torylltales: (Default)
[personal profile] torylltales posting in [community profile] antishurtugal_reborn
I thought it would be interesting to look at the Amazon rankings for Fractal Noise, especially as we can compare directly to the rankings for To Sleep at roughly the same time in its sales cycle (within the release month).


To Sleep in a Sea of Stars: September 2020. 5 days after release.

#284,586 in Books (Paperback version)

#87,730 in Kindle Store (ebook version)

#39 in Audiobooks (audiobook version)

#339 in Books (hardcover version)



Fractal Noise: May 2023. 15 days after release.


#342,028 in Books (Paperback version)  (worse than To Sleep by 57,442 ranks)

#4,297 in Kindle Store (ebook version) (better than To Sleep by 83,433 ranks)

#674 in Audiobooks (audiobook version) (worse than To Sleep by 635 ranks)

#3,249 in Books (hardcover version) (worse than To Sleep by 2,910 ranks)



So it looks like the Kindle version of Fractal Noise is doing better than To Sleep did, but all other formats are doing worse.

Is this an indication of Amazon's market share, given all the controversy about staff treatment and workforce practices? Does it show that Amazon is shifting more into the ebook space than physical copies? Are more people buying fork their local chain or independent bookstores rather than Amazon?


There are lots of factors that could cause this overall drop in rankings, but it's tempting to suggest that readers just aren't as interested in this one now that they've seen what Paolini can do in the sci fi genre.

Date: 2023-05-31 03:44 am (UTC)
snarkbotanya: My spitefic character Vanora as she appears in later chapters post-haircut, looking annoyed. (Default)
From: [personal profile] snarkbotanya
The Kindle Store statistic is interesting. It seems like the kind of statistical anomaly where other factors are contributing.

Date: 2023-06-26 08:14 pm (UTC)
cmdrnemo: (Default)
From: [personal profile] cmdrnemo
Okay, I was bored at work and this looked like math. So, I wanted to poke at it a bit. According to Amazon the ranking of a book is a weighted average of total page activity per hour. It doesn't correspond directly to sales. Think of it as average views or searches for the book within Amazon's system. This means the sales numbers must be lower than the rank. The rank values according to: https://www.theresaragan.com/salesrankingchart ,
https://www.startawildfire.com/amazon-sales-ranking-calculator ,
https://kindlepreneur.com/amazon-kdp-sales-rank-calculator/#mainbg-wrapper ,
Numbers in the 10s to hundreds of thousands put these books on the order of 1-5 copies sold per month. With the ebooks doing about the same. At these rates a single interested observer poking to find out the BSR numbers could spike the books by hundreds or thousands a points and a small sporking community or neighbourhood book club picking up a few copies can shift things dramatically.

With a publishing date of May 16 2023 which was 41 days ago and the hardcover being at 13,679 and paperback at 566,357 we can get a solid estimate of the total number of books sold. Assuming the books started at position 1 and have slid down at a steady rate. Which would give an upper limit on the total possible sales. We know it was less than that. We get the paperback as having an average sales per day of round about 1/4 for a total sales count of just about 10. The hardcover would be doing much better at close to 20 books per day. I'll say 25 which is 1,025 books sold.

The Audible numbers are a little harder to pin down. The major issue there is that the book is free on Aubdible. But it is currently sitting at 5810 in audiobooks. Which means at least 21 people are looking at it every day. For a maximum sales number of 1,394. The Ebook is still sitting at 5131. Which gives an estimate of 32 books per day and a maximum sales number of 1,312.

At this time the total number of people that can possibly have purchased all English editions of this book through Amazon must be less than 3,741. Call it 4,000 to account for me mucking the numbers up. Which happens a lot when I play with logarithms and don't really care about the consequences. Like right now for example.

So, that's not an impressively large number. And again, all this assumes the book started at position 1 and slid down from there. In a more likely scenario where the books started about halfway between 1 and where they are now and have been working their way down expect about half that number. Given that the numbers correlate to attention, not sales, it is entirely possible that the 533 reviews on Amazon represent more than 50% of the total number of copies sold. This release does not compare with an arthouse theatre presentation so much as it does what you might expect from a garage sale at Art's house.

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