That’s the title of an article by author Alan Baxter. You can find the full text on his website.
Ah yes, the Amazon Sales Rank: that addictive bit of eye candy that can lift an author’s spirits into the stratosphere one day and hurl him down onto the rocks the next. In all likelihood neither reaction is truly justified, because a book’s Amazon Sales Rank is a temporary, relative thing, and does not mean what many authors think it does. If you want to get to the bottom of what your book’s ASR means, you might start by thinking about what the ASR does not mean.
Sales rank means a bit more when linked to tracking of that ranking by Novelrank.com. They know how to extract a good guess at the sales figures from the numbers. Also, those who’re members of Amazon’s Author Central can get BookScan data for their titles that includes sales (by geographic region) through most brick-and-mortar. Between the two, you can get a good idea of how well a book is doing.
I suspect Amazon is paying for that BookScan data to reduce the pressure it must be getting from authors to give them more sales data. It is interesting to watch that data change. A couple of weeks ago, my books seem “hot” in NYC. Now they’re doing well around Denver.
What is “Total Units” mean on the top of the map on the sales by Geography page anyway. I am very confused. When Amazon’s Author Central has “Total Units: 61, yet on the sales by geography map has 117 ares with 2 copies sold in each combined area, plus one area having 59 copies sold, it is confusing. What does it mean by “Total Units?” Is that how many books are sold or books per unit? I”m confused. If you want I can send you a print-screen of the sales by geography map of my book sales. If I am reading this correct, then my print sales are well over 300 in 10 weeks, which means my e-book may be equal to that or double which puts my book sales at over 1,000 in the first 10 weeks. I’m a newbie, this is my first book and outrageous, it must be a mistake on my part.