I've always wondered this. Let's say your book has an Amazon Sales Rank of 50,000, and lets say it stays there for a month. What does this mean in terms of how much money an author could expect their book to make?
Is there a correlation between sales and Amazon Rank?
Passive Guy brought up this topic today in one of his rare posts. He posed three questions:
Question #1: Is this [Amazon Best Sellers Rank] a fair way of evaluating how well an ebook-only or mostly-ebook publisher performs for authors?The rest of PG's article is here: Amazon Sales Rank vs. Author Earnings.
Question #2: While we’re discussing Amazon Best Sellers Rank, has anyone seen any credible discussions concerning how sales rank translates into dollars for indie authors? If you’re at 20,000 with a $2.99 ebook, are you making $500 per month from that book? Or is Amazon’s algorithm too volatile to make it a useful gauge of the dollars coming in the door?
Question #3: Everybody knows that lots of ebooks have experienced sales spikes immediately after Christmas as new ereaders and tablets are packed with ebooks. What about other sales patterns? For example, do sales go up on the weekend when many people have more leisure time to read?
PG hasn’t seen any analyses of sales rank that address these kinds of questions.
He doesn’t want to trigger obsessive-compulsive behavior centered on your KDP dashboard, but would be interested in whatever tribal knowledge his readers might have about sales rank.
Cheers.
Karen, thanks for the link. I'm checkingit out as I'm doing the KDP Select free promo June 18-19th. The verdict is still out but overall I'm expecting positive results I can use to my advantage. I'll do a recap later in June so other writers contemplating this promo can see what works and what may not.
ReplyDeleteStephen, thanks for your comment, I would be very interested in hearing about your experience with KDP. Thanks for sharing. :)
ReplyDeleteIf you set up your Amazon Author Central account, you have access to info on how sales ranks work. It's very lengthy to explain though!
ReplyDeleteHi Freyed, thanks for your comment!
ReplyDeleteYou're right, of course, Amazon Author Central does have a lot to say about Bestseller Rank, but--to myself at least--it didn't seem to answer Passive Guy's three questions. I think he's interested in hearing from authors about their experiences. Experience rather than theory.