WTF is going on with paid US store rankings?

[TimothyEllis]

I've noticed this a few times recently.

My last book should be in freefall rank wise at the moment.

It's sales and reads are crap, my income is flatlining generally, and yet....

The rank improved significantly today, with Space Opera in particular improving by over a 100.

The main rank went 28,000 ish to 17,000ish.

And I've seen this before, where the main rank gets better with no apparent reason, and the categories showing change.

I've lost Metaphysical again on this book, and the main rank is all over the place, and better than it should be for it's sales and reads..

I don't know what is going on, but something is really wrong in the Amazon back end at the moment.

The only thing I can think of for the sharp improvement in rank is an increase in KU downloads, but I'm not seeing any increase in reads, and in fact, they're going down.

Or is Amazon culling low content books or something so fast in the top 50,000, it messes with the ranks every time they do it?

 

[Bill Hiatt]

I've sort of lost track of how the system works. Is it still true that KU downloads are a factor in book ranks. If they are, that could be one reason a book is going up.

We can't tell how many KU downloads  a book gets, just how many pages are read. So if someone downloads but doesn't start reading right away, the book gets a seemingly unmotivated boost. Of course, it would take a lot of downloads to cause the effect you're seeing.

Another possibility would be the discovery of another batch of authors somehow scamming the system that Amazon caught onto and removed. In the past, when I've seen sudden jumps from books with no apparent activity, it was around the time when such an event has occurred. And if the authors affected weren't publicly vocal about it, we'd never know.

[notthatamanda]

I looked at my rankings and one of my books that hasn't sold a copy since 2020 now has no sales rank. I don't know if that is new or not, I don't really pay attention to rank much, but maybe they have changed something and are getting rid of ranks on books that don't sell after a certain period of time. You figure that wouldn't change stuff that is selling since those books would be dropping off the bottom, but who knows.

[Bill Hiatt]

I'm now seeing the same thing with certain titles that haven't sold in quite a while. Maybe the total number of books on Amazon has gotten so huge that rather than redo the ranking process, Amazon is now just letting the ones that have reached a lower rank than the old system would cover revert to no rank. Or maybe Amazon realized that once a book reaches a certain point, really high numbers are so discouraging to further activity that they decided no number at all was better.

As you say, though, books dropping off the bottom isn't going to affect books ranking far higher. Something else must be at work.

[She-la-te-da]

Amazon is always tweaking something. Maybe they did something to more accurately reflect sales ranks, and it backfired. It wouldn't be the first time they "improved" something that it went totally FUBAR. They'll fix it eventually.