Last week on Wild West Thursday, we talked about the changes in the way we buy books, comparing the act of visiting a bricks-and-mortar bookstore to buy a printed book with that of shopping online for a digital (or print) book. I talked a bit about bestseller lists at online bookstores, and mentioned that their tabulation isn’t necessarily just a reflection of raw sales numbers.

Let’s backtrack a bit. Bestseller lists are particularly important in online bookselling, because they drive sales in a very direct fashion. Because we can’t browse the online bookstore in quite the same way we can wander around a physical bookstore, and probably because we are all tight for time, many readers go directly to the bestseller list in their genre category of choice. These are also titles that have been “validated” in a way by other readers, because they have been purchased and presumably read. So, these book buyers scroll down the list, looking for titles in the genre of choice that they’ve yet to read. This practice is why there are so many sub-genre lists on portals like Amazon – those lists encourage people to buy more books.

How do books get on the bestseller lists? Obviously, because people buy them, but how do they find them in the first place? On Amazon, books appear on Most Popular Lists and the Movers & Shakers list, and on other display spaces around the site. Not all of these positions are paid – in fact, many of them are a mirror of reader interest in the title.

All online portals use algorithms to fine tune their bestseller lists and to present products to consumers, but when people talk about The Algorithm, they are invariably referring to the one used by Amazon. Amazon’s algorithm is the most sophisticated, and, for many authors, the most influential. It is also mysterious, as its parameters are considered to be proprietary information. The Algorithm determines the sales ranking of each book; the sales ranking determines position on any bestseller lists as well as how frequently the book is displayed to consumers visiting the site. You can find the sales ranking for any book at the bottom of the product information on the book product page.

Amazon has said that only the top 3000 ranked titles sell 100 copies or more per week. Having the highest ranking possible for any book at any time means understanding The Algorithm on some level, since ranking is not just about sales numbers.

Consider again the mechanism of the bestseller list. Imagine that you, as an author, had a title on a bestseller list. That title would continue to sell at some kind of steady rate, because (as mentioned last week) bestseller lists are self-perpetuating. If The Algorithm was changed and that title fell off the bestseller list as a result, you as an author might not be very happy. This change would directly affect your income. A title can go from selling hundreds (or even thousands) of copies a day to selling none when it is no longer on the bestseller list. This also promotes avid interest in the workings of The Algorithm. It has very little to do with the merit of the book – it has to do with the book’s visibility and discoverability.

Many of the authors who are affected by the doings of The Algorithm write fiction. The lack of absolute information about The Algorithm leaves us free to speculate or even make up stuff about it.

(And no, I don’t mean any insult to the many writers who are determined to dissect the intricacies of The Algorithm. There are a vast number of posts out there in the blogosphere, chock full of research and statistics and calculations. I am awed by these posts and somewhat overwhelmed by their detail. I am also living proof that you can make good money selling your books on Amazon without being so absorbed in the workings of The Algorithm. I’m intrigued by it, but I know it changes constantly. Rather than figure out what it’s doing right this minute, which could change at midnight tonight, I’d rather write and publish another book. Amazon also says that the top selling indie-published authors spend more time writing than marketing.)

So, let’s speculate. What other than sales could skew the results for a specific title?
• the number of times the product page has been viewed in a period of time.
• the relative velocity of sales. (If the book is selling more quickly today, for example.)
• the number of incoming links directly to the product page.
• the number of times the “Look Inside” feature has been used for that book.
• the number of times a sample has been downloaded.
• the number of times the book has been borrowed. (Amazon Prime customers can borrow some titles, as you might from a library, and authors are compensated for these loans similar to the Public Lending Right Commission’s financial model.)
• whether the book is enrolled in an exclusivity program, like KDP Select.
• the number of free units of the book that have been given away within a period of time.

This is an interesting quirk that seems to be particular to Amazon. A book can be made free in two ways at Amazon, although it cannot be priced directly to be free. Amazon’s KDP Select program requires that a digital book be published exclusively at Amazon for 90 days, and during that time, the title can be made free for five days. Amazon will sometimes also price match to other portals, so making a book free at KOBO or Apple can convince Amazon to make the book free as well. On Amazon, there are mirror bestseller lists for each category: the left column is the paid bestsellers and the right column is the most popular free downloads. Because they are displayed together, there is visibility gained in the category by having a free book available. Also, after the book “comes off free”, it is displayed in the Also Bought banners at the current price, as if all those downloaders had bought it. In addition, the number of downloads affect the ranking – some say The Algorithm counts ten free downloads as equivalent to a single sale, but this is speculation. What is certain is that there is afterburn from a free title at Amazon, which doesn’t seem to be the case at other portals. I’ll talk about more about free and its fallout next Thursday. Now, back to our list of variables.

• the number of Facebook “likes” for the title.
• the number of tags associated with the title.
• the number of agreements with any given tag or cumulatively for the tags.
• the number of reviews for the title.
• the number of five-star reviews for the title.
• the average review rating for the title.
• the number of lists (in Listopia) on which the title appears.
• the number of wishlists the title appears on.
• the number of pre-orders (for a title that can be ordered in advance of publication. Only titles published by traditional publishers can be made available for pre-order at this point.)
• the sales for the title in other formats.
• the sales pattern for the author’s other titles.
• the price point for the title.

This is an interesting one. There is some third party data that people who have Kindles tend to buy titles at lower prices than those who have Nooks. That means that Amazon sales data skews naturally in favour of cheaper books. (There also are testimonials from buyers that they chose to buy a Kindle specifically because of the number of free titles available on Amazon.) In May of this year, however, many authors saw a sudden change in their daily sales patterns and many saw titles that had been consistently on bestseller lists fall off those lists. That this happened on or about May 3 made those authors conclude that The Algorithm had been changed on that date. You can look around the blogosphere and find a number of very thorough analyses of the change – the upshot is that people believe The Algorithm was modified to skew in favour of higher-priced books. There’s another layer of speculation out there as to why this change might have been made, but it appears that titles priced at $2.99 and higher now skew better in the rankings than those at 99 cents and $1.99.

And one last good one:
• the publisher.

Owie. Did you see that one coming? No one is talking about this much, but it seems to me to be the elephant in the room. Since Amazon has begun to publish books (i.e. to be a publisher), why wouldn’t they skew The Algorithm in favour of their own titles? Any other publisher with that power would do it in a heartbeat. This freaks industry people out a bit – they fear that only Amazon-published titles will appear on the bestseller lists in future – but Amazon’s publishing programs are modest at this point in time. I don’t think we have to worry about it for a while, if ever.

(And in the meantime, yes, I would sell a book to one of Amazon’s publishing divisions with barely a second thought. I have nothing against a little skew in my favour – plus you have to believe that they are one publishing company who understands how to market digitally.)

Now it’s your turn. How do you shop for books online? Do you trawl the bestseller lists? Or do you have another method of finding new books and new authors? Diana talked about review sites last week – do you follow certain reviewers or give much consideration to reviews in your buying decisions.