Friday, December 14, 2012

Should You Care About Your Author Ranking?



In case you didn’t know, authors with books selling on Amazon.com are now ranked according to their sales. If you have books published during  the 1980s that are no long selling well, your author ranking is high. (And we all know that low is much better).

The book I’m most proud of, a 202-page coffee table centennial history book with more historic photos than pages, is currently sales ranked at 4,220,667 in paperback and 11,707,397 in hardcover. (I didn’t realize the numbers went that high.)  The numbers change hourly, creating an interesting graph. My 1987 history hardcover has taken my ALL BOOKS rating as high as 77,061, although my sales rankings for mystery, thriller, historical romance, self-help and genre fiction have been as low as 560 since I’ve been periodically checking the numbers.
Theoretically,  a writer with one book that’s selling moderately well,  with no early publishing baggage, can have a much better  rating than a veteran writer with a great many books online. It makes me wonder why Amazon created this mid list nightmare. Do readers actually care whether an author’s rating is 98,564 or if it skyrockets over a million, if they enjoy reading the author's books?

On the other hand, should writers care if they’re ranked in the higher numbers? Will it lead to lower sales and humiliation when their lack of sales hangs on the electronic clothesline for all to see? Hopefully readers won’t go hunting for ratings before they buy a book.

How do you feel about the ratings and do you judge an author by his or her sales ranking?

7 comments:

Lynn Cahoon said...

Jean, I'm happy when my numbers are low, not so much when their high. My husband tells me to stop looking. But when I do pop in and check my amazon stats, sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised.

I don't think it affects much except an author's mood.

Jean Henry Mead said...

You're probably right, Lynn. I guess I'll have to buy all my old history books from Amazon and that will take care of the problem. :)

Jean Henry Mead said...

I have a dry sense of humor and wrote this article tongue-in-cheek. I should have included a smiley face emotican at the end. I hope no one thinks I'm crying in my "literary beer." :-)

C. M. Albrecht said...

I'm not so concerned by Amazon's way of ranking sales. What I'd like to see is a way to enable potential readers to see that you have an available book for them to read. In my case, with mysteries, readers who has the patience to keep going down the list until they reach one of my books will have forgotten what they were looking for and will also probably need new glasses.
Maybe it's unrealistic, but I wish Amazon (and others) would randomly rotate books on a given subject so that your chances of having a book pop up are at least as good as everyone else's chance.
I belong to author sites that randomly rotate book covers on a regular basis.
Happy holidays anyway to all.

C. M. Albrecht said...

I'm not so concerned by Amazon's way of ranking sales. What I'd like to see is a way to enable potential readers to see that you have an available book for them to read. In my case, with mysteries, readers who has the patience to keep going down the list until they reach one of my books will have forgotten what they were looking for and will also probably need new glasses.
Maybe it's unrealistic, but I wish Amazon (and others) would randomly rotate books on a given subject so that your chances of having a book pop up are at least as good as everyone else's chance.
I belong to author sites that randomly rotate book covers on a regular basis.
Happy holidays anyway to all.

Jean Henry Mead said...

I agree C.M. Books should be rotated and given equal exposure. I've noticed sales increases whenever on of my books has been featured on the main Amazon page, which doesn't happen very often.

Jake said...

As a reader I am more interested in summary & reader comments. Some with "low" rankings would never be on my TBR list.