 What the difference is between a book’s Amazon’s sales ranking, it’s position in the Amazon Best Seller lists and the book’s actual popularity may not seem like a big thing, but it can affect the way your marketing strategy works. In fact, understanding the differences can make the difference between you selling a few books and selling a lot of books. It can definitely increase your KU downloads, if your book is enrolled in Kindle Select. You may think that sales rankings, best seller lists and popularity are just different names for the same thing. You would be wrong.  Popularity, in Amazon’s terms, is very different from the first two and it has a far greater impact on how visible your books are on Amazon. Visibility is just another way of saying “free advertising”, because books that are visible are likely to sell, whereas a book that isn’t visible can’t sell unless a reader is looking for it specifically, which is unlikely if they haven’t heard of it. So, let’s take each of those terms in turn and unpack them to see what the differences are. Sales ranking is a very volatile feature. First of all, it is relative to the millions of other books that are listed on Amazon. Secondly it changes by the hour, depending on who buys what and when. A book that has a sales rank of 1,000 today may be down at 5,000 tomorrow and 10,000 the day after. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t popular. Some people think that KindleUnlimited (KU) downloads don’t count for much when it comes to sales ranking, but this is an urban myth. A KU download is treated the same as the sale of a book, ie 1 KU download = 1 sale.  The problem is that the value of sales diminishes by 50% each day. So, a sale today is only counted as ½ a sale tomorrow and will only be counted as ¼ of a sale the day after. This is part of the reason that sales rankings are so volatile. If you sell 10 copies of your book today but none tomorrow, then today’s 10 sales are only worth 5 sales tomorrow and your sales ranking plummets. This means that promos have a disproportionate impact on sales ranking when they end. All those books that were downloaded during the promo period are only worth a fraction of what they were the day after the promo ends. A sale on day 1 of a 5 day promo is only worth 1/16 of a sale by the time the promo has ended.  Best seller lists are driven by sales rankings, so they are just as volatile. Yes, you may have earned that elusive brown “best seller” tag for your book, but you may only be at number 99 for an hour before dropping out of the list, because the lists are limited to the top 100 books. However, the lists are category specific, so even low sales in some niche categories can keep you in the best seller lists for days, weeks or even months. But those sales levels will never get you into the Kindle Store best seller list, which is dominated by the high volume sellers. By contrast, popularity isn’t calculated hourly, like sales rankings and best seller listings. Popularity is calculated as a 30 day rolling average. What’s more, your sales on day 1 don’t lose their value on day 2, 3, 4 etc. 100 books sold on Day 1 is still worth 100 books sold on day 30. It is only on day 31 that they drop out of the calculation. BUT – and it’s a big but for a reason – KU downloads aren’t counted at all. I’ll get to that reason later.  Unlike the bestseller rankings, popularity rankings don’t cut off at 100. If you are patient enough to keep scrolling, you could find out which is the 1 millionth most popular book on Amazon. If a book has made just one sale it will be in that list somewhere. The popularity listings aren’t easy to find on Amazon, so I’ll provide an easy to use guide for you to download. But viewing the listings isn’t the important part anyway. Very few readers even know they exist or how to find them. The important part is how Amazon’s algorithms use the popularity data to make books more visible. Promotions can play a big part in that visibility too, because they have so much influence on a book’s popularity during the rolling 30 day period within which the promo is running..  Amazon doesn’t like spikes in sales, which you often get with promos. They want to see consistency in sales. Which is why popularity is part of the algorithm and sales rankings aren’t. If your book is selling consistently even at a low sales rank, it can find its way into the algorithm and will be made more visible. For example, when people do searches, the results aren’t presented to them in sales rank order, they are presented in popularity order. So, if your book is more consistently popular than the No1 best seller, it will be more visible while the best seller is ignored, especially after the best seller starts drifting down the charts. Yes, your newly self-published book could appear higher in the search results than Harry Potter or last year’s Jack Reacher (but not this year’s Jack Reacher, because that will still be popular). The other way visibility is improved is through appearing in the “also bought” and “recommended for you” listings that appear when someone is actually viewing the page of a specific book.  Don’t underestimate the value of those listings. People like to read what other readers are reading, so the “also bought” list is particularly influential. And some people buy solely from the “recommended for you” lists because they know that their buying history is telling Amazon to show them the sort of books they like to read and it saves them having to do searches to find their next book. So, popularity feeds into popularity. Because if your book appears in those listings they will sell more copies - which indicates that they are still popular. So, you are into a virtuous circle. This is also why the relevance of keywords is so important in Amazon Ads these days. If you are getting lots of impressions but few clicks, it means that the ad isn’t appearing as relevant to readers. If you are getting clicks but few sales, that also tells Amazon that the keywords you are using aren’t relevant to the readers who are seeing the ad. If they were, more readers would be buying the book.  And relevance is important when it comes to your book being displayed in the “also bought” and “recommended for you” lists, because if the algorithm doesn’t think your book is relevant for the reader, it won’t be displayed. Relevance and popularity work hand in hand. So, all those broad targeted, scatter gun approach keywords that some authors use in their ads are actually harming the sales of the book, not helping them. The ad may make a few sales, but it won’t benefit from increased visibility, because the algorithm can’t work out its relevant audience. Now, to that reason why KU downloads aren’t included in the popularity calculations.  Essentially, the popularity list is about selling more books so that Jeff Bezos becomes richer. KU downloads don’t earn Mr Bezos anything. KU has its own popularity listings based on books that are downloaded, but including KU popularity data in with ebook popularity would skew the picture. The ebook popularity data is fed through to make recommendations for KU downloads. If you sell more ebooks you will see a corresponding rise in KU downloads at the same time. You can see this for yourself when you run a promo. Not only will you sell more books at 99p, you should also see a rise in KU downloads for the same book (there is a time lag of up to 4 days for the KU data to appear) However, if KU download data was fed back to the ebook popularity chart, it would create an inflationary spiral, with KU popularity driving more KU popularity. The ebook’s sales might be tanking, but it would still be flying high in the popularity rankings fuelled by KU. But if an ebook’s sales are dropping, Mr Bezos wants the book to drop lower in the popularity chart so that better selling books can rise. So, to make sure that the popularity chart reflects ebook sales and not KU downloads, KU download data isn’t fed into the ebook popularity chart.  How can you get your book higher up the popularity chart so that more people see it and buy it? Promos sell books, so that is the simplest way of doing it, But there are nuances to that. Promos are a great way of making books popular, but they have to be managed carefully. The algorithm is set up to reward steady sales over a period and to ignore spikes in sales. It also rewards an upwards trend rather than a flat trend line and a descending trend will be reduced in value as it indicates a drop in popularity. Knowing this, you can set up the marketing campaign for your promo to produce that rising trend. The following is provided for illustration purposes only. We are not suggesting it as an actual marketing plan (though you can use it if you wish). If you are doing a 99p Kindle Countdown promo over 7 days, you can plan your marketing activity to increase steadily over the promo period. Day 1 – Launch Facebook ad to run for 7 days. Day 2 – Launch Bookbub ad to run over 6 days. Day 3 – Send promo info to ½ of your email list Day 4 – Launch Amazon ad to run over 4 days. Day 5 – Increase spending on Facebook ad. Day 6 – Send promo info to other ½ of email list Day 7 – Change wording on Facebook ad to “Offer Ends Today”.  With each new activity layering onto the top of the previous one, sales are bound to take an upward trend rather than all being made on Day 1 and then starting to tail off by Day 3 as you start to run out of interested readers. And because your ebook is trending in the popularity chart you will continue to get sales after the promo has ended because it will be appearing in those other lists I mentioned. Supported by continued advertising, this can maintain your book’s popularity for a lengthy period, certainly until you become eligible for the next Kindle Countdown Deal for your book in 3 months’ time – when you start all over again. And, because your books are already popular, the new campaign will push you even higher up the popularity charts and get you higher up those lists, making your books more visible and driving organic sales - which feed back into the popularity calculation. So, there we end our quick look at the popularity chart, what it means for your book’s visibility and how to get your book higher in the chart. Don’t forget to download our guide (below) to assist you in locating the popularity charts. As with the best seller charts, they are broken down by categories so you can see where your book is in relation to other books in the same category. You will see that some of the books have the “best-seller” flag attached, but many more of them don’t. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so. 
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