Don’t worry. I’m not going to delve too deep, or pretend this is much of a thing; but, it is handy for this author to track his books’ Sales Ranks as per Amazon.com.
I sold a book today. Yay? Many authors can claim that they sell a book an hour. Some may never sell a copy. Few can sell so many that it is ridiculous for them to check.
I sold a copy of Twelve Months at Barclay Lake. Yay! It is my second book, the first in a series of three about the wilderness in Washington’s Cascade Range, and it won an award. Since I wrote it, that patch of temperate rain forest (annual rainfall ~119 inches/year, lots of moss and enormous trees) it has become neighbor to the Wild Sky Wilderness, and the Bolt Creek fire. It is also one of my poorest sellers.
(In retrospect, it needed a better title, a cover that tied the series together, and a smarter marketer.)
One site doesn’t tell the entire sales story, but Amazon is the biggie to watch. Every day I check my Amazon account to check the Sales Ranks for each of my books. There are comprehensive and official techniques, but Amazon Sales Ranks became a useful tool when I began to understand the notion of how the number is calculated.
Note: I do NOT know Amazon’s algorithm. Search the internet. Someone probably does.
In general, from what I can tell, Amazon tracks the frequency of sales, not the total sales. If total sales was the measure then the oldest books could be the top sellers, always. The Bible, something by Newton, or Shakespeare, or Dante would rule. Amazon is a business. They care about cash flow. How many and how fast are they selling?
From what I can tell, Amazon dramatically raises a book’s sales rank after a sale. If there’s another sale, the rank remains elevated. If there’s no subsequent sale, the rank drifts down, which means the number gets bigger. A day or so ago, Twelve Months at Barclay Lake was at about 11,000,000. That’s freakishly far down the list. No one has the time to scroll through eleven million books, even at twenty per page at a time. Someone found it or me or both, bought a copy, and suddenly the Sales Rank raised to ~350,000; still not great, but dramatically better. Another sale would’ve pushed it higher. Instead, it is already down to ~500,000.
Down to ~500,000 brings the book significantly closer to Amazon’s front page, or at least within a genre, or a sub-genre, or a sub-sub-genre. They probably didn’t find it that way. Searches still succeed, but each builds and reinforces the other.
I care less about the number than about the indicator that something happened. That’s my cue to amplify that sale by mentioning the book on social media, etc.
This is also a reminder of how sparse and spartan sales can be after a while. Look at the graph and see the more hopeful days at the start, immediately after publication. The sales were more frequent and the Rank stayed higher. Unfortunately, I didn’t emphasize it at the time because my strategy was to finish all three books in the series before trying to professionally sell them. Unfortunately, as I finished the third one, I dropped into an emotional crevasse of a divorce. Unfortunately, as I was ready to sell them more energetically, we entered the Great Recession. Life got complicated after that. That’s a lot of ‘unfortunately’. #massiveunderstatement
Fortunately, I followed some advice that makes the book more timeless. I mention days and dates but not years. That’s appropriate because the book is about Nature, and our designations of time are meaningless. The seasons matter. The only way the days of the week matter is whether the critters time their scrounging for our weekend arrivals. The area is still a temperate rainforest. Sunny Saturdays still have swimmers and kids. Mid-winter Mondays are an adventure to a world that forgets about us for months. The story remains valid. Maybe someday the sales will become more valid, or valuable, too.
Until then, and even after, I’ll try to check the Sales Rank daily. It is quick view into my sales world.
General updates
- Firewatcher’s sequel – about 1/3 done with the third of ~10 drafts, hopefully, ready to publish by the end of 2024
- Previous publication – I received the updated cover for an updated version of one of my already published books, mostly fixing some format issues
- Screenplay – completed the first draft of the true story screenplay of a 14-year-old brat aboard a Tall Ship in that era, now formatting prior to additional drafts and industry comments and interest
- and the inevitable story ideas – two episodic concepts: one is a white-trash comedy (reflecting personal perspective), and one is a comedy/sci-fi animal/alien story
tomthewriter.com 
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