After all the work, you’ve finally launched your book. Now it would help to understand how to track and amplify your Amazon sales. Two days after his book launch, my writing coach client Jeff Hutcheson realized he needed a little help on that front. So, Keri Barnum, who handles distribution and promotion for my self-publishing company Incubation Press, made him a short video. With their permission, you’ll find it here.
The video starts with Keri pointing out that changing the categories for Jeff’s novel Going Barefoot made a huge difference in his Amazon ranking, which matters in terms of Amazon’s algorithm. Then she explains how Jeff can track his Amazon sales. You’ll find a transcript below.
Video Transcript:
Jeff, congratulations on your book launch. I wanted to show you a couple of things. Here’s your book up on Kindle. You can see it’s on Kindle Unlimited. You have one rating already, which is awesome.
You probably got an email from KTP letting you know that they had they’d done what I asked and changed your categories. So we got you into some niche categories, and you can see that you are ranking much higher here before you were just in cozy mysteries and mystery in general. So what happened is that you were not ranking as well as you could because you’re in these huge categories, but we got you in some more niche categories. So you’re ranking higher in the top 34,000 and most of them and overall your ranking and Kindles 346,000 a hundred thousand.
I always tell people that this is out of millions. So if you are in the top 500,000, then you are actually in the top ranking of that date, and that does change every hour, but even more exciting is your paperback because, on your paperback, you’re actually doing really well. I can see that people are buying it. And look, you are at 501 in cozy craft and hobby mysteries. You’re at 667 and small town or rural fiction. And then at 1,500 in amateur sleuth.
I can tell that, you know, your people, the people that you know, and who love you are buying that paperback, which is great. So, I just wanted to show you that you don’t have any reviews yet. It looks like someone rated the book probably on Amazon, which allows you to give it a star rating, but not actually leave a review, but no reviews yet. I expect those to come. So keep on asking.
You asked about how to know about sales. And I wanted to show you that if you log on to KTP, you can see your sales right here. This is just your bookshelf. It’s just where it shows your book. Then up here, if you go to the Reports tab, click on this, and you can see that you’ve got this bar graph here, which is awesome. And if you hover over it, it’ll tell you, you know, every day you have sales. Since you can see on this one, eight ebooks were ordered on May 14th, two ebooks on May 16th. This gray line means it’s a paperback. You had one paperback bought on the 17th, and on the 18th, you had eight paperbacks ordered and one ebook ordered. This is how you can track your sales from day to day. Don’t worry if there’s no sale on certain days; there’ll be an up and down. What we’re looking for are consistent sales, so that those sales keep showing up
Down here where it says Kindle edition, normalized pages, this is your Kindle Unlimited page reads. So you’ve got four pages read so far; I would guess someone kind of browse through this, downloaded it, and hasn’t really read yet. So this will be up and down as well, but this is your Kindle unlimited for your ebook. Keep in mind that your royalty does not include your Kindle Unlimited pages. This is just for your outright book sales. And so far, you’re at $69 50. And also, keep in mind, this tells you what your royalties are based off of this page, but you’re only paid 60 days in arrears. So you won’t get the $69.50 until, um, gosh, July. So just know that it’s a little bit further away, but it gives you an idea of what you’re making. And you’re just a couple of days in. So, hopefully, this helps. If you have questions, let me know. We will absolutely dig back into this once we’ve got a couple more days of data to pull from, but right now, it’s just so new. There’s not much to see, but, um, dig in, look around very excited for you. And if you have questions, you know where to find me. Talk soon.
I hope this helps you track and grow your Amazon sales once you launch your book. If we can help, give a holler.
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