Your
Sales Rankings
The
Review-Getting Nudge
By
Carolyn Howard-Johnson,
Excerpted from the newest book in Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers, How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically: The ins and outs of using free reviews to build and sustain a writing career.
Excerpted from the newest book in Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers, How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically: The ins and outs of using free reviews to build and sustain a writing career.
You
need only a few essentials in your Amazon tool box to build the
traffic crucial for your reviews to be seen—and to convince readers
to buy your book. , How
to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically: The ins and outs of
using free reviews to build and sustain a writing career helps
you get the reviews that influence Amazon’s sales ranking and this
section gives you everything else you need to maximize them.
Amazon
sales rankings are dandy little aids for evaluating how your
book is selling. Not that you should fixate on that, but having an
indicator that your book might need a little sales boost is nice.
And—when those ratings are nurtured—they prod Amazon’s
algorithms to lead people who read books similar to yours
to your Amazon buy page.
The
problem is that most authors and publishers know little if anything
about how those rankings come about. That isn’t their fault because
I doubt if Jeff Bezos, the brains behind the entire Amazon model,
knows exactly what his algorithms measure. If they’re anything like
the rest of the Amazon site, they change from day to day anyway. You
don’t need to know the magic behind them; you do need to know what
they are and how to prod them a little:
§ Find
your sales ranking (or rankings) on your book’s buy page under
“product details.” Often called “metadata,” these details are
the specifics for your book like ISBN, publisher, number of pages,
etc. Scroll down a bit to find this section on your page.
§ If
you have a ranking of 24,800, that means that 24,799 books listed in
your category are selling
better than your book and that up to millions of books in your book’s
category are selling less well.
§ The
lower your sales ranking number for your book the better. Sales
rankings for your Kindle (e-book) page will not be the same as the
one on your paperback page.
Note: When
the pages for your paper book and e-book are digitally connected
properly, your reviews will be the same on both pages. (There should
be a link on each page pointing to the other.)
§ If
you market and promote, your efforts may lower those rankings (lower
is good!). If so, celebrate because this doesn’t always happen.
Sometimes the marketing you are doing does not improve your rating at
all, though it should contribute to your overall branding effort.
§ Don’t
try to translate a drop in your ratings to the number of books sold.
The algorithms are a lot more complicated than that.
§ Sales
rankings fluctuate (sometimes wildly) during the day.
Warning: Do
not spend a lot of time checking your ratings. They should be used as
indicators. They shouldn’t become an obsession. It’s best not to
obsess, but if you can’t avoid it, Bookbuzzr.com and others provide
services available for pinging ratings to you in your e-mail box.
Carolyn
Howard-Johnson brings her experience as a publicist, journalist,
marketer, and retailer to the advice she gives in
her HowToDoItFrugally
series of books for writers and
the many classes she taught for nearly a decade as instructor for
UCLA Extension’s world-renown Writers’ Program. All her books for
writers are multi award winners including both the first and second
editions of The
Frugal Book Promoter and
her multi award-winning The
Frugal Editor won
awards from USA Book News, Readers’ Views Literary Award, the
marketing award from Next Generation Indie Books and others including
the coveted Irwin award.
Howard-Johnson
is the recipient of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year
in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community’s Character and
Ethics award for her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She
was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list of “Fourteen San Gabriel
Valley women who make life happen” and was given her community’s
Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts.
The
author loves to travel. She has visited eighty-nine countries and has
studied writing at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom; Herzen
University in St. Petersburg, Russia; and Charles University, Prague.
She admits to carrying a pen and journal wherever she goes. Her Web
site is www.howtodoitfrugally.com
Amazon
Profile - bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile
Twitter
- @FrugalBookPromo
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