Amazon rankings not working for July?

Hi folks,

Just a quick question. Are others having problems with Amazon not updating their rankings this month? Amazon reports 10 sales for the Kindle version of my intellectual property book so far this month in my royalty statement, nine in the U.S. and one in the U.K. However, my rankings have dropped since the first sale on July 1 and upticked again only once a couple of days ago for my 9th sale. The others have not affected my rankings which I track pretty faithfully on a daily basis. Novelrank credits me with two sales for the book, and none in the U.K. this month. This seems to coincide with the rankings during the month. My Author Central page at Amazon is even worse, listing only one sale for the book for the month. Does anyone know what is going on?

I don't have an issue with royalties posting correctly, but this obvious disconnect is disturbing as one would think that the same data are used for both reports. It does not build my confidence that such an obvious issue can go unfixed for at least the two weeks that I am aware of it.

Am I the only one with this problem? I would find that hard to believe.

This problem always arises at the beginning of every month, but is usually resolved quickly. It is in your interest to know the status of your book; more importantly, it is essential to Amazon to keep your book as high as possible in the rankings for the alogorithms to place your book in the "also boughts" list

Amazon have been making changes to the algorithms, not to lower sales but to increase them. However, as a company dependent on sales, they are unconcerned about which items sell; they just want to maximise sales. If it is better for a hundred products to make ten sales per month than for fifty products to make fifteen sales per month and fifty more to make less than one sale per month, they will do just that. Hence the change in algorithms to sell more of the slow sellers at the cost of the steady sales. This is a very simple example using low figures; in reality, Amazon's algorithms affect millions of products and their subsequent sales.

As far as reporting rankings is concerned, this is a service Amazon provide for their vendors; they are not obliged to give out this data on a daily basis. However, the weekly KDP sales stats should be accurate and reflect the actual sales of the week. I agree with you that it is frustrating when we are used to a system and it suddenly breaks down. I hope it's fixed soon.

Thanks for the feedback, Shelagh.

I've always noticed significant discrepancies, but not like this. I don't expect Amazon to update the sales rankings for every sale, though I see no reason why that would not be done automatically. But when the data are not updated for two weeks, there is clearly a problem. Novelrank reported (and still reports) only three sales out of 10. Novelrank, an unaffiliated site, pulls their sales from reported reported sales statistics presumably provided by Amazon. Customer support has not been helpful, despite repeated attempts to tell them there is a problem. (They have provide stock, obvious answers as to how the rankings work without addressing the question of why sales did not affect rankings for a two week period for at least one of my books.)

Because my sales are modest in a very narrow area, every single sale makes a significant impact on the rankings and selling even a book a day or every two days will keep it in the top ten in its category. That's why I know with certainty that the rankings have not been updated normally at least for an entire two week period for one of my titles and I just wanted an acknowledgment from Amazon that they are aware of the issue and working on it, rather than telling me how the rankings work.

Hi,
What I think lower sales is not about amazon's ranking, some time it's depend up to your marketing strategy. make sure Amazon also being changes his algorithm like google in a month.
You would have better sales to increase your online presence.

My post was from July of last year . . .