This is big news, Timothy. Let me know if you see any effect with US.

US down from 51k to 8k. UK down from 43k to 3k.

AUS now 1352. But what it got to during the night is anyone's guess.

Not sure what the delay is, but there is still one going on.

But they seem on track to me.

So the resubmit thing does seem to work. I just don't know the trigger though. Could be the resubmit, or the version number change. Or both.

So releasing a new book at the moment.

I did a resubmit on my book as soon as it came out of lockdown.

Then got some obvious goofs I needed to fix immediately, so uploaded and submitted again as soon as it was out of that lockdown.

The AUS store just went from 30kish down to 2kish, so that is very promising that a resubmit solves the rank problem.

I'll know if it solves UK and US when I get up tomorrow. US will probably take a while to come through anyway.

Alt text for an image for screen readers, when an image is not a "necessary" part of the narrative, is marked as decorative. This instructs the screen reader to skip over that image and continue the reading order without considering the image.

If an image is essential, then alt-text needs to be written with as minimal language "polishing" as possible, focusing on being direct and descriptive instead.

MS Word: It has been 3.5 years since I last prepared accessible documents (I did for AODA, not ADA, but they are similar. AODA is for Ontario, Canada), but what I recall is that MS Word was very problematic with accessibility, and we often needed to use Acrobat to resolve post-MS Word issues. It almost always ruined the read order (how a screen reader understands what to read when), and table headers were also problematic. Math equations were non-existent, although MS claimed screen readers recognized their language (they did not). We had to write them in MathML using software that did what it claimed, or write the formulas, take screenshots, and then write the description in alt-text to explain the formulas. It was not fun when I had to create hundreds of documents.

If you are using MS Word to do accessibility stuff, I am unsure if MS has upped their game. These issues I mentioned were all in Win 11 and office 365. It is not MS's style to update things to fix; they usually change things in the next major version or SKU.

If an ebook is ALWAYS free, then it won't matter much. By the time the rankings catch up, the sell through should still work.

If an ebook is only free for a few days, by the time the rankings catch up, the book is no longer free and never sees that boost.

For 99c promos, I haven't heard good things lately...but maybe that's just in Facebook groups?

ETA: Mostly WIDE author groups.  Might work better for KU. 

I totally glossed over that KU comment.

KU not affecting rank? It used to for my KU books. That was one of the big advantages to Amazon KU. It ranked easier. Now it doesn't? Huh 

The response doesn't say that KU doesn't affect rank. It says that many factors do. But why category ranks should be dictated by so many extraneous considerations puzzles me.

If Amazon wants to have a metric that reflects engagement with various parts of the product page, there's nothing wrong with that. But they shouldn't take existing metrics that used to mean something different and repurposing them without comment. This only confuses customers.