amazon numbers, and why it's not a good idea to check on them

[Teresa Edgerton]

I'm sure everyone with a book out succumbs to the temptation sometimes, whether we're what Brian calls traditionally published, self-published, POD, small press, or whatever.

At least the numbers at amazon.co.uk stay put long enough, you have to figure that when they recalculate it actually means something ... maybe.

But at amazon.com they've had some weird system that takes how many books you've sold in the last hour (or whatever) calculates how many books that would be if you continued to sell at that rate for some arbitrary period of time, adds it to how many books you've sold already, and comes up with a figure based on that. Sell a handful of copies within an hour of each other, and you'd surge ahead of 2 million other books that didn't sell any new copies on that particular day. The next day, however, 500,000 other books would have overtaken you. You'd fallen ignominiously from 40,000th place to 540,000th.

In spite of this madness, it used to be possible to make some kind of sense of the process, just by tracking the fluctuations. If your ranking improved at all, by even the tiniest number, you knew you sold at least one copy -- a more significant improvement, maybe two or three copies. If your ranking bobbed up and down several times in the same day, you knew that your book was selling, if not fabulously well, at least steadily.

Now, however, they have added a fiendishly confusing feature, by including your ranking for the previous day. That ought to make it easier. Except for one thing: if you wrote down yesterday's numbers and compare them to what it says about yesterday today, they may or may not be the same, in fact, sometimes the numbers have no conceivable relationship to one another. There is no way to make sense of them. None.

I think it's all a plot to make writers even crazier than they are already.

[Mark Robson]

Ha, ha, ha! Even by writing this, you have demonstrated to me that your obsession exceeds my own! I will admit to a more concerted obsession over the last month, but I've always kept an occasional eye on my ratings over the years. I will even admit to having printed the page off whenever a title reaches a new peak rating. How sad is that? (Highest rating printed so far - 670, but who's counting? )

For a while I became able to translate sales into actual booksales figures, and I worked out that if the rating of a book settled below 20 000 for any length of time, you were actually selling at least one copy per day, but this was on amazon uk, so I doubt that statistic would bear any resemblance to the .com version. Imperial Spy has been between 1000 and 8000 pretty much since the launch, which I'm guessing means it is selling in reasonable quantity. However, the mysteries of amazon in whatever country you're in will no doubt remain just that - mysteries. One thing's for certain - amazon won't tell you anything they don't want you to know.

[Patrick Mahon]

Originally Posted by Kelpie

I'm sure everyone with a book out succumbs to the temptation sometimes, whether we're what Brian calls traditionally published, self-published, POD, small press, or whatever.

I think it's all a plot to make writers even crazier than they are already.

Kelpie,

Writers? Crazy? Surely not?!

Patrick.

[Teresa Edgerton]

Ordinarily, Mark, I would back my obsessiveness against your obsessiveness any day of the week -- but I must admit that I've never thought of printing out the page. Until now.

Making the numbers even more confusing in my case is that they've got three editions out, each of which they compute separately. Even though the Trade Paperback and the Bargain Paperback are exactly the same book -- they were just able to get some copies at a substantial discount. Between all three "editions" they may be moving a lot of my books -- or not. There is no way to know.

Patrick, insanity in writers is directly proportional to the number of years they've been writing.

[Lissa]

I am still amazed at how difficult most companies seem to think they need to make their accounting. All they need to do is give you several sets of different numbers:

Total sales - $amount
Total books - number of books sold

they could even give you a break down of those depending on what type of book they are selling, hardback, paperback, trade, etc.
Then they could do their projections of your sales status.

Dadburnit, they just need me to tell them how to do it better and more effeciently.