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Frank is being called an up-and-coming author whose writing has been praised as suspenseful and sophisticated. After writing articles that have been published and distributed by a professional organization, Frank was mentioned in a news story at msnCareers before turning his creative style to novels -- his debut novel praised as thrilling and a roller-coaster ride. His life has been an interesting one for his age of 47, in which time he has traveled to a dozen countries and lived in several of them. He spent 15 years working in management positions of Fortune companies and as an instructor at the college level, before providing communication skills training in other countries. Some highlights of his background include providing tutoring services to a member of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Planning Committee; holding the position of director in an international language business; and being praised as the best trainer by a former student (corporate lawyer). He has worked as a Ghostwriter for a publisher, judged a short-story competition, has provided editing services for graduate research material at USC, and writes book reviews for a POD publisher.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

The latest perplexing problem which remains inexplicable. Amazon KDP ranking.


The ranking above is for one of my novels and the sales figures reported show zero sales for the time period where the ranking was at its highest. The sales figures also said zero prior to and after the highest point on the graph. After speaking with Amazon, they were not able to explain the curious scenario — a high ranking which continued for days with zero sales reported. 

It was explained to me that there is no formula for the KDP ranking and that the ranking is based on (historical) sales and a relative comparison to the other (750,000) books in the catagory, while updated by the hour and shown in the graph by day. It is not known how much higher the ranking was — following the fairly uniform trend of the graph prior to the one month timeframe, but for the same prior time frame immediately before Nov. 1, sales were also reported as zero. 

As it stands, this curious scenario of ranking without any reported sales figures remains inexplicable.  Does anyone have any insights which might explain this? Is it a glitch in Amazon's data/information system? Or is there some other possible explanation? Is it reasonable/plausible that hundreds of thousands of KDP books all declined in sales regularly for days and weeks, which could shed some light on how a book with zero reported sales would have this type of performance in ranking? And similarly, has anyone had a high ranking when their book has had zero sales results for days and days?

*Have you heard of a different figure for the number of books in the KDP listing? The graph says 750,000 and Amazon hasn't said anything to the contrary.
*For 750,000 books in the KDP listing, the highest ranking point on the graph equates to approximately the top 15% of all books. (85th percentile)


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