Amazon ranks product sales within categories on its website. That includes books. Amazon allows pre-orders (pre-sales) of e-books by both traditionally published and independent authors. In addition, traditional and independent authors both promote their books through non-Amazon sites and sources.
A few months ago—April 2, 2015 to be exact—I released Heaven to Betsy. I offered it for pre-order, as I had for my October 2014 release, Going for Kona. Amazon had just made pre-sale of e-books available to independent authors in the summer of 2014, so I had not been able to offer it on my previous books. This month, August 2015, I offered Earth to Emily for pre-order. Here’s how the sales went for each:
Because in the past pre-order sales dropped on release date, they impacted rankings tremendously, helping a book possibly attain “Hot New Release” status with Amazon, which propelled more sales and better rankings. With all the books I’ve offered for pre-order, Amazon also sent out announcement e-mails to those people who had bought my books before. So it’s been a pretty big advantage to get your e-book up for pre-order.
When I sold 213 pre-order e-books of Heaven to Betsy for its April 2, 2015 release, the result was that it was #18 in romantic mystery and nearly cracked the top 1000 overall on its first day of sales. That’s a bestseller, folks. It looked like this:
But it wasn’t a “Hot New Release,” so we tried harder for E2E, even though we’d started to hear rumblings of changes to the algorithms, that indie authors pre-order sales no longer counted on release day, and that promotion ranking spikes were being “smoothed”.
I sold 685 E2E via pre-order. Over three times as many as I sold of Heaven to Betsy. On release day (August 6), its ranking fell from 8,000 to over 11,000. Yes, you read that right. By the 2nd day the rankings started climbing and ultimately it reached #37 in romantic mystery on day three and cracked the top 2000. It did not make it as a Hot New Release. Obviously. But why was its rank so much lower than H2B‘s with triple the pre-orders? (First, a look at the screen shots: E2E‘s rank on its day three peak; overall sales at the end of day 3, August 8; the romantic mystery rankings—which included four of my novels, so I can’t complain too much; the free download rankings, which my Saving Grace led; the author rank, in which I was #30 in category.)
It turned out that it was true that Amazon is smoothing the impact of spikes caused by promotions and pre-orders, in favor of sustained sales. A longer averaging period, if you will. Pre-orders counted, for indies, at the time of the sale rather than on release day. Why else would H2B sell only 566 compared to E2E’s over 800 in the same period, and H2B be ranked 15 while E2E was ranked 37? That’s not evil, really, but it does decrease the impact of the enormously successful Bookbubs and the BookSends, and, yes, the pre-orders, for indies.
Now we have the data to prove the change between April and August of 2015, but we’d hoped we wouldn’t, that we’d have data showing the opposite, because we certainly hadn’t seen it dramatically with our promotions, so we hadn’t been sure. In retrospect, that is probably because we were already selling a good number of books, steadily, but our May and and summer promos weren’t as “spikey,” if you will.
Rats. Like I said, though, I can’t complain too much. I’ll still complain a little though. Because 213 pre-orders was such a success, we really had counted on great things from 685 pre-orders, thus it was a tremendous disappointment, and, strategically, we would have run more paid promotions on days 2-7 for E2E had we known of Amazon’s algorithm change. By the time we figured it out, it was too late to book the promotions, so the rankings fell.
Hell to Pay (Emily #3) is coming out in 2016, so we’ll just have to see what we see then, vis a vis pre-order impacts. I’ll still do pre-orders, just a compressed period for them. I want Amazon to send that e-mail to all my readers. 🙂
Have any of the rest of you seen a smoothing of spikes in your rankings on Amazon, post promotion, or post pre-orders? I’d love to hear your experiences, and so would my readers. Please do share in the comments below.
And over the next few weeks, I am posting on two purely positive new developments on Amazon, I promise: Amazon giveaways and Amazon new release author emails to followers.
Pamela
Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes overly long e-mails, award-winning and best-selling mysteries, 
