Plug Your Book: Q&A: How reliable are Amazon Sales Ranks?

QUESTION: I have noticed some dramatic, puzzling shifts in Amazon Sales Ranks lately. I have noticed many of my titles moving both up and down in large increments -- hundreds of thousands of places within a day or two. It makes me question the reliability of Amazon's rankings.

I purchased eight copies of a new title this past weekend. It had a sales rank of around 150,000. Now, three days later, this title is ranked around 750,000. It seems the rank should be much better.

ANSWER: Like everything else on Amazon, the sales rankings have plagued by periodic glitches. Amazon Sales Ranks get stuck sometimes, then move erratically, as if Amazon is making up for lost time. However, I haven't seen this technical problem for the past few weeks.

A title with very slow sales does typically have a rank exceeding 200,000, and a single sale can move that title with a rank of 200,000 to about 70,000. And then it falls with increasing velocity until it has another sale.

To give a recent example that I've watched this new book, which has come on the market in the past few weeks. When first listed, this book had an Amazon Sales Rank of 0. After a while, it apparently had one sale, which brought its rank to 60,000. For the past 10 days it hasn't had a sale, and the rank is falling every hour with increasing velocity, and already exceeds a million.

When you say you purchased eight copies of a book and didn't see an appropriate movement in the rank: Amazon counts a single order for multiple copies of a book as only one sale in terms of Amazon Sales Rank. In other words, to have the effect of eight sales, there would need to be eight separate orders -- not necessarily by different customers or to different shipping addresses, but eight separate orders nonetheless.

On the other hand, I've heard that Barnes & Noble does it the other way -- they count each copy sold toward the sales rank displayed on its Web site, even if those copies are sold in a single order. This is why some practitioners of the online "bestseller campaigns" do it on BN.com instead of Amazon, since each copy is counted in the sales rank.

Also, because Barnes & Noble's online sales volume is much lower than Amazon's its sales rankings are more volatile (or more easily manipulated). And some marketers believe that a huge spike in sales on BN.com will prompt the chain to stock or display the book in its brick-and-mortar stores.

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