Re: Kindle Store sales report software glitch?

John I suspect that what you are missing is the relative size of the two markets.

With pbooks, the number of sales involved is high enough that its easy to connect the sales to changes in the sales rank. Generally, without sales a book's sales rank declines over time because other books sell.

But with Kindle I don't think that the sales volumes are high enough to stabilize the ranks very easily. Minor corrections and adjustments have significant repercussions, simply because there aren't enough sales to make the adjustments disappear.

When your book sells a copy, I'm sure that the Amazon Kindle ranking goes down.

But it could also go down because the sale yesterday of someone else's book has been cancelled, or because the customer's credit card was rejected, and that book then suddenly moves way below your book, making your book move closer to 1 (down in the rankings).

Thanks to monitoring sales ranks on Titlez.com, I've seen the effect of returns or cancelled sales of my own books on the rankings of those books -- essentially the ranking goes back up to where it would have been had the sale not occurred. If the Kindle rankings have much of that, given the much lower number of daily sales compared to Amazon's book sales, I'm not surprised that the rankings seem to bounce around for no reason.

You might also note that despite the obvious cancelled sales or returns, I never see returns on my LSI reports. I've heard that Amazon holds on to these copies and sells them again to other customers. Could it be that Amazon does something similar with Kindle books? I can't imagine how that would work, but I guess you never know.

Kent




At 7:21 PM +0000 3/25/08, you wrote:
>Thanks, Liz, but what your actually saying here is that there IS a relationship between sales
>ranks and sales reports. I agree that books can move up and down the ladder in hours on
>the basis of a single copy sold. What I'm talking about is books moving up the ladder
>many more times than can be accounted for by the number of copies sold. Your example
>concerns a print book. I'm not questioning the accuracy of my LSI sales reports for my
>POD books sold on Amazon because with them I see a definite relationship between sales
>rank moves and copies sold. It's my Kindle editions where I'm not seeing this.
>
>John
>
>--- In <mailto:ebook-community%40yahoogroups.com>[email protected], Elizabeth Burton <EBurton@...> wrote:
>>
>> John,
>>
>> Sales rankings and sales reports ARE two totally different things.
>> Amazon sales rankings are a fluid system based on a raft of
>> complicated and somewhat esoteric criteria that can have a book moving
>> up and down the ladder from one hour to the next--on the basis of a
>> single copy sold. They are a good marketing tool but otherwise
>> essentially meaningless.
>>
>> Case in point: one of my people set a specific day and time and asked
>> everyone who planned to buy his book to purchase it during that period
>> at Amazon. At the end of the specified time period, his ranking had
>> gone from the 100K level to just over 2,900. Total number of books
>> sold: 31.
>>
>> So, don't lose any sleep over the apparent discrepancy. The two things
>> have only a distant relationship to each other.
>>
>> Liz
>>
>>
>> Elizabeth Burton, Executive Editor
>> Zumaya Publications LLC
>> Opening Doors to the Creative Mind
>> <http://www.zumayapublications.com>http://www.zumayapublications.com
>>
>
>								


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