It has been a good few days as far as publicity for my new book, Promote Your Book, Over 250 Proven, Low-Cost Tips and Techniques for the Enterprising Author. And that’s pretty much because I have been constantly putting myself out there. I’ve had two professionals with followings recommend my blog in their interviews this week and a few articles published (with bios mentioning the new book), including one accepted by Jim Barnes at Independent Publishers. It will go live before the weekend: http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1471
Tomorrow my guest blog for Christina Hollis goes live at http://www.christinahollis.com
Also, the publicist from the publishing house says that we’ll have something in The Writer about my book very soon.
Now if only they would get the Kindle and other digital versions up and running… I have customers waiting to purchase the book on Kindle.
I’ve been watching my book’s ranking at Amazon. This seems to be a fickle system. Not quite sure how much validity or clout it holds. Last week, we were in the 800,000’s. Yesterday we were at 200,000-something. This morning we rank 453,166.
While some other books in my category are lower, some others by known professionals are higher. In case you’re wondering, lower is better.
Some authors organize mass buying sprees for their books in order to generate a higher rankings. They ask everyone who plans to purchase a copy of their book to do so on a certain day at a certain time so the blast of orders will make the book rank really high. I’m not sure what the point of this is. Isn’t this sort of an artificial way of getting that ranking? And how long will it last? Also, who cares? I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book based on the way it ranked at Amazon, have you?
It is an interesting system, though, and one that publishers and authors seem to pay close attention to, even if no one else does.
Did you know that the ranking figures might change by the hour—not the day or the week—but the hour! Well, this is true of those with very high rankings. Books within the typical ranking range (10,000 on up into the millions) are calculated once a day. And, according to some analysts of this ranking system, a large jump up the ranking scale does not necessarily indicate huge sales. Depending on what is happening with other books within the range, a big jump could mean only one or two sales.
You can actually track your own book sales at Amazon through a handful of sites. But most offer a disclaimer indicating that the results are only minimally accurate. Here’s one such site:
http://www.ranktracer.com
I see that Aaron Shepard’s Sales Rank Express has closed down.
Do you try to keep track of your book’s ranking at Amazon? What have you learned about this process? About your book sales?
Of course, if you are the publisher/distributor, and Amazon is ordering books from you, you have a pretty clear idea of Amazon sales. They are going to order more books when they have sold most of those in stock. But when you have a publisher, they get the orders and you don’t know anything about your sales figures until you get your royalty check.
For more information about my new book, Promote Your Book, Over 250 Proven, Low-Cost Tips and Techniques for the Enterprising Author, visit the book’s Amazon page. Order the book and watch the ranking figures change. Now there’s a fun way to spend your afternoon.
http://amzn.to/oe56Ia