[LMB] (chat) A Writer's Guide to Amazonomancy

[W. F. Zimmerman]

Lois,
I don't know where you got this, but these numbers are way off.

I am a publisher with more than 75 books in print (all POD, so 90% of my
business is via Amazon) and I watch the sales ranks v. my inventory closely.


The real numbers are more like this.  When a title hits

80,000 that means 1 sale today
40,000 = 2 sales today
20,000 = 4 sales today
10,000 = 8 sales today

The trick is that the sales rank "decays" as soon as you sell a book, so if
it's down around 500,000 that means you haven't sold a book for a week or
so.  1,000,000 means you're probably doing 1 or 2 a month. Whenever it
bounces back up to around80,000, that means a sale within the last hour or
two.

You can follow all your titles (24 x 7, compulsively ;-) using free services
www.salesrankexpress.com or titlez.com.

See

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

for a very good quantitative explanation that still holds today.


On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Lois McMaster Bujold <
lbujold at myinfmail.com> wrote:

> Because it's the season...
>
> Ah, Amazon sales rankings.  What do these numbers -- changing every hour
> in their hypnotic fashion that drives authors mad -- really mean?
>
> Here's the skinny:
>
> Ranking above 10,000 -- essentially meaningless.  At that point, the
> books are in order by ISBN or alphabetically or something.  Don't even
> look.
>
> 8k - 10 k -- your title is selling one or two units a month, maybe.
>
> 4k - 7k -- your title is selling one or two units a week.  Nationwide.
>
> 2 - 4 k -- OK, maybe a little better than that.
>
> Ranking below 1000 -- Now, at 3 figures, we're getting into "selling
> briskly for its genre" territory.
>
> Below 100 -- Pay dirt at last.  A book pretty much has to attain and
> sustain rankings at two figures to crack any of the bestseller lists; to
> crack the big lists like the NYTimes, the title needs to hold well below
> 50.
>
>    Back when I started in this business, distractions like this didn't
> even exist -- they would have been considered science fiction, y'know.
> The writer, laboring dutifully in obscurity on her next novel, wouldn't
> hear anything about sales for months, unless able to extract some
> non-committal noises from her editor while on the phone about something
> else.  It would be upwards of a year and a half before the royalty
> statements would tell one anything -- much too late for treatment, sort
> of like an autopsy after an exhumation.
>
>    Publishers are focused on bestseller lists for some good reasons and
> bad.  The big lists do both represent and create feedback loops of
> recognition for an author or title that can, in rare and glorious cases
> which we all know about, hit a critical temperature and catch fire,
> becoming, for a while, a self-sustaining phenomenon.  Most books just
> sputter and go out, though.
>
>    The downside is that, like schools that have proficiency tests and
> become focused on teaching the tests rather than teaching the students,
> publishers tend to become focused on gaming the lists.  Everything comes
> down to the first pop of publication -- an initial period about 4 months
> beforehand, where orders are taken from the accounts, and then a last
> gasp the first two or three weeks a book is on the shelves, a book's one
> chance to defy pre-set expectations and break out.  (After three weeks,
> the attention must be diverted to the next book in the queue, the
> publisher's next bright hope.)  For the publishers who win this
> bestseller lottery, the rewards are huge -- whatever you think of the
> Stephanie Meyer books, her publisher is, according to the latest
> _Locus_, one of the few who was in the black during the last half of
> this past recession year, and all due to her sales.  So you can't really
> blame the publishers.
>
>    They _are_ trying to please you, the fickle book-buying public.
> Reviews are all very well, but sales figures are the only true votes the
> publisher can count, and count on.  So you can figure that for the next
> couple of years, bookstores are going to be awash in bloodsucking teen
> angst, until the fad is slain by the usual overproduction.
>
>    As a writer who has historically produced evergreens -- books that
> sell in low chronic numbers to a core audience _forever_ -- I've taken
> another path to to a less hectic sufficient success.  But every year and
> every book I still get seduced by the brief glitter of the game.  Book
> launch madness will pass, it always does.  In the meantime, be patient
> with me... although a straight jacket would indeed keep me from
> obsessively clicking into my book's Amazon page eight times a day, it
> would also prevent other more useful typing, so that's out.  (It does no
> good for me to tell myself, rationally, that book #4 of a tightly-locked
> series really can't do anything unexpected: a miracle could occur, after
> all.)
>
>    And now there's Bookspan...  if one has cultivated a friendly
> neighborhood bookstore owner, one can sometimes get a peek at the past
> week's Bookspan numbers, which are a point-of-sale summation of how the
> tops books are really doing, stripped of hype and hope.  You bet one's
> publishers sees these, too.
>
>    Too Much Information strikes again.  But hey, it's the amazing 21st
> century, and I wouldn't wish it away.
>
>    Ta, L.
> --
> Lois-Bujold mailing list
> Lois-Bujold at lists.herald.co.uk
> http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold
>



-- 
http://www.NimbleBooks.com