The Top 10 Things All Authors Should Know About Amazon

This article is highly inaccurate or misleading in many, many ways.

1) This is wrong. Rankings absolutely have to do with sales.
2) Inventory notices often do have to do with low stock. It may be the case that Amazon uses this to encourage purchases when there is plenty of stock, but without a cite I'm not going to take this article's word for it.
3) There is absolutely no evidence 50 reviews is a "magic number." "An author I work with told me" is NOT an appropriate cite. (!!!)
4) This confusingly mangles POD information.
5) This acts like it's a revelation but it's obvious. If other people buy a particular book along with yours and do it often, of course it will show up in also-boughts. I don't think it would be worthwhile it to try to "manipulate" this, but who knows.
6) This is nothing revelatory.
7) This is true for print, but not for ebooks. When ebooks are discounted it's usually because of price-matching, and the author does NOT get paid on the original price. I have never heard of Amazon discounting ebooks when it's not a case of price-matching.
8) This is true.
9) I don't have much knowledge about BookScan, but one thing the article *completely* neglects to mention is that it's just print; ebooks are not included.
10) It sounds incredibly fishy that Amazon would be trying to work directly with an author who is with a publisher at all. It's the publisher's job to work with retailers. I can't even make sense of this.

The article also use the word "logarithm" when they mean "algorithm." That alone sort of sums up the level of knowledge on displayed here as a whole.

I'm far from an expert, but there's so much in this article I can identify as wrong or misleading that I'd highly recommend not taking any of it at face value.

Don't get too inspired--there's a lot wrong with that article and the author admits they phrased things wrong in the comments.

Amazon only matters to Amazon because Amazon and Amazon does Amazon.

There are lots of mistakes in that article.

As has already been said, the author agrees in the comments which follow, and suggests several ways in which she could have made it better.

I'd ignore it.

They left out the big one: "Amazon exists for Amazon's benefit, not yours."

We're Amazon. We Know What's Best For You.[sup]TM[/sup]

Sargentodiaz said:

The first one caught me by surprise – Your Amazon rating has nothing to do with sales. Really?

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No, not really. But she's not entirely wrong, either.

In addition to actual sales, rankings are also influenced by traffic to the books page, regardless of whether or not that traffic leads to sales.

Ranking = time weighted relative sales. So the main thing it is about is sales, but especially recent sales, and how they compare to sales for other books. Which is fairly unsurprising because rankinsg are innately relative, and selling now matters more than selling last year.

Jackx said:

No, not really. But she's not entirely wrong, either.

In addition to actual sales, rankings are also influenced by traffic to the books page, regardless of whether or not that traffic leads to sales.

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This depends a lot on what the author means by "rankings".

If it's referring to "bestseller" rankings then its demonstrably false that it's impacted by traffic and other factors. It's influenced by sales and Prime/KU Borrows, not traffic, and presumably nothing else.

OTOH, if it's referring to "Author Rank" or the "Popularity" lists then those are affected by other factors we can guess at like page traffic and likely a host of things we are unaware of.

for what it's worth, after my first ebook hit 100 reviews, sales noticeably increased

also, after playing around with keywords for one book, sales dropped significantly. they rose again when i reverted them. i've been doing a ton of research/experimenting with this

BenPanced said:

We're Amazon. We Know What's Best For You.[sup]TM[/sup]

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I have to laugh because that is so true.

Nothing like an IT drone offering creative advice on a book they've never read (and in what is in all likelihood a second language to them).