Edited to add - I'm only on my first coffee of the day and my fingers are racing, so I typed a ridiculously long post to say, 'I like looking at author rankings, blah, blah, blah, make sure you market well if you want to do well in author rankings. Good writing alone will not suffice.' So, having read that, you don't need to read my verbal diarrhoea below.
________
In 2012, I published a middle grade book about kids and their horses in the outback, followed by a couple of others in that series. I didn't think they did that well, got the, 'I can't write, no one wants to read my books' blues and spent years listening to that negative voice. Half way through 2018, I switched to positive talk and reminded myself I really CAN write, wrote Muted (180k words, romantic suspense/medical mystery/ transformational women's fiction), and published it at the end of 2018. I've since published a few other stand alones, jumping around genres - I always knew it was a financially stupid way to write, but I wasn't writing for money, I really loved the books I write and wanted to tell those stories.
To relate that to the author ranking jumps - looking back at my overall results - in 2012, I was regularly in the top 20k authors with the couple of kids' books (admittedly, the majority of readers are adults). Clearly, there wasn't much competition then, so imagine if I hadn't listened to that negative voice and kept writing from that point - so to anyone feeling disheartened now, if you write well, keep on writing. In the six years of doing nothing - no promoting, nothing - that middle grade series had me leaping back and forth between about 30k and 400k in the author rankings. I guess nothing sold for a few days, then when someone bought the first one, there was about a 95% read through. Since publishing Muted, I'm usually between 20k - 30k in the author rankings - occasionally out as far as 45k, once in the 5k range, and often under 20k.
I haven't read any books on marketing as I dislike marketing and don't care - I spend my time doing what I like, which is living and writing, not marketing. I'm the ultimate, 'don't do as I do' author - I don't do ARCs, I don't do preselling, I don't have a newsletter, I don't blog... I just write, edit, publish, and I'm not financially driven to change. I'm the Field of Dreams type marketer: 'Write it and they will come.' They don't, of course - Muted has 111 U.S. reviews and 100 of those are five star, almost all reviews in other countries are five star, and hundreds of readers say it's the best book they've ever read (but maybe they haven't read many :D ) (oh, and they are strangers - not friends or family - I don't expect them to read my books), so, with good marketing, it should be a huge seller, but it plods along in the 20k - 50k rankings, occasionally in the teens a few times under 10k. In the last month, the author rankings have stayed in the low 20s - a couple of teens, one at 30k. It still jumps erratically, just on a smaller scale.
I find the 'all available' author ranking graph very interesting - those massive swings while I did nothing, and smaller swings with overall climbing in the last 12 months. I didn't care when rankings jumped and fell by 100s of thousands because I wasn't even looking at them, now I check each morning and feel happy over jumping a few thousand and frown at falling a few thousand. Can you even imagine what it must be like to be a really successful author who stays in the top 5,000? And then the top 1,000? Then the top 100? Ah, that's my field of dreams, so now I go back to writing. I've had my once-a-day look at the rankings (it's too easy to obsess over them... I need to change to once a week) - it's fallen in one day from 19,440 to 25,436, and I could market to improve it, but I'd much rather finish this next book.
Happy author rankings to all of you. And no matter how well you write, you need to market well - I know that. I don't do that, but I know that.
