If you’re publishing on Amazon you should really be using Author Central. There you can track your books quickly, see your reviews, and look at a nice graph of your sales over time.
Well, it’s not so much sales as what those sales mean for you. See, each author on Amazon has a rank. This depends on how many books they sell, and you can see a list of the most successful Amazon authors right here.
Suffice it to say, I’m not on that list.
Will I ever be? Well, judging by how my own Amazon author rank has been bouncing around lately, I’d say no.
But of course anything can happen, so why don’t we sit down and look at my graphs so you can pick up a few things about yours.
My Current Amazon Author Rank
My Highest Amazon Author Rank
Oh yeah, reviews have an effect on your author rank. If you see your rank go up but you haven’t had any sales recently, well, chances are you got a review. And as far as I can tell, even bad reviews give you a boost! I…am…set!
My Lowest Author Rank
Any Joe on the street will tell you right away that I’d been on a downward spiral for some time. Day after day, week after week, that train was going one way and one way only – down.
But then look what happened the next day. I shot all the way up to #124,687. What happened? Probably just 3 to 4 sales, maybe even less!
Yeah, it doesn’t take a whole lot to move that needle. And a lot of those big spikes you see are small promos I did, or perhaps a new release that got a few sales. I think it was really just keeping titles coming out, Sell Your Book and my perma-free hitting in September, that all catapulted me up higher into the mid-levels there at the start of fall.
I had a good run, but then around Christmas I fell back down. Books were just not selling, and sales for January continued to fall. The trend continued on into February, and it’s been getting worse since.
It’s tough when you’re doing just about everything right (new titles each month, series, perma-free, promotions, Facebook advertising, blogging, link-building, guest posting, SEO, offering advice, throwing tantrums) and you still go down.
And of course someone that knows nothing will write a book and it’ll shoot up the charts. As someone recently said, self-publishing really just comes down to luck.
Damn you luck! Give me the Muses and Fates any day!
Well, what can you do? I guess I’ll try to put some more books out and hope they do better than the 30 I already have.
Remember, I’m really trying to get up to around $500 each month in royalties so I can pay my rent, although I’d really need $665 to do that. Well, maybe next month.
Update - May 27
I had a huge dip in April on my Amazon Author Rank, and there's really no explanation other than a bug or in-house cleaning.
Here are two screenshots, one of the dip and one of the day before. You can see the next day it jumped back where it belonged and stayed there. Weird.