For one brief, shining moment I had the thrill of climbing up on a best seller list.
I noticed last week, looking at my Amazon author dashboard, that I had a jump in Canadian royalties. It took me a minute or so to figure out which book it was. The book was the one I wrote on how to format a book for Amazon using Microsoft Word.
Now, this wasn’t a complete surprise, as the first day I put the book up for sale, I had one sale in the UK, and the second day I had two sales in Canada. At the time I thought, great, I’ve got a winner. And then things died. I’ve gotten an occasional sale here and there. The book has sold some in the U.S., but not as vigorously as in Canada and the UK. The surprise wasn’t that I had sold a handful of copies all of a sudden, but that those handful of sales had bumped the book up to the number thirteen slot.
I didn’t think about taking a screenshot that day, when the book was at #13. The next day I did think about taking a screenshot, but by then the book had dropped to #15 (as shown below). But I was still excited.
Of course, the book could have been higher on the list than #13 just prior to when the royalty spike caught my attention. There is no way for me to know this, however. I’ll take #13, or #15.
The interesting thing was that there wasn’t a single rating or review. It was strictly sales that had moved it up. Typically it takes Ratings and Reviews (social proof) and Sales to move a book up in the algorithm. Of course, it also depends what category you have the book listed in. This category was something like “Books on Microsoft Word.” Overall, though, I believe the book was listed at one hundred and something on Amazon.ca. That is still pretty good, though the Amazon.ca market is much smaller than the U.S. market.
Of course, the next day after I took the screenshot the book had dropped to #22, and then down to #44 and I don’t even want to look now. LOL.
According to several marketing books, at least regarding the U.S. Amazon market, if you are listed at 30,000 or below, that is really good. I’ve had books listed below this and am still scratching my head wondering exactly how that is good when I’ve had no sales while I was there. So who knows, really?
When you list a book on Amazon.com you get to pick a couple of categories in which to list it. I think for this book I just picked Writing and Reference. I don’t know whether the algorithm picks what categories the book gets listed in in other countries, or what. I just know this book ended up in the Microsoft Word Book category. A lot of times an author will pick some obscure category that the book might vaguely fit into, that has very few other books, hence less competition. The book moves up into the best seller list, and then that author can put in the book’s description that it is an Amazon “best seller.” It is a science. One I have yet to master.
As you can see from the above screenshot, the overall ranking in the U.S. Amazon Kindle Store is #1,182,639 for this book at this particular moment. You can also see what categories I’ve got the book listed in, and the ranking. This should give you some idea as to why I was excited to hit #13. The Canadian market is smaller, but I appreciate it all the same.
I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many screen pages you would have to go through to find my book at #2,056 in the Publishing & Books category. I can tell you that most people aren’t going to search beyond the first five or six pages to find a book in a specific category.
So anyway, I’ll just leave you with this thought. There are a lot of good books out there, by some very good authors, that just sink like a rock to the bottom of the pile. These books sink because they don’t have the social proof (ratings and reviews), or sales. Often times, of course, the books don’t have sales, because people don’t take a chance on a book without ratings and reviews. This is somewhat understandable. And often times, no one wants to be the first one to leave a review. However, Amazon is often pretty generous as far as refunds go, so if a book really doesn’t suit your needs, you can usually get a refund. At least I’ve never had a problem. Though I believe I’ve only ever sent one physical book back. Oh, but, as I mentioned in a previous post, I got a refund for the audio book of The Scarecrow (Wormsley) because the audio was only of the first story, and I mistakenly believed I was getting the full complement of short stories.
What I’m trying to say is just to please search a little more, beyond the first couple of pages; and if a book seems like something you might be interested in, even though there aren’t any reviews or ratings, give it a shot anyway. You never know what treasures you might find. There are a lot of good books just sitting out there, waiting to be discovered. And if you like the book, leave a review and a rating. Or at least just a rating.
In the meantime, I’ll dreamily glance at my #15 screenshot (and remind myself that the book was at #13 the day previous), and be forever thankful to Canada for the sales.
Also, I’ll have the comfort of knowing that I will have helped someone along the way to getting their book formatted. The author will not have to spend the hours and days of frustration that I went through trying to figure out how to wrestle with the maddening “Link to Previous” button.