I recently received a query from a new author who has a book available on Amazon.com, but rather than having a sales rank on the site, his book is shown with “none” as a sales rank. This is an interesting result, but rather than focus just on that, I write about the bigger topic of tracking statistics versus actively promoting a book and talk about some reasons why authors are foolish to pay too much attention to Amazon sales rank anyway.

But don’t take my word for it, read what I wrote:

Figuring out Amazon Sales Rank

If you’re an author, I’m particularly interested in your response to my article! An excerpt:

I’m the author of book “Nuestro dios, el hombre” (See Amazon) and I can’t figure out my sales rank. Do you want to help me?

As an author, I have to say that there’s not much more puzzling than trying to figure out Amazon sales rank figures. On more than one of teh author mailing lists I’m on, this subject comes up at least twice yearly and results in a flurry of theories and very little actual hard data. Making this more complex, Amazon just recently changed how they calculate sales rank, so you don’t have the ability to see the “long tail” sales with ranking over a long period of time.

With your particular book, Nuestro Dios, El Hombre, it appears that the basic problem is that while it has one five-star review, no-one’s ever bought a copy through Amazon. As a result, your sales rank is “none”…

[Continue reading Figuring out Amazon Sales Rank]

[tags]amazon,publishing,book authors,book sales rank[/tags]