Re: Kindle Store sales report software glitch?

To be honest, Kent, having published both ebooks and POD books for years  I think I'm 
quite well aware of the relative sizes of the two markets.  Do you have any data to back up 
your assertion that there aren't enough Kindle sales to override minor adjustments?  In my 
observation, if a Kindle title's if a sales rank is 7K, 24 hours later it will be between 11K 
and 16K in the absence of sales.  I'd say that indicates pretty strong sales in the Kindle 
store, and from what I've seen monitoring my titles' sales ranks, that's been pretty 
sustained for some time now.   What I'm talking about is seeing a title's sales rank move up 
the ladder from 16K to 3.8K in one day but not seeing sales on the report that would 
correspond to that.  I don't think returns are the issue, because my Kindle sales reports do 
show returns, and I only had one in December, not for either of my books where I saw 
consideraably more sharp moves up the ladder than the sales report listed.

John

--- In [email protected], "Kent S. Larsen II" <kent@...> wrote:
>
> 
> 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>ebook-
[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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