Book sale rankings

Hi

I have a question about sales rankings such as Amazon. Do they reflect actual sale rankings or is it just a marketing thing? And if so, is it only calculated by amazon sales alone or not?

If someone has actual experience and can reveal their financial rewards in reflection to rankings, that would be very helpful?

Thanks

Thanks for your reply. Are you a writer of fiction or non fiction? Am going to take a guess from your picture. If it is you, I think fiction right? Maybe Thriller genre or romance? Tell me if am wrong..lol.

Again Thanks for your reply

Careful Marie,
someone may write a romance novel about you. Fiction of course, to be safe.

Oh, thats good. Since you have done ghost writing, I have another question for you. I want to write a book for someone which means ghostwriting but the publisher may not know about it. Because its for someone I know. Can that be done? Or do I need to tell the publisher that its my friend's book but I will be the one writing it?

Oh. thats interesting. So even the publisher does not know that the book was ghost written. Very secretive. Never knew it worked that way. I know that celebs get their books ghost written and other people but I always thought the publisher was involved.

Yeah I think that would be a better option for me to co author the book although I will be doing the most and maybe all of the writing. What if I did all the writing and it was for the book of my friend and we were going to have both our names on it?

Am sorry for these questions but publishing is so new to me.

My friend's engish is rather limited when it comes to writing. So not sure how it would work. I guess I will just wait and see..I have a few more ideas for books.

Another thing is that I have noticed some books that seem to always have a good rank while some other books are over 200K rank on the same subject. Although the author who is rank 200 thousand looks a little bit more credible. Does this have something do with which publisher you go with?

Or is it just luck, that your book sells and gets a good rank while others with the same subject, similar or even better credibility to write the book may not get a good a rank as your title?

Or it could be that amazon ranks does not represent true sales at all. I guess only a writer who has received past royalties would know the real difference. I will just have to wait.

Amazon ranks are calculated every hour based on the number of books sold. The longer it is since one of your books sold, the lower the rank (higher the number, e.g. Amazon ranking: 1,003,534). When one book sells the ranking shoots up (lower number, e.g. Amazon ranking: 645,345) and slowly drops day by day back to over a million. If two books sell the ranking will shoot up even higher to, say, 346,123. If eleven books sell in a short period of time the ranking may go to 16,124 or higher and then slowly drop down again. After a period of no sales the ranking will drop even lower than one million+ to maybe 2,345,612 and even lower as sales dry up. Then, with just one sale, the ranking will shoot up again and drop back within a matter of days.

It is normal to become obsessive about the rankings but once you can stop checking and use your time for promotion/marketing/writing, you will wonder why you became so obsessed!

Oh thanks for that Admin. I understand more now. But some titles (not famous people) are always at around the 10000 rank. So not sure.

The only ranks that stay constant are the bestsellers (top 100). The rest go up and down. Give me the titles that remain around 10,000 and, over a period ot time, I will check to see if you are right.

I believe you are right. I do not monitor what the ranks for those books over the course of the year.

sale ranking currently at about 7thousand. How many books do you think are being sold?

Two probably: one to your mum and one to your grandma.

You're not being nice, Shelagh. For shame.

She is being honest. One sale can take you from a million or more ranking into the thousands. It all depends on what else is selling at the moment. And in an hour, you can be right back up into the big numbers.

Shelagh..haha.

Ranking in last few days been in ten thousand to 15thousand mark. Never been over million. From what I have observed, never been over 100 thousand. (Did when first put on amazon, ok) Sometimes go back up to 50 thousand. But then goes back to 10-20 thousand.

I think you should be honest with us and post the title and author of the book. If you want information, you must give information.

My PA book over a 14 month period sold 271 copies. A few from Barnes and Noble but most were through Amazon.com. There were some months when sales ran 30 copies a month.

The book during those "heavy" sales months ranked between the high tens of thousands and the low hundreds of thousands.

What is odd is that when my contract was terminated it took over a year for my ranking to hit nine hundred thousand. There was not one single sale.

Now, without a sale in three years my books ranks 1,789,634!

My point is that I could not and can not find any meaning at all in the Amazon rankings...LOL

Phillip, you are not alone, and it shows just how meaningful the ranking system on Amazon really is (read that 'isn't').

I view sales rank on Amazon similar to Page Rank on Google. Both are neat to look at, but mean little.