Yesterday I spent 2 hours checking that the categories for my
kindle books were the most appropriate and this resulted in changes in most
cases. I did the same for my search
words. There was a reason for this.
One of my titles is selling much better than the others. MUCH better.
And I still don’t know why. It is
certainly more visible than the others – is this because it is selling better or is that why it is selling better?
Chicken or egg?
Beware of the Horse is ranked 12,476 of all paid books in the Amazon UK kindle store, which is
fantastic. This means that it ranks 32
in the top 100 kindle store/books/fiction/children’s fiction/animals, which is
turn means that it shows up on Page 2 of the top kindle books page in that
category. For a while it was in the top
20, so was on Page 1.
In the US, it ranks 40 in a similar list, so still appears
on Page 2 (just) and its overall ranking in the kindle paid store is
30,867. I pretended I was a reader
searching for the book and clicked on some of the search options. For Children’s
Horse Books, which yields 7234 results, it appears on Page 1. For kindle
store/horses it is on Page 1 in the centre of the 2nd row. Very noticeable! And in kindle store/ebooks/teen & YA/literature/fiction/horses it is the
first book on Page 1 of 266 pages. Before
War Horse, which is the second book!
Before you get too excited (I did!) this ranking is in terms of search relevance (not popularity or
sales!!). Even so, in terms of visibility,
this is a great result.
Yay! You’d think I
would be a millionaire by now (ha ha!) if you knew nothing about the publishing
process and the mysterious Amazon algorithms. Clearly, I’m not – you only have to look at the overall ranking of the
book in the US, ie 30,867 to realise that.
However, it does make you understand how important the categories
are. I wondered if the fact that the
book appears in the Teen and Young Adult category
for horses, which only lists 263 books in this group, as opposed to 798 for
children’s horse books, is significant.
To put this into context with my other books, which I
promote more actively, the rankings as of yesterday (they change hourly) in the
Paid in Kindle store are as follows:
Title Amazon.com Amazon UK
Coming Home 423,201 76,745
Matty & the Moonlight Horse 338,972 85,325
Matty & the Problem Ponies 659,019 48,935
Matty and the Racehorse Rescue 727,973 57,135
You will understand why I am so pleased about the ranking of
Beware of the Horse by comparison –
and the enormous challenge of selling any books at all when the competition is
immense – especially on Amazon.com, which is a much bigger pool. Since I donate my royalties from the Matty Books and Coming Home to animal charities, I have a powerful incentive to
drive sales. The Matty series was the first I published, when I still had even more
to learn than I do now, and sales were steady for the first few months but are
now dropping off. When I checked the categories I had selected it was fiction/general and juvenile fiction/general, which is not exactly making the best use
of my available choices. There are only
2 categories for authors to select, but there are sub categories within some of
these, so I have changed to Juvenile Fiction/Animals/Horses (which I chose
for Beware of the Horse) and the
second is now Pets/Horses for one
title and Sports/Equestrian for the
others. Phew! I will monitor sales and
see if this makes a difference.
Visibility of the titles when you put horses or ponies into the
search bar isn’t too bad for the Matty
series. However, I am really struggling with
Coming Home, my cat story, which
simply doesn’t appear for pages when you put cat or cats in the search
bar. I’ve tweaked my search words and
changed one of the categories. But I
think the main problem is the fact I don’t have the word “Cat” in the title of
the book. Realising this after
publication, I added a sub-title (The Journey of Two Special Cats) which helped
a bit, but I will have to change the title of the book if visibility doesn’t
improve. (It did have a sales spike,
after some frenetic promotion, but unfortunately this did not last long,
despite the book having great reviews).
I have more marketing ideas and plans for all the books, and
it is still very early days, (I’ve not had a complete sales year yet with any
of the titles so far) and I’m determined to raise lots for the charities.
What I love about indie publishing is the fact that you can
monitor your sales and if you aren’t satisfied, you can take action. It is this
element of control that I enjoy, and finding ways to get round obstacles.
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