Quick Links: Why Amazon Book Rankings Make You Nervous — And Why You Can Stop Caring

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Curious about Amazon book rankings? Can’t help but obsess about them? Emily Wenstrom  over at The Write Life feels your pain, and shares what she has found out regarding how the rankings work and tips on how she manage to tame her ranking anxiety. One added tip, Kindle Nation Daily has a free eBook tracker tool that will pull your rankings from Amazon, store them, and show you a handy dandy chart. Full disclosure I do some consulting for Kindle Nation Daily, but I am getting nothing in return for tell you about the tool. Like I said, it is free and something I think worth value to authors.

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Why Amazon Book Rankings Make You Nervous — And Why You Can Stop Caring

June 15, 2016

By Emily Wenstrom
I’m three months into selling my first novel, and I’m sorry to say, I have absolutely nothing I can report regarding my sales numbers.

My publisher delivers sales reports by quarter: January to March; April to June; July to September; and October to December. But those sales reports are delivered about two months following the end of the quarter.

So as I write this column in mid-May, all I know is that as of December — two-and-a-half months prior to my launch — I had sold seven books.

Womp.

I’m doing my best not to stress over it. From everything I’ve heard from other authors, sluggish sales reporting is pretty par for the course.

In the meantime, I’ve become unreasonably attached with the only metric for my success that I have access to: my Amazon rank.

Life by the rankings
Watching your book’s Amazon rank rise and fall — which happens several times over the course of even a single day — quickly becomes addictive. During my book’s launch, I kept it open in a browser tab and refreshed it frequently.

An Amazon ranking bump of even a place or two, up or down, drastically affected my mood.

This is no way to live, writers. And yet, it’s somewhat inescapable.

After a few weeks of living by the rankings, I realized that I could at least put this nervous energy toward something productive.

If Amazon rankings were going to affect my mental state, I could at least understand how they were determined, and hopefully do something to get more control over mine.

I embarked on a quest to learn all I could about them.