I’m an Amazon addict …

• Posted in About Books

Okay, I have to confess something.

I’m completely addicted to Amazon. More specifically, to checking my sales numbers for Karma Girl. I know, I know, it’s not even out yet. It won’t be out for three more months (May 1 to be exact). But evidently, Amazon keeps track of pre-orders and posts those ranks too.

Right now, I am #711,130 in Books. That’s up from the 1.3 million range I was in last week, but down from my high of 400,000 and some earlier this week. Since I don’t know exactly how many books Amazon is selling, I don’t really know what my rank is.

How many books would you have to sell to get into the top 10,000? The top 1,000? The top 100? A girl can dream …

Maybe I’ll check it again in a few minutes … just in case it went up …

What about you? Do you obsess over Amazon rankings? Inquiring minds want to know …

4 Responses to “I’m an Amazon addict …”

  1. Pansy Flox says:

    Hi Jennifer,

    You don’t need to go to Amazon every few minutes to check your sales rank. Just add your book to Charteous (https://charteo.us) and let it do the “looking up” for you. You should then be able to see the historical values whenever you want as nice charts.

    Btw, Amazon recomputes the sales rank only once every hour. Also, you can find a nice analysis on relationship between salesrank and actual sales at https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/08/a_methodology_f.html.

    /Pansy

  2. Jennifer Estep says:

    Hi, Pansy. Thanks for the links, especially the one that explains the sales numbers. That was really informative. I’ll definitely check out your site.

    Right now, I just want people to try the book. If they like it, hopefully, they’ll tell their friends about it, and then that will translate into solid sales figures. 😉

  3. Meljean says:

    I did this, but ultimately became very frustrated with it. Two weeks before my book release, I went from #500,000ish to #3,000 in one day, then up to #80,000, then down to #8,000 the next — and my book has sold out of stock there twice, and both times I was around #40,000 again. So I don’t know how they compute the numbers, and how it translates to sales.

  4. Jennifer Estep says:

    Basically, I think it’s the more books you sell in an hour, the higher your ranking goes. So, if you get all your friends and family to order copies at the same time, you could probably push your rank into the top 100 or something. Not that I’m going to do that or anything …

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