Why You Do Not Want A Massive Sales Spike During Your Book Launch On Amazon

Anyone can get into the top 100 of the Kindle charts with enough traffic. Put a lot of money in your hands and post Facebook and Amazon ads. Let your big email list know when you have one. Post your book link in every Facebook group and tweet on Twitter every ten minutes.

Book BookBub ads and promotions for the same day on every e-book ad page you can find. At the end of the first day of sales, your book will be in the top 100.

Isn't that great? Unfortunately, the next day you'll find your book falling like a stone in the rankings. Two days after the big hype, it disappears entirely from the top lists and sales collapse.

You've spent your whole budget and can't do anything but watch helplessly as your book disappears irretrievably into the basement of Amazon, where no reader will ever find it.

What went wrong?

Sales rank is worthless in the long run.

Yeah, you read it right. Whether a book has a good sales rank on Amazon says nothing about how successful it is. It changes every hour or two. The algorithm continually recalculates this rank and correlates the sales figures of all books.

So if you have a good sales rank, it just means that your book has sold very well within the last hour. It says nothing about the future.

Massive advertising measures can push a book very high within a day; there's no question about that. But as soon as the measures are over, you are dependent on the readers finding your book on Amazon by themselves.

If this is the case, how can you even make sure that your new book doesn't crash again immediately? Do you have to spend a lot of money for weeks on end and keep your ads running so that readers can find your book?

The different rankings and the Amazon algorithms

Many authors are not aware that there is more than just sales ranking. In addition to this ranking, there is another ranking that is much more important - the so-called popularity ranking.

In this ranking, the customers really find your book by themselves. Unlike the sales ranking, the popularity rankings are only updated once a day.

But the most crucial difference to the sales rank is elsewhere: In the popularity ranking, the average sales figures for the last thirty days are evaluated.

In contrast, the sales ranking is based on sales over the last twenty-four hours - with one significant restriction: sales older than twenty-four hours are still included in the ranking proportionately. What this means for your launch tactics, I will explain below.

Up to this point, we'll keep the following in mind: There's the sales ranking, which puts the most weight on the sales of the last twenty-four hours, and there's the popularity ranking, which evaluates the average sales of the previous thirty days.

Sales rankings and popularity rankings are available for all books together (general bestseller list) and each subcategory.

Why the popularity rankings are so important

A ranking that is updated only once a day gives a well-placed book more extended visibility. More visibility also means more sales.

Another reason why authors need to pay more attention to their position in popularity rankings is the general visibility of these rankings.

Customers rarely discover new books via the bestseller rankings. Finding these charts is not so easy. The only way to get to the bestseller lists is from a product page.

Under the keyword "product information," approximately in the middle of the product page of the book, the placement of the book is displayed in three subcategories.

Only if you click on the categories at this point will you be forwarded to the relevant bestseller ranking.

Hardly anyone searches for new books like this. Most customers will choose a different way to discover new books. They will click through the category tree on the Kindle Store, which can be found on the Kindle E-Books home page on the left side of the page.

The lists you can access from there are the popularity lists.

So readers discover your book mainly through the popularity rankings. Now you know why it doesn't help you to get high on the sales charts for a short time. Hardly anyone looks at these charts.

Popularity rankings also play an important role in your success in the Kindle Unlimited program. The ranking there is also based on the popularity rankings.

How to climb the popularity rankings

If you have read carefully up to this point, you should know what to do: make sure that your book runs well over several days so that your 30-day average is always higher.

But that's easy to say. How can you generate more and more sales over several days without spending more and more money on advertising?

First of all, there is no alternative to increasing your advertising budget from day to day. Within the first five days, you should be working with Facebook ads and Amazon ads with steadily increasing daily budgets.

To avoid being ruined, you should start with a meager budget.

Here's how I usually increase my daily budget:

Day 1: 10€ for Facebook and 10€ for Amazon

Day 2: 20€ for Facebook and 20€ for Amazon

Day 3: 30€ for Facebook and 30€ for Amazon

Day 4: 50€ for Facebook and 30€ for Amazon

Day 5: up to 100€ for Facebook and 40€ for Amazon

All in all, I can get up to 340€ for advertising within five days.

On the fifth day, I send out my newsletter and book paid advertising on three other platforms. So day five is the day for a massive spike.

Why do I do this? A gradual increase in sales over several days is essential because Amazon wants to see organic growth. The algorithms penalize anything that looks like an artificial push at this stage.

This also makes sense, because it ensures that it is not the authors with the fattest purses who consistently dominate the charts. Nobody can buy a permanently good ranking. If you try to do so anyway, the spending eats up any profit.

So the goal must look like this instead: Increase the visibility of your book a little bit more every day and hope that the increased visibility leads to more organic sales.

Bad books with a lousy cover and a boring blurb don't stand a chance, because, in the long run, only books with high conversion rates will stay in the charts.

So to climb the popularity rankings, you need to have good sales figures for several days.

Organic sales that exceed those generated by your advertising efforts will only come from visibility in the bestseller rankings at this point.

Because a continuous rise in the bestseller rankings is very important in the first days, even if their importance decreases, later on, we will now take a closer look at the bestseller rankings.

How to climb tactically right in the bestseller rankings

I wrote above that the bestseller ranking is mainly based on the sales of the last twenty-four hours.

The operative word here is "mostly."

In fact, it has been found that even bestseller rankings are influenced to a certain extent by sales history.

Nobody knows precisely how Amazon's algorithms work and how historical sales are evaluated precisely, but we can assume the following rule of thumb:

yesterday's sales count for half of today's bestseller rankings.

Sales from the day before yesterday count for a quarter in today's bestseller ranking.

This series can be continued at will. Each sale thus loses half of its value for the bestseller ranking with each additional day.

Only through this mechanism alone is it possible for me to climb further up the bestseller ranking every day with reasonable effort. Furthermore, this principle means that books with a sales history can defend their rank against entirely new books.

An example for explanation: Book A started selling yesterday. It sold a hundred times. The bestseller ranking takes 100 sales into account.

Today book A sells a hundred times again. The bestseller ranking takes into account the full one hundred sales from today and an additional fifty sales from the previous day.

Book A can, therefore, rise in the ranking even though the sales figures have remained the same over two days. So I don't have to sell one hundred books today and one hundred and fifty tomorrow to move up.

Now let's look at another book. Book B is on the market today and sells one hundred and forty times. Normally you would expect Book B to overtake Book A in the rankings. But this is not happening.

Book A, as shown above, has one hundred and fifty sales in the bestseller ranking. Book A keeps this lead as long as Book B does not generate significantly more sales than Book A on several days.

Amazon has, therefore, built in a sustainability factor here, which makes it easier for books to hold their own in the ranking until enough readers have seen it and can make a purchase decision.

By exploiting this knowledge, you can ensure that your book will continue to climb in the bestseller rankings for several days, that more and more readers will see it and that your organic sales will grow steadily.

If you can keep this up for a few days, your book will eventually begin its rise in the popularity rankings. Step by step, your book will become less and less dependent on the relatively short-lived visibility in the bestseller rankings. This is the moment when Amazon begins to market your book actively.

The popularity rankings generate direct visibility in the subcategories, feed the Kindle Unlimited Ranking, and provide the data that determines whether your book will be included in Amazon's millions of advertising emails sent daily.

Why a spike on day five?

In the headline to this article, I warn against showing massive sales spikes during your launch phase. Nevertheless, I generate such a peak on the fifth day of my launch. Isn't that contradictory?

Such a spike is only harmful if it comes without a solid foundation. But after five days, the book already has such a foundation. The rise in the popularity rankings has begun, and the bestseller rank is now easier to defend.

Now it is vital to turn a good ranking into a very good one. A sales spike in this phase can make this possible. Attacking the top 100 from position 150 is more promising than from position 100000.

If I can generate a spike of three hundred sales, it is only worth three hundred sales on the first day. On the fifth day, however, the residual values of the last four days are added to this.

So the later I generate a spike, the higher the jump it is, provided that the sales and ranks have risen continuously until then.

You could also aim for the spike after six, seven, or eight days. But then you have to invest a few days more in advertising.

Conclusion: Three stages

For a book to have lasting success on Amazon, we have to take three steps:

1. upload an excellent, professionally designed book with a convincing cover and blurb. Without a book that convinces real readers, no algorithm will help us. Stages two and three only ignite when we have a good product.

2. continuously increase sales over several days through external traffic (Facebook ads, Amazon ads, etc.)

3. establish the book in the popularity rankings.

If you follow this order, your book will sell better on Amazon in the long run. Don't shoot your powder on the first day. Build up your book carefully but consistently.

Now you know everything you need to make your next book release your most successful.