Sales Rank and Reader Reviews
Is there value for authors or readers to follow the Amazon sales rank or reader reviews?
Every author likes to read positive reviews of their work, but if the reader reviews on amazon.com are unmonitored, their value becomes nebulous. On the Amazon pages, the readers may assume they are reading reviews by professional reviewers or impartial readers, while in fact, the author of the book may have made an asserted effort to have their friends and family submit raving reviews on their behalf.
On the other hand, some elementary teachers encourage their students to submit amazon.com book reviews as a class assignment. As in many book reports, the actual book is merely scanned and the review becomes more of a work of fiction than an honest evaluation of the book.
The sales ranking system of amazon.com is often not used in the way it was originally 
intended. On Amazon’s FAQ page they claim that the Sales Rank is “interesting.” From Amazon’s perspective users are not supposed to find the sales rankings informative or helpful, just interesting. A decade after book-sales rankings were introduced, it remains an object of obsession for many authors. Because brick and mortar bookstores are restrained by shelf space, the Web stores such as amazon.com give millions of books a ranking. These are updated hourly and displayed on the book’s sales page and on best-seller lists. Little is known about the reliability of Amazon’s ranking system even though scores of scholars and publishers have attempted to reverse-engineer the system to determine how a sales ranking translates into actual sales. The Amazon ranking system is useful for potential authors to useful to determine the need for a book on a particular subject matter. However, forget writer’s block — many authors put their manuscripts aside because they cannot stop checking their rankings.
To make life easier for the compulsive Amazon-Sales-Ranking authors, there is now a website design specifically for them: Aaron Shepard’s Sales Rank Express.
Using this website, authors can obtain their current sales ranking and be back working on their manuscript within seconds. Authors can then say, ‘that’s interesting’ and concentrate on the blank screen before them. What a great time saver!
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Amazon Reader Reviews, Author, amazon.com, sales rank, writer's block. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Every author likes to read positive reviews of their work, but if the reader reviews on amazon.com are unmonitored, their value becomes nebulous. On the Amazon pages, the readers may assume they are reading reviews by professional reviewers or impartial readers, while in fact, the author of the book may have made an asserted effort to have their friends and family submit raving reviews on their behalf.
intended. On Amazon’s FAQ page they claim that the Sales Rank is “interesting.” From Amazon’s perspective users are not supposed to find the sales rankings informative or helpful, just interesting. A decade after book-sales rankings were introduced, it remains an object of obsession for many authors. Because brick and mortar bookstores are restrained by shelf space, the Web stores such as amazon.com give millions of books a ranking. These are updated hourly and displayed on the book’s sales page and on best-seller lists. Little is known about the reliability of Amazon’s ranking system even though scores of scholars and publishers have attempted to reverse-engineer the system to determine how a sales ranking translates into actual sales. The Amazon ranking system is useful for potential authors to useful to determine the need for a book on a particular subject matter. However, forget writer’s block — many authors put their manuscripts aside because they cannot stop checking their rankings.
Using this website, authors can obtain their current sales ranking and be back working on their manuscript within seconds. Authors can then say, ‘that’s interesting’ and concentrate on the blank screen before them. What a great time saver!
Educational Technology Vodcasts
September 12, 2007 at 6:42 pm |
Great article Ann! As a contributor to Amazon reviews (I am in the top 754 reviewers) and Publisher & Editor of the book reviewing and author interviewing site Bookpleasures.com, I agree with you that some of the reviews posted on Amazon are not exactly reviews.
Moreover, if the author or his or her friends are not happy with an honest review, a negative vote is posted.
Some of our reviewers post on Amazon and to complete the review we also post interviews with the authors. These interviews are sometimes linked in Amazon’s Amapedia.
Thanks for your article.
Norm, Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com
December 27, 2007 at 8:03 pm |
What do the numbers refer to? For example, on salesrankexpress.com, if you look up
Paul Ekman’s Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage, you get a number of 385,531, Four Stars and a rating of 4.0. Please explain what
385,531 refrs to–ditto Four Stars and a rating of 4.0.
Thank you for your kind help!
George Neiiendam
December 28, 2007 at 1:04 pm |
Reviews are an interesting phenomenon. They are extremely subjective. Readers of the same book can either love or hate the that book, yet so much of the marketing dollars rests on a single review.