The ranking status of our books

[Marti Talbott]

The beauty of dropping the price to $.99. I just had a $.99 cent sale on McShane's bride and sold 58 copies (trying to get more ratings/reviews.) Anyway,it got me to thinking about ranking.
 
My book "The Viking" hangs on to its low ranking and has for months - not the exact rank, but low enough to stay in the top 100. (today's rank below)

Best Sellers Rank: #5,218 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
#9 in Historical Scottish Fiction
#42 in Scottish Historical Romance (Kindle Store)
#286 in Teen & Young Adult eBooks

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003X95M94/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i6

Yes, it's free, but you'd think with all the authors buying BookBub free book ads, it would slip way down. I mean lots of authors are writing about Scottish Highlanders these days. Therefore, I think that rank is not just based on today's sales, but all-time sales. In my case, it's been free for over ten years.  For example, I haven't had a promo on this book for over a month and today so far I've only given away four copies.

Thoughts? Reasons? Excuses?

[j tanner]

Your bestseller rank is 100% of yesterday's sales, 50% of the day before, 25% of the day before that, etc decreasing by half each day for all time. As that "all time" gets big, those very tiny amounts add up and create a kind of rank floor that prevents a book from falling below because it's greater than the "1 book sold today" threshold.

I've seen screenshots of books that have been unpublished for years that held on the sub 1M ranks while more recent low-sales books get there in 2 weeks.

(This is the basic algorithm as reverse engineered by a lot of smart people. Amazon will never confirm or deny its accuracy. They could also change it at any time. And, note, the popularity list uses a different method.)