Author Rank Retired

[Shoe]

Important Notice About Author Rank
As of March 23, 2020, we’re retiring the Author Rank beta. We apologize for any inconvenience.

[Lynn]

Wow. Talk about short notice.

[Jeff Tanyard]

It's already gone from Author Central.   

Hope y'all took screen caps when your rank was peaking.

As far as I know, I never cracked the top thousand authors.  My best rank, courtesy of Bookbub:

[Eric Thomson]

Oh noes... No more ego stroking 

[Jeff Tanyard]

Oh noes... No more ego stroking 

True, but it was also useful to see where other authors stood.  I never would have guessed some authors sold as much as they did if not for the author rank.

[Eric Thomson]

Oh noes... No more ego stroking 

True, but it was also useful to see where other authors stood.  I never would have guessed some authors sold as much as they did if not for the author rank.

Meh.  I'm not in competition with y'all.  The only metric I watch is my publisher bank account.  If that meets my expectations, I'm number 1 in my books 

[TimothyEllis]

Serious WTF!

[Anarchist]

Never looked at it. As a metric, it was worthless to me. So I won't miss it.

[LilyBLily]

I think I looked at it once in five years.

[TimothyEllis]

I just sent in my protest on AC.

I use it regularly to chart how I'm going overall.

If I'd known this was getting the chop, I'd have done a whole series of screen vids.

I don't know how something which has been there for 5 years could still be called a beta.

Not happy Amazon!

We need MORE information, not less.

[lea_owens]

I loved that graph. It was one of my favourites. The best I ever made was just over 5,000, so it's not like I'm one of the big guys, but I could get an overall view of improvement over a few years. I found it motivational and it reflected promotions. I've only been hovering around the 20k mark this past month, but I was hoping to see it move through the teens with the next two books. Darn. I liked it.

Were people somehow misusing it? Or not using it enough? It seemed such a handy tool with no downside.

[TimothyEllis]

I loved that graph. It was one of my favourites. The best I ever made was just over 5,000, so it's not like I'm one of the big guys, but I could get an overall view of improvement over a few years. I found it motivational and it reflected promotions. I've only been hovering around the 20k mark this past month, but I was hoping to see it move through the teens with the next two books. Darn. I liked it.

Were people somehow misusing it? Or not using it enough? It seemed such a handy tool with no downside.

I've been top 5,000 for a long time, and dropping out was when I knew things were bad.

My guess is the server bandwidth to keep it up to date is too high.

My suggestion was to limit it to top 10,000 authors if that was the problem.

[Anarchist]

I don't know how something which has been there for 5 years could still be called a beta.

Gmail was in beta longer than that.

[dgcasey]

Just one less tool for me to use to procrastinate doing any actual writing.   

[MadWyn]

I just found that the author rankings are apparently no longer available on Amazon. Anyone know why or when this happened? I looked at it monthly out of curiosity...

[RPatton]

https://writersanctum.com/index.php?topic=3509.0

[Bill Hiatt]

I stopped looking at it regularly, but it was nice to have the option. We definitely need more information, not less.

Amazon keeps the beta label on things forever. KDP Print is still in beta. It hasn't been five years, but after all, they shuttered CS quite a while ago, leaving the "beta" as the only option.