Hi Folks, I'm not feeling well enough yet to sit at a keyboard for long periods, but I saw this article and wanted to pass it on. It appears that those of us who are publishing on Kindle or Kindle Select need to keep a sharp eye on the way Amazon ranks our books. The rules have changed. What worked last month will not work this month. Here's a pretty clear explanation of what's going on: Updates to Amazon’s Book Ranking Algorithms: The Death of 99-Cent Ebooks? An End to KDP Select Perks?
Posted by Lindsay | Posted in Amazon Kindle Sales | Posted on 18-05-2012
42 Ever wonder how Amazon’s ranking algorithms work? Why one
book gets recommended to readers and another doesn’t? The difference
between the popularity lists and the bestseller lists? Well, indie
author Edward W. Robertson
doesn’t work for Amazon, but he’s a stats junkie who’s been studying
the e-seller’s algorithms for a while. Today, he’s here to answer
questions on how books get ranked and recommended along with new changes
that could punish 99-cent titles and take some of the appeal out of the
KDP Select program. Amazon Algorithms Examined You seem to enjoy studying how Amazon’s algorithms work for
ranking and recommending books. Before we talk about what’s new, could
you give authors an idea of how things work, at least insofar as you
know? What goes into ranking a book and causing it to appear on
such-and-such bestseller list? Also, what’s the difference between the
bestseller lists and the popularity lists? Yeah, studying these things is a lot of fun for me. I don’t have any
formal training in numbermancy (which I’m pretty sure is the term), but
spending the last 10-12 years reading about the statistical study of
baseball appears to have taught me a few things about data analysis.
Perhaps I wasn’t wasting my life after all! On to the lists. Everyone who’s spent much time on the Kindle store
has seen both the bestseller and the popularity lists. The bestseller
list is the Top 100 of a given category of books. For instance, here’s the bestseller list for Epic Fantasy. The popularity list is the list of all books in that category. Here’s the popularity list for Epic Fantasy. What you’re currently seeing on those lists will depend on when
you’re reading this, but you’ll note they aren’t identical. That’s
because they differ in key ways. The bestseller list is essentially a
gauge of how many copies a book has sold over the last 24 hours. It
takes longer-term sales into account to a degree, but the last 24 hours
are far and away the most important factor. A book can rise and fall
extremely swiftly on the bestseller list. The popularity list is more complicated. For one thing, Amazon
changes the formula for how it’s calculated a few times a year.
Currently, to the best of my knowledge, the popularity list is the
accumulated sales of a book’s last 30 days compared to those in its
category–but free books given away only count for roughly 10% of a paid
sale, and price is factored in as well, in that the higher your price,
the more each sale counts for on the list. Lastly, borrows aren’t
counted as sales for purposes of popularity list rank. The formula looks
something like this: (sales + (0.1 x free downloads)) x (unknown sales factor) / last 30 days A simpler way to think about it is gross revenue earned by your book
over the last 30 days (with an additional boost depending on how many
copies you’ve also given away). I’m not sure that’s a 100% accurate way
to put it, but it fits the data we’ve seen well enough to work as
shorthand. In short, then, appearing on the bestseller lists is mostly all about
having sold a bunch of copies in the last 24-48 hours. To appear high
on the popularity lists, however, you need strong sales (or an extremely
strong giveaway) over the last 30 days. Additionally, the higher your
price, the fewer books you’ll have to sell to do well on the popularity
lists; the lower your price, the more you’ll have to sell. That’s a lot of information! What is the popularity list
actually used for? It sounds like that’s what the changes are effecting,
but, as a shopper, I wasn’t particularly aware of it until recently, so
I never used it to find books. Do people actually browse through it? Or
is it used for determining recommendations? The popularity lists are pretty important. Obviously, Amazon has an
almost endless assortment of ways to promote books from within the store
itself, but I think the popularity lists are one of the major factors.
See the main Kindle store page? With all those links on the left to a variety of different genres? Those bring you to the popularity lists. So they’re pretty prominent. Both for browsing and, yes, for
recommendations–when Amazon sends out emails along the lines of “You
might enjoy these other books in Epic Fantasy,” the links they include
take you to the popularity list for that category of books. Of course, the importance of any given category varies quite a bit by
its overall popularity with readers. Romance > Romantic Suspense
might be just a little more important than Basketry > Underwater
Basketweaving. Ranking high on the popularity lists of small categories
won’t make much difference. But in the well-trafficked ones, it’s pretty
big. It’s hard to know just how huge unless you are actually Amazon, but
if I were to make conservative guesses based on my experiences, being on
the first page in Epic Fantasy might lead directly to 20-60 sales per
day based on your visibility there alone. (And maybe much more. This
will vary a lot depending on your book’s overall appeal. I’m sure A Game
of Thrones benefits from it just a little bit more than my dinky indie
title did.) In Science Fiction > Adventure, I’d say it might be good
for as many as 30-100 sales. For the biggest categories like Romance and
Mystery & Thrillers, the visibility the popularity lists provide to
the top books might be responsible for thousands of monthly sales by
themselves. Key word “might.” This is really tough to estimate. But in my
experience, a lot of people see these lists, both when they’re browsing
around Amazon and when they’re directed there by emails. Based on
post-free results from hundreds of different authors, I’m positive the
popularity lists were the main drivers for the big sales Select authors
used to see after making their books free. Now that it’s so much harder
to achieve high visibility on these lists via free alone, I’m afraid
Select authors are in for some much leaner sales. |