't obsess over this. Take a vacation. Wait for your royalty statement. Then you can panic.

badducky said:

Amazon sales ranks.

Tell me how they are calculated. Tell me now.

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If I knew, Amazon would have to kill me.

badducky said:

I watch my sales rank bounce up and down on the pre-orders, and in my mind I'm desperately trying to figure out how to figure the sales rank into a number of units actually physically sold.

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This has been the subject of a few previous threads in the last year that I've been here on AW, and before then I've seen it as a point of speculation and wonder by me and thousands of others who have sold used books on Amazon, wondering what price I should list a book at, and trying to figure out how soon it might sell if I list it at a certain price. I even recall seeing a website with a graph of sales rank on one axis (logarithmic, ranging from 1 to 1,000,000) and number of book sales per week or some other time frame (also logarithmic, ranging from perhaps thousands to 0.001). But it's all approximate, at best.

You can find earlier threads with this Google search string:
Amazon sales rank site:absolutewrite.com

This has been the subject of a few previous threads in the last year that I've been here on AW, and before then I've seen it as a point of speculation and wonder by me and thousands of others who have sold used books on Amazon,

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YOU SOLD USED BOOKS ON AMAZON??

I'm sorry, I'm going to have to kill you.