What I’ve Learned About Amazon Rankings
I’ve learned a few things about sales and rankings lately from tracking my rankings on Titlez.com. While I probably need to check the numbers less frequently than I do, my OCD has resulted in some useful information, so I wanted to share it. It might not be anything new, but it’s definitely effective based on the results I’ve seen.
Rankings for Sex, Lies & Wedding Bells (paperback) – lower is better
You can see that each drop indicates a sale, so I’ve gone from a sale every 3-4 days to sales every day during the past two weeks, and some days I’ve seen multiple sales. The data points are collected once every 24 hours for this graph, so the timing of the sale slightly affects the data point, but the overall trend is clear.
The most important thing on Amazon is visibility, unless you are well-known and people are already searching for you or your books. Here’s an important step in improving your visibility and thus Amazon sales/rankings, even if you don’t do anything else:
Amazon Categories
Once your titles get on Amazon, you want to make sure that they are set up in the categories that best describe them. The categories are listed near the bottom of the page with the heading “Look for Similar Items by Category”.
My book wasn’t in any categories at first, but all I had to do was email Amazon (via Amazon Author Central https://authorcentral.amazon.com/) with a list of the categories, and they added them, but it takes a week or two. I looked at similar books to mine and copied the categories that fit. The categories first showed up about two weeks ago, when the rankings trend became obvious.
After you get listed there, people will find your books a lot more easily and you’ll get rankings in the categories too, if you make the top 100. I got put into 2 additional categories yesterday and got rankings in all of them immediately, even though my overall ranking wasn’t all that good. Here’s a snapshot of data from Thursday evening for the paperback edition of Sex, Lies & Wedding Bells.
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #58,415 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What’s this?)
| #11 in | Books > Literature & Fiction > Erotica > Gay & Lesbian |
| #18 in | Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Fiction > Romance |
| #42 in | Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Fiction > Gay |
It hit #3 in G&L Romance last week and since then it’s only dropped out of the top 100 one time, so being in the categories really makes a huge difference. I’ve done zero promo the last 3 weeks, but the sales are picking up at Amazon anyway due to being in the categories.
Here’s the Titlez.com graph, showing how having the categories listed during the last 2 weeks has improved my ranking by increasing visibility, even though I’ve done nothing else.
Once you start selling more, your titles also end up on the “also purchased” section of other books. That’s also brought in some sales. More people are looking and out of those more are buying:
My “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?” percentage went from 45% to 55% which means buyers are more confident buying this book because of seeing it on a top sellers list or an “also purchased” list. At least that’s how I’m interpreting the data.
Kindle Tip
I noticed my Kindle version did get a couple of categories assigned, but that plenty of Kindle books also have non-Kindle categories, so they get rankings and show up in the bestseller lists as separate entries, further increasing visibility. I’ve asked Amazon to add the relevant ones to my Kindle version as well. I’ll post the results when I can see the effect on rankings.
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6 Responses to “What I’ve Learned About Amazon Rankings”
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Interesting still. I wonder what a search on Victorious Star results in…
Sascha–If people are already searching for your book, then this is less crucial. It’s the only way to get noticed in 5 million books if you’re unknown, like me.
I should definitely get on making sure I’ve added categories for all my books…!
Good information to know. 😉
I’m glad you found something useful here!
Fascinating. Thank you for the info!