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So about a month ago, I told you about my experiment to improve my sales on Amazon. Basically, I moved my book, Dead and Kicking, from a category that had tens of thousands of other books listed to one that fit my book but had a significantly smaller number of books listed. The idea behind this is to improve a book’s ratings and by improving the ratings, increasing sales. The lower rank a book has, the easier it is for readers to find and therefore buy.

Here’s what I mean:

Before I made the change to Dead and Kicking‘s category, it was ranked (at that particular moment) #5740 out of 307,344 books in the Parnormal & Urban category on Amazon.com.  A person would have to be really persistent to go through the Amazon top seller’s list twenty books at a time to get to 5740, so basically unless a reader knew to look for it, they weren’t going to find Dead and Kicking.

After the change, I noticed an improvement in my rank almost immediately. The next day in fact, Dead and Kicking was ranked #140.  Not too shabby.  And it only improved from there, breaking into the Amazon.com top 100 in just a couple of weeks.

Things were even better on the Amazon.ca side of things.  The day after the change in category, Dead and Kicking sky-rocketed to #27!  That meant a reader only had to decide to click over to the next page once and my book would be visible in the top sellers list.  Three days later I hit lucky #13 on the list.  In other words it was on the top screen in the list so it would be immediately visible to a prospective buyer.

So did a better rank equate with increased sales?

YOU BETCHA!

I wish I could say it was a dramatic increase, but it wasn’t. It was a noticeable change, however, especially on Amazon.ca where my book was ranking higher.

As you can see from the graph below, sales were pretty steady before the change (the left side of the green line).  I was making sales but the numbers stayed pretty consistent.  After the change (as indicated by the green line), I saw steady growth in sales and momentum is continuing to build.

Increased visibility = increased sales

The other thing I noticed immediately after the change is that my rank didn’t fluctuate as dramatically as it did when it was in its original category. When Dead and Kicking was first released, the rank would jump all over the place from the thousands to the hundreds and back again over the course of an hour or two.  With the new category, the fluctation is much slower and the rank usually stays constant for several hours at at time, if not the entire day.  That isn’t to say it doesn’t fluctuate at all, but the up and down swing is much shallower.

On Amazon.ca where my rank has been the best, there is a steady momentum towards the top five.  Hopefully it’s only a matter of time before it hits #1!  It was #4 all day yesterday 🙂

So, the moral of this story? Pick the categories for your book carefully. It does make a difference!