Made the Top 100 on Amazon Kindle's Bestseller List? Don't Start Spending the Money Yet!

 

            I don’t know where I’ve been because all of a sudden checking your seller ranking on Amazon is right up there with checking your blood pressure, your cholesterol, and your bank account! So…out of curiosity I decided to check the Kindle ranking for one of my books and it said 35. Yep – 35 in the top 100 for YA teen sci-fi. I was ecstatic!

            Then, the truth hit. Like when you find out that the tooth fairy is really your mother. Turns out the rankings change constantly, depending upon the number of books sold at that very moment.  So…either Light Riders and the Morenci Mine Murder was a big hit or a few people decided to download it at the same time. Yeah, you guessed it. It was the latter.

            Still, I’m now hooked by this thing! I pull up the numbers and get excited if I see them going down. (Lower numbers are better, high numbers mean you’d better not give up your day job). And frankly, in this business you’d better not give up any job! My last Kindle earnings said $0.28. That’s right. Twenty-eight cents. But that was the beginning of the month. Then again, that might be as good as it gets for that month.

            Then there’s this category thing. In broad categories like “Mystery,” it’s tough to show a low seller number ranking. But when the category gets narrowed down, like mine did for YA teen sci-fi, it’s easier to get a lower rank. (Remember – lower is good. Higher is not). I’m thinking of really narrowing the category down for my next novel so it looks something like this:

Fiction>young adult>not that young>mystery>whodunit?>who solved it>who cares> g rated>sci-fi> why?>some time travel

        This may really work! Oh, and now for the bad news. I just checked my ranking number again and it slipped to 42! By the time this gets printed, I might be off the top 100 list altogether. Unless of course people start downloading that book now… (I’ll keep my fingers crossed!)

         Meanwhile, I think I’ll just check my bank account.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/7006632011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_kstore_1_5_last