Amazon's Algorithm

November 20, 2019 4:19 PM

Yesterday, a book on Amazon was ranked 616th in General Broadcasting and 1564th in Journalism Writing on Amazon. Today, it's ranked 68th in General Broadcasting and 206th in Journalism Writing on Amazon. What does that mean? Could a ranking change that much in a day? Somebody said their algorithm might be screwy. Amazon isn't generous in explaining what those numbers mean.
posted by CollectiveMind to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

My understanding of publishing is that you've got a few books at the top selling a lot, a clump of books selling some, and an uncountable number of books that basically don't sell, So if you are mired in that bottom grouping a handful of sales can make it look like you've jumped way up, but you still basically aren't selling any books.
posted by COD at 4:53 PM on November 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

A couple of observations from, um, watching my own books' Amazon sales.

* yes, the rankings do change by the day
* it doesn't take a heck of a lot of sales to get into the top 100 of a category
posted by zompist at 5:10 PM on November 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'm a book editor and while I don't really know this side of things well, I think what COD said is correct. Also: "General Broadcasting" isn't a powerhouse book category, so a few sales will go a very long way. (see: publishers gaming book categories on Amazon for just this reason)
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:34 PM on November 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

What they said. Here is my favorite article about Amazon rankings.

A while ago, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded to Amazon, and in a matter of hours, had achieved “№1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything.

How many copies did I need to sell to be able to call up my mother and celebrate my newfound authorial achievements? Three. Yes, a total of three copies to become a best-selling author. And I bought two of those copies myself!

posted by jessamyn at 5:35 PM on November 20, 2019 [12 favorites]

The ranking counts how a book performs in relation to other books in the same category. If a category is small, other books had relatively few sales on that day, and the book in question a bit more, the effect on the ranking can be significant.
posted by Zumbador at 7:35 PM on November 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm a small press publisher. I've had poetry books become "bestsellers" (in the weird Amazon sense of the term) simply by selling one copy, because not a lot of people buy poetry books compared to other genre categories. When rankings change that much in a day, either it's genuinely a bestseller or it's a category with not a lot of movement, which makes small sales a greater percentage of the whole. In this case I would bet on the latter.
posted by joannemerriam at 9:00 AM on November 21, 2019

Response by poster: Thank you all.
posted by CollectiveMind at 7:02 PM on November 25, 2019