Since publishing GONE TOMORROW on Amazon, I’ve grown more curious about how the best seller rankings work.
It was a laughable moment for me when I saw that my short story was ranking higher than several books that had been best sellers a year ago. I wondered how that was possible since mine had sold only a handful of copies on the day it was posted.
It turns out the Best Seller rankings are essentially a number that represents the number of books selling more copies than your book is selling, over an extremely short period of time. The ranking has nothing to do with cumulative sales, instead it has much more to do with sales velocity.
Book rankings are updated every two hours, so it’s possible for a book to significantly jump, or fall in the overall rankings very quickly.
Some research shows that selling as few as ten copies of a book a day will keep your book in the top 3,000 of the paid best sellers listing. (Please note - I’m talking about the paid best sellers list, not the free best sellers list.)
Some authors manage to get their books ranked into specific categories, rather than just being ranked against all paid books. You may have seen things as specific as this:
So in this case, the book THE VILLIANS SIDEKICK, is ranked #45 in the Noir category, so people searching specifically for Noir fiction are fairly likely to come across this book. Of course, the author can also claim a top 50 seller on Amazon as well.
Most book postings don’t have that level of detail in the best seller ranks, but a few do. There’s obviously a secret, and I intend to find out by the time I post my next book. If anyone knows the secret please post it in the comments.
