This is a post about the power of keywords, and buyer behaviour.
Before we get there, take a look at this screenshot.
What’s missing?
You might not notice at first, because you’re used to looking at freshly-published books, but this kindle book was published in 2016… and has no rank in the kindle store.
Yep, if you don’t make any sales for long enough, Amazon no longer displays your kindle rank.
(This is mildly annoying to a statistical soul, because it means we don’t know how big the kindle store is, since we won’t see the bottom…. unknown percentage.)
But how did I find this book? Now there’s an interesting bit for discoverability!
I searched “harrier and murder”, which is the title of Alma Boykin’s latest… but as I was searching inside three hours of her seeing it go live in the kindle store, it hadn’t populated to the search index yet. So this was in the very few search returns amazon gave me for “harrier and murder” when searching in the book category.
(The general search return had more things, decidedly non-ebook, so I tried in the book category to refine. It hadn’t populated yet there, either.)
So, even though this book has had extremely low sales, and those were long enough it is no longer ranked… it will still populate a keyword search.
Okay, so now check out the book itself.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BPJPX92/
Note that “murder” is a word in the blurb.
But where is harrier? Why did this book come up?
One of the chapters is named “Phuket Hash House Harriers”.
So chapter titles are keywords that are search-engine indexed, too.
And this is a perfect example of that.
Now we get to buyer behaviour.
First, the blurb sold me on downloading a sample, because this guy sounded like One Of Nature’s Originals. (They definitely broke the mold when they made him.)
The sample carried out the promise of the blurb, and made me laugh out loud and learn something within the first couple pages. I love this guy’s voice!
So I bought the book.
Therefore, the keywords and the search engine did its job – while it wasn’t the book I was looking for, as far as Amazon’s search engine can tell, it’s close enough, because I went ahead and downloaded sample, then bought it anyway.
Furthermore on buyer behaviour, I then shared the existence of the book with friends – the ephemeral, untamable, sometimes capturable but never reliable word of mouth.
So within 24 hours, two other people bought the book. How did this affect its rank? 10 hours later, I couldn’t tell you.
Here’s what Amazon has to say:
Rankings are updated hourly but may take 24–48 hours to appear. Rankings reflect recent and historical activity, with recent activity weighted more heavily. Rankings are relative, so your sales rank can change even when your book’s level of activity stays the same. For example, even if your book’s level of activity stays the same, your rank may improve if other books see a decrease in activity, or your rank may drop if other books see an increase in activity.
When we calculate Best Sellers Rank, we consider the entire history of a book’s activity. Monitoring your book’s Amazon sales rank may be helpful in gaining general insight into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and other initiatives to drive book activity, but it is not an accurate way to track your book’s activity or compare its activity in relation to books in other categories.
Yep, can take up to 48 hours to change. I suspect the active sales ranks update more often, and the inactive books less often… As I write this, I have a 12-hour work day ahead, so it’s likely I’ll miss when the changeover happens. By the time you read this, it will have been almost a week, so you’ll see the ephemeral results in their kindle store rank decay by then.
Interesting, no?
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Harrier and Murder”
The book still has a ranking!
This was useful. I’m going to be helping my dad with his memoir, so it was interesting to see that memoirs have photo covers these days. Good to know.
I know I bought a copy as well, as it caught my interest for similar reasons and when Dorothy first talked about it I grabbed it.
For covers, Memoirs are interesting. Looks like the current trend for celebrity memoirs is a close-in (implies intimacy) portrait. But they can also have a color block behind text, or many other styles, it looks like. If you do use a photo, I’d use no more than one, high quality, with a clear focal point to it. You want it to pop at thumbnail and not look like a ‘snapshot’.
Got it. So no photos from the ’70’s. Thank you kindly!
Hmmm. Why are there boxes at the end of my sentences when I comment here? I didn’t put them in.
I’m not seeing boxes at the end of your sentences, Laura. WordPress delenda est!
Lol. Also, uh oh.
It’s news to me that something like chapter titles would be indexed.
So actually giving your chapters names and including those names in the book could be worth it?
For example here is a list of scene titles (for my own reference) from a Sword & Sandal / peplum hero novella I was a-gonna write about a year ago (but never got past a synopsis with a paragraph or two for each scene):
Scene 1: The Ambush
Scene 2: Entering the City
Scene 3: Audience at the Palace
Scene 4: Private Consultation
Scene 5: The Feast
Scene 6: Spring of the Sexy Nymphs
Scene 7: Escape from the Spring
Scene 8: Stowing the Prince
Scene 9: Return to the City
Scene 10: Death of the King
Scene 11: A Hero Accused
Scene 12: Search Orders
Scene 13: A Wedding Proposal (for the Good of the Kingdom, of Course)
Scene 14: Whispers in the Dungeon
Scene 15: Report of Search Failure
Scene 16: The First Trial – The Pit of Fire
Scene 17: The Second Trial – The Mad Bull
Scene 18: The Third Trial – The Oracle Stone
Scene 19: A Wedding Announcement (for the Good of the Kingdom, of Course)
Scene 20: The Prince Revealed!
Scene 21: Against the Traitors!
Scene 22: The New King and a Promise
I was trying to go for something similar to how Edgar Rice Burroughs used title names for the Barsoom and Tarzan books, a bit descriptive and hinting at what happens in that part.
(Also if anybody is wondering about my health situation mentioned a few weeks back, still have persistent vertigo and unable to work at my school bus monitor job (haven’t driven my car in weeks and carry a cane with me in case I get too wobbly or have to rest while walking). Neurologist won’t fill out the form for my short-term disability claim with my employer – now trying to contact a physical / occupational therapist to get somebody to actually evaluate my current capacity vs. job requirements. If I can get the disability payments actually started I have contacted a credit counselor who has got a proposed deal to reduce my monthly CC payments. MRI’s for head / neck scheduled a week from today. Otherwise my financial assets consist of $650 and about 3K in an IRA I can’t touch for another 4-1/2 years without penalties.)
Four years ago I had severe problems with my sense of balance. It took me three months to actually get it diagnosed as a stroke. I wasn’t showing any of the “traditional” signs of a stroke, my face was still symmetrical, I wasn’t dropping a foot, no slurring of my speech. The local Urgent Care said my vitals were normal and because of the scamdemic they couldn’t recommend going to the ER. It took an MRI to detect it, a CT scan doesn’t show any issues (and the local ER does not do MRIs). I have also lost a lot of words, not in the sense of I don’t know them, instead I have problems with the index to find them. Names are probably the worst, but I have also had issues naming some things in a picture.
It really sucks. I was able to drive with care mainly because I’ve had enough instrument time in airplanes to be able to easily ignore my sense of balance.
I hope you get a solid diagnosis and the help you need. I know that speech therapy helped me a lot and I continue to play word games on my phone to strengthen my recall.
First, thank you for you’re thoughts.
The ER did do a CAT scan to check for brain stroke type stuff, but found nothing. The neurologist referred me to a see cardiologist just to rule out pulmonary issues (although with family history of blood pressure issues, I guess it is that age to start worrying about that) but the cardiologist called out the day of my appointment and it will take like a month to get a new one scheduled.
My own personal suspects are either nerve compression in my neck or Meniere’s Syndrome. I’ve had shoulder / neck kyphosis for decades, and also tinnitus and slow hearing loss in one ear for 10 years that led to me getting a hearing aid last year.
I’ve had to abandon my plan of becoming a school bus driver already as a history of vertigo a BIG no-no for getting a CDL. I hope I can return to work as a bus monitor, but the work environment consists of bouncing around in the back of a moving school bus for 4 hours a day, and just a ride back and forth from a local restaurant makes me lie down with my head still for like 2 hours when I get home. The only way to keep the background vertigo from getting worse is to NOT MOVE, especially the head, and DON’T TURN MY NECK. So I am basically like Frankenstein’s Monster with my head bolted on looking straight ahead all the time.
The immediate problem is the finances. Without something coming in (such as the attempt to get short-term disability payments) I’m not going to be able to pay any bills.
For what it is worth, my stroke was caused by an issue with the artery that runs up my neck vertebrae, which there is no good surgical remediation for. Carotid arteries can be cleaned out while this one apparently can not, or at least it’s a crap shoot whether it will help or hurt.
I had already had multiple tests in the past involving contrast, so I knew I did not have any issues with it. Well, except for the fact it took them three tries to get the IV started.
If you get some sort of fundraiser started, please let me know. I can donate a little bit.
This was also the main takeaway for me – I tend to title my scenes so I can tell what they’re about more easily in scrivener. It may be necessary to start translating that into chapter titles.
Checking today, yup it has ranks now (just copy/pasting as getting screenshots to post… is not my strong point.)
Product details
I broke the links so as not to get stuck in moderation purgatory… So it looks like the sales do register!