Topic: Feature Question
I'm wondering if it would be helpful to have a feature that tracks how your books are doing across the sites where they are for sale. How do people check their sales today? Is it a difficult process?
Sol
- rhiannon
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Re: Feature Question
Combined with a track of readers if you are published, but in short stories online, and sales from hard copies, it might be an idea. I'm not sure. It depends on how people react to that sort of thing. I guess people's responses will tell you that.
- MrsPiddles
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Re: Feature Question
How would this be posted? Would the author post their sales, or would you somehow link to Amazon, or???? I'd love the idea of seeing who and what type of writing is successful (other than romance and outstanding fantasy) I can write, but it seems that I haven't found the right niche yet. Locals rave when they get one of my books. Now, if the US would take a chance.....
Oh well, I'll be tuned in to see where this goes.
- MrsPiddles
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Re: Feature Question
Ann Everett wrote:
it's a lot of bookkeeping...in my opinion. I have a guy who keeps record of all my sales...my husband. I rarely look at them. Just easier to ask him. :+)
Ann, you are soooooo lucky. My hubs doesn't want to hear it and surely won't look it up. All he wants to know is when is supper! Oh, and will I please check the water in his pigeon loft.
Write On!
- bimmy
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Re: Feature Question
If we're just looking at amazon every book has a rank rhat is public info and it's based on sales. Each country has its own rank though.
Bimmy
- rhiannon
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Re: Feature Question
Only three things matter: the satisfaction of your own self-expression, your communication, measured, in part, by readers' responses), and the money. That's it. (Oh, and the peace that comes from being in your own world for a while.)
- jack the knife
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Re: Feature Question
Unless you self-publish, only the publisher gets sales numbers from Amazon. Amazon rank is indicative of sales in a general way, but not specific. If your ranking climbs, you know that's because of a sales increase, but a rise of several thousand in rank may only translate to a couple of books sold. I don't think your idea is workable, Sol. And I don't really see the point, as it would create an irrelevant competition among TNBW published authors who write in various genres and use various promotion discounts.
- jack the knife
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Re: Feature Question
Regarding the above, as an example, three of my books today rose several thousand ranks each. (Amazon claims to update this figure hourly.) But I'm not expecting big royalty checks as a result. 
- Don Chambers
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Re: Feature Question
jack the knife wrote:
Unless you self-publish, only the publisher gets sales numbers from Amazon. Amazon rank is indicative of sales in a general way, but not specific. If your ranking climbs, you know that's because of a sales increase, but a rise of several thousand in rank may only translate to a couple of books sold. I don't think your idea is workable, Sol. And I don't really see the point, as it would create an irrelevant competition among TNBW published authors who write in various genres and use various promotion discounts.
I agree with the irrelevant competition aspect. When I do a promotion, my ranking will shoot up by tens of thousands. And then it quickly goes back down. And what would be tracked? The overall Amazon ranking? The genre specific? And which genre, since Amazon allows up to three? Us authors are keeping track of our sales based on the bottom line, royalty payments. No need for TNBW to do it.
- SolN
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Re: Feature Question
Unless you self-publish, only the publisher gets sales numbers from Amazon. Amazon rank is indicative of sales in a general way, but not specific. If your ranking climbs, you know that's because of a sales increase, but a rise of several thousand in rank may only translate to a couple of books sold. I don't think your idea is workable, Sol. And I don't really see the point, as it would create an irrelevant competition among TNBW published authors who write in various genres and use various promotion discounts.
I was really thinking of this more as a separate tool from the site that you could use to put in your sales results from the various sites that you have published on and track individual sales that way. But I can see it probably won't work for individual authors. It will probably be more of a tool for publishers to keep track and account for the sales of their authors. Getting data from Amazon and other sites and then parsing it and creating reports is a major pain in the kneck.
11 2016-08-19 22:23:43 (edited by Susan Stec 2016-08-19 22:24:43)
- Susan Stec
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Re: Feature Question
jack the knife wrote:
Unless you self-publish, only the publisher gets sales numbers from Amazon. Amazon rank is indicative of sales in a general way, but not specific. If your ranking climbs, you know that's because of a sales increase, but a rise of several thousand in rank may only translate to a couple of books sold. I don't think your idea is workable, Sol. And I don't really see the point, as it would create an irrelevant competition among TNBW published authors who write in various genres and use various promotion discounts.
A lot of things create book/author rankings, not just individual sales. I'm in three boxed sets and have several more coming out between October this year and next. There are at least 20 authors in each set. These really pump my author rankings because we can sell hundreds, sometimes thousands in a day, and that doesn't count KU readers where we can have hundreds of thousands of pages read a month. This pumps the rankings in individual books and author ranking. The higher the ranking the more visual your site pages are. Being strictly Amazon, with KU also pump rankings. So do tags and genre selections in individual books. It is a very complicated process. I don't think you can run totals on all books and be accurate. I am indie so I can tell you exactly how many books I sold this year and how many pages were read in KU, but then even that would be skewed because of my boxed sets. Did they purchase the set for my book, or 20? We just made the New York Times bestsellers list with the Magic and Mayhem boxed set. We had over 15K in the first couple of days and hit the list at #13 out of the fifteen after release week. Talk about bleed over. I sold over a hundred books the day after we hit the best sellers list. So I'd look sooo damn good on paper, but in reality... not so much.
