- Amazon is a mysterious book selling machine, isn't it?
And there are different places books are ranked
and sold on Amazon.
So if you're not sure of the difference
between Amazon sales rank,
Amazon popularity and Amazon bestseller lists,
then this video
is for you.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, I'm Julie "The Book" Broad,
the founder of a fabulous self publishing services company
called Book Launchers.
My disclaimer, nobody outside
of Amazon actually knows
the Amazon algorithm.
So, much of what I know
is because of my fabulous team
at Book Launchers.
The production experts that are in the platform
every single day
that observe and report to me.
And because I've read some great books,
done some tests,
and watch what happens with my books and our client's books
when we do different things.
So with all that said,
let's dive in.
Amazon sales rank
is what we'll hit first
and it's the one
you're most likely to be familiar with.
When you go to Amazon's product listing for a book,
you'll see the cover,
the title, the subtitle
and the description.
As you scroll on down,
you'll see books you may like
and products recommended
like this item.
Sometimes, but less these days,
this section was called
the Customers Who Also Bought.
Then you'll see editorial reviews,
if the author has some,
and about the author section.
And then finally,
you get to the product details section.
The product details here,
publication date, October 16, 2020,
file size, 38, 93,
word wise, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The ASIN number, B08HX98B2B (laughs).
All right, so now you get to the best sellers rank.
So in this case,
427,879 in the Kindle Store.
So this is ranking you overall
in the Kindle Store and then you see
the subcategories like motivational business management,
and business motivation, and self-improvement
then you've got customer reviews and so forth.
So what is
that sales rank?
It's calculated by an Amazon algorithm
and it's not a measure of your overall sales.
It's a relative measure
of how you are selling relative
to the other books in your category.
And overall it's also based on type of book
so you noticed that was for the Kindle Store.
To Kindle versus paperback
versus hard back
versus large print.
This is not a game
of highest number, wins here.
By the way,
lower numbers are better.
So this number is based only on sales,
but not all sales are treated as equal in this.
Sales that happened in the most recent hour
or given more value or weight
than sales that happened yesterday
or even half a day ago.
There are a lot of online sites that talk about this
but one of the best sources I found explaining this
is David Gaughran's book, "Amazon Decoded,"
which I'll link to in the description below.
So this is how it works,
the sale value degrades every hour
so that after 24 hours,
it's worth half a sale.
By the time a week has passed,
that sale from this hour today
is worth almost nothing
as far as your Amazon sales rank go.
Sales rank is updated hourly
but it's not something that happens immediately
after the hour has passed.
There's a lag.
If you're refreshing that page every 10 minutes
during a launch to see how you're doing,
well, you're not getting instant results.
There can be a 90-minute,
sometimes, four hour lag
after a sale happens
for it to get reflected
in your sales rank.
All the Amazon bestseller ranks
are based on Amazon sales rank.
So the top 100 in the Kindle Store
or any other rank
is based on recent sales volume.
If you're curious about a ranking,
typically means for sales volume,
there's a resource for you.
I'll drop the link
in the description below
from Dave Chesson,
to help you calculate
what a sales rank might mean
in terms of overall sales
on Amazon for that book.
Shout out to Dave for his amazing content
and we did a video together too,
which I'll also drop a link for you below
if you wanna check that out.
Okay.
So back to how they rank sales and weight it.
Amazon made changes to how the sales were ranked
after there were so many gimmicks
to get your book a bestseller
in a category for that flag.
You're no longer rewarded well for a single push of sales.
Let me repeat this
because I know you're still secretly coveting
that orange Amazon flag.
I know it. I can read your mind.
Now, doing that one-time push
to get sales up once
doesn't really do anything with Amazon,
thanks to this change.
Amazon wants conversions
on a regular basis.
One-time push
plus continued sales is good.
A one-time boost in sales
and then crickets...
Not good.
So those are bestseller lists.
That's what most people focus on,
but there is another list to be found on Amazon.
The popularity list.
Now it's not actually called the popularity list.
That's just what people refer to it
as like David Gaughran, for example.
It's updated hourly like sales rank,
but it's calculated completely differently,
which explains the lack of overlap
between the two lists.
First now, before you head to Amazon
and try to find this list,
again, it's not called popularity list but...
Thanks to David Gaughran's book,
I actually found
this list that people call popularity lists.
So let me show you where this little beauty is hiding.
Nope, not on the backpack.
Not under the pillow.
Nope.
Not in the Lego truck.
But when you go
to the three little lines on the top left, click that,
click Kindle E-readers and books,
and then go to Kindle Store,
click on Kindle books.
You're gonna be taken to a page that seems normal
but if you scroll
all the way
down to the bottom,
past all the recommendations,
you're gonna see a big list
that says one of 70,000 or 90,000 books,
keep on scrolling
and the listings are there.
Above it are some selections of genre
so I clicked nonfiction,
I got more choices
and I picked business and money.
And then you start to see a new list.
This is the popularity list.
So what is this obscure list
and why does it matter?
Or does it?
Again, I didn't really know
until I was reading a forum post.
It kind of triggered me to dive into this
and then I saw David Gaughran's content
and explained popularity plus sales rank feed
into the overall recommendation engine.
So popularity plus sales rank feed
into the recommendation engine
and we want our books to be recommended by Amazon, right?
So if you know what feeds that beast,
you can give it the food it likes, right?
So this popularity list is a rolling 30-day average of sales
with no decaying value
of a sale
from one day to the next,
but a sale completely ages out after 30 days.
We've known for a while
that Amazon rewards consistent sales,
but now you can see it's based
on recency of sales plus 30 days sales performance
for their overall recommendations.
Then you can see
why consistent conversion is everything.
So just a reminder,
this unnamed popularity list is a measure
of what has been selling consistently well recently
whereas the bestseller list
is a measure of what is selling most at this exact moment.
Back to this popularity list.
Amazon clearly uses both sales rank
and this sales performance measure
for its reader recommendations.
They even have a highlighted book section,
which is largely books that are bestsellers
but when I went through,
there was a few self-published titles in there
that had decent sales
but weren't long time best sellers.
Now, a few other things to know.
Free books are counted
for this popularity list,
which is also a big difference
from bestseller lists
where free books are not included.
But free and cheap doesn't seem
to have really a high rating overall.
A 99 cent book isn't considered
the same value
as a $4 and 99 cents sale.
There also is no separate top 100
for free and paid books on the popularity list.
They all co-mingle.
There is a free list for best sellers.
They don't wait pre-orders for this list
but when it launches,
they're there again.
So what do you take away from all this?
Well, we can chat about it in the comments
and I wanna hear from you.
And when you comment the day a video is released,
you get enter, to win our suite.
#Noboringbooksswag
like our mug
and our also soft journal.
So subscribe and turn those notifications on.
Hit that bell
so you don't miss any videos
but I'll summarize in three points.
Number one, Amazon wants your book to sell,
not sell once,
sell over and over again
and you will be rewarded
on Amazon for consistent momentum and conversion.
It's fun to talk about these things
and check your ranks
but don't worry too much
about the nitty-gritty of these things.
Focus your efforts on the thing
that's going to generate ongoing sales on Amazon.
Two, Amazon will help you sell your books
and it will do it better if you don't try
to game the system
but rather focus on the things that set you up
for foundational success.
Hard back cover,
a grabbing title with keywords,
lots of great reviews
and then traffic that converts to book purchases.
Three...
Metadata with Amazon matters a lot.
Get the right categories,
sell consistently and sit beside the books
your ideal reader is already browsing
and you're setting yourself up for better success.
All right, so as noted,
huge source for this video, David Gaughran,
and then also,
Amazon keywords written by Dale Roberts.
Both helped me reaffirm
and further research for this video.
Next, head over and watch this video
with the fabulous Dave Chesson on writing book descriptions
or this one right here on book metadata.
If you don't know what that is
or how to figure out yours for your book,
I'll put the coffee on.
I'll see you there. (bouncy music)