WTF is up with US ranks?

[Bill Hiatt]

The other thought I had, was you may have missed the rank spike itself. Between 2 times you looked, the initial sales spike may have happened, and then been replaced by the the lower sales level a few hours later. Just guessing though.

I'm too compulsive for that. 

If I were to take a conservative estimate, based on other past promos, the total rank should be somewhere between 20-40k in the US store at the moment. It certainly is not "161,263" with all those sales (the current ranking). Actually, more concerning, 161,263 matches closer to 6 sales today. In fact, ranking started moving again just this morning after a 3 day freeze. Did Amazon literally not rank my book at all last week during the main sale? 

Looking at my other titles in series, they're all hovering around 400k right now. This is also too high and I've seen it immobile over the past few days. Internationally, again, ranking was fine in Australia and UK; Canada is still immobile.

It was slow three months ago as well with my BookBub. There ranking was eventually seen and the book ranked at the top 1000; but it would have been in the top 100. Think twice about running a promo right now. Whatever's going on, your book might not be counted in ranking.

Another thought: How important is ranking? I'll guess maybe 10-20% extra sales from the top 3 charts, now lost??--not a lot, but still significant. But it also helps with future algos for your book search.

One word of caution in interpreting today's rankings based on previous experience: we don't know how many books are involved or what other authors are doing. The slowness to update is clearly a real issue. Where the book ends up may not be. I'm just speculating, because as usual, we have no ****ing data, but it's reasonable to assume that more and more books are being published. Depending on how many of those authors have money to spend on AMS ads and other promotional strategies, the competition for those top ranking spots may be fierce.

Amazon has been using that "over one million" language for years. Certainly, there are far more books in KDP by now. We don't know how many authors are making major sales pushes at any given time nor how effective they are. But those numbers could easily be far greater than they have been in the past.

Of course, people also drop out all the time, but the segment of authors heavily investing in advertising is the one that would make a difference for our purposes.

Also worth considering is what's going with the factory method of production--several authors under one penname. There used to be a lot of conversation about that, but I haven't heard much recently. Because such author collectives can release more rapidly than most of us, what's left of algorithmic boosts would be sucked up potentially by those collectives.

[TimothyEllis]

Amazon has been using that "over one million" language for years. Certainly, there are far more books in KDP by now.

1 mill in KU.

Last time I did the math on total books in KDP, it came out around the 48-50 million mark. And that was before low content began. (2 or 3 years ago now)

I've seen paid books with a 15 million rank, and I've seen free books with a 15 million rank as well.

That's 30 million plus to start with, without counting the books which never had a rank, or lost it.

It's probably way past 75 million now.

[Bill Hiatt]

Now that you mention it, I remember you posting some of this analysis before.

To give you an idea how out of the loop internet sources are, I found one that claims Amazon has published 1.4 million books through KDP.

[TimothyEllis]

To give you an idea how out of the loop internet sources are, I found one that claims Amazon has published 1.4 million books through KDP.

 

Someone who obviously never gets off the top 100 lists. And never ever hits anything off an ad slider.

[Lorri Moulton]

In some of the author Facebook groups, people are saying average of 4 days for rankings to show.  It's been that way for at least a few weeks. 

[TimothyEllis]

In some of the author Facebook groups, people are saying average of 4 days for rankings to show.  It's been that way for at least a few weeks.

Are they mentioning genres?

What about cold launch, pre-order, or promo?

[alhawke]

In some of the author Facebook groups, people are saying average of 4 days for rankings to show.  It's been that way for at least a few weeks.

Nope. Not for me. I'm at six days (just look on the prior page at the stats). You guys can clearly see my sales have not been ranked. And I don't buy that there's loads of competition out there. There is, but if you look at the categories the books are not ranked unreachably high. The highest ranking at #1 occult was around 5000 in the store and after 150 sales, I should have hit that.

I'm trying something new. Problem is it is probably too late for this sale. After doing a bit of research, I stumbled upon a suggestion to find at least 1 category that is popular and add that to the less popular higher rank-yielding categories for your book to be ranked--if you are using relatively unpopular categories. In other words, all this headache could all be due to Amazon category changes. And, in fact, though not stated on the email by the Amazon representative, it was highly hinted at when I received a long form letter after "apologize for all your troubles" all about choosing 3 categories with their new system.

Well... eureka! Most books under the Occult category in the urban fantasy/dark fantasy mix, like mine, have one general category like paranormal fantasy. Coincidence? I doubt it. If this is the culprit it means that this mess was all due to stupid Amazon algorithm changes. Surprise? The fact that we are all under the influence of their algorithms, which is essentially AI btw, is a sad state for the publishing industry. But we are and it's not new news, is it? My books were all changed to occult magic last month in order to work with the new category system (stupid move). Anyway, if I'm right, I might never know because by now the book probably won't rank. But it's quite a coincidence that about 75% of the urban fantasy like books under "occult" happen to have exactly 1 general category to work the AI algorithms. Apparently, I didn't get the memo. Now you guys do. Hope it helps for your future sale promos.

[TimothyEllis]

Well... eureka! Most books under the Occult category in the urban fantasy/dark fantasy mix, like mine, have one general category like paranormal fantasy. Coincidence? I doubt it. If this is the culprit it means that this mess was all due to stupid Amazon algorithm changes. Surprise? The fact that we are all under the influence of their algorithms, which is essentially AI btw, is a sad state for the publishing industry. But we are and it's not new news, is it? My books were all changed to occult magic last month in order to work with the new category system (stupid move). Anyway, if I'm right, I might never know because by now the book probably won't rank. But it's quite a coincidence that about 75% of the urban fantasy like books under "occult" happen to have exactly 1 general category to work the AI algorithms. Apparently, I didn't get the memo. Now you guys do. Hope it helps for your future sale promos.

What categories is the book in?

And what keywords did you use for more categories?

I don't get books in only 1 category. That makes no sense. Last time I saw that it looked like Trad incompetence to me. They simply don't know how to use Amazon correctly.

[alhawke]

I'm not referring to keywords. I'm referring to choosing your three categories in "details" section within KDP. Choose two that are not too competitive, like for me, "Occult Magic" or like "Metaphysical Fantasy" (like we've spoken about before and you've used, Timothy) BUT choose one category that is broad and popular. The popular category will trigger the book to not go invisible in US markets. I'm trying it but the books haven't had enough time yet to see if the changes will work.

{edit: if this tweak works, it might not work in the future. But I think the less categories are triggering Amazon to slow your book sales/ranking while they do whatever they're doing to make sure your book is legitimate. That's my theory, anyway.

[Bill Hiatt]

That's interesting, and it does sound logical.

However, I don't think mine are generally in unpopular categories, and the ranking changes are still slow, though admittedly, not as slow as yours ( 2 days vs. 6 plus).

It makes sense that Amazon would try to stop people from gaming categories. However, it needs to find a better way of doing that.

[alhawke]

Ranking 94,681 today US. Limited sales today and yesterday. Basically, the large sale spike I published on the prior page was invisible to ranking
Can't tell if my theory on categories is correct because Amazon's wonky rule of choosing whatever category they want after you enter them has made them not change the categories. And if the categories finally change to my new ones, it will be far too late to show any effect with ranking. But I'll keep the new 3rd category of Paranormal Romance for future categorization anyway.

[TimothyEllis]

So ranks seems to be back to what used to be the normal.

The only thing lagging at the moment is orange tags on UK books. That took a day, when the rank was there in normal time.

It seems like whatever was going on to slow ranks showing is now over.

The first 24 hours is now when the debut best rank will show up in, and then things start the normal slide.

[Bill Hiatt]

That suggests one of three things:

Amazon had a glitch.
Amazon was experimenting with something, and the experiment didn't work out as planned.
Amazon listened to feedback and adjusted accordingly.

I'd like to think it was the third, but we'll never know.

[alhawke]

Glad it's working for you, Timothy! Hope it remains.

I've seen the brakes put on sudden peak sales from promo sales in the past. If this happens again with my upcoming release, particularly in the US, I'll let you know.

I'm not holding my breath. Really, the problem on Amazon has been going on for 2yrs, focused on the US market over the past year. But I remember it hitting the Canada market two years ago where the rank wasn't even moved on one of my titles. As I've said before, all their antics have done for me personally is shift my emphasis away from Amazon and concentrate more on other retailers wide.