Sell More Books on Amazon - Sales Rank and Popularity Explained | Livestream Replay

All right. Hello and happy Tuesday, my friends. I hope you are doing fantastic as you arrive. Please go ahead and say hello in the chat box. That always is fantastic, even if you are just watching the replay. Go ahead and say hello. For those of you in the U.S. happy Thanksgiving week to you. I don't know about you, but my inbox is already blowing up with Black Friday deals and Friday from places that I haven't shopped in a long time and some of them that I shop on a regular basis. But yeah, it's pretty crazy. There's always some good opportunities to buy things during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but yeah, it's a little overwhelming now. Speaking of that, hopefully you caught my video last week on how to sell your book during the holidays because this year is a little different, as I'm sure you've realized in terms of holiday shopping. And my biggest thing for you to realize from that video is you need to start now. Holiday shopping is well underway. Everybody is already moving on to Christmas and holiday season to bring a little joy to their life. It doesn't matter that it's not December yet. You know, people like my mom have had their Christmas shopping done since Halloween. It's just been one of those years. So your time to start promoting your book for the holidays is now. So make sure you check out the video if you haven't already. And yeah, say hello since you're here. Hey, Melissa. Melissa's in the house, so Angela is usually here. For those of you who are here regularly, Angela's usually my go to person, but unfortunately she had a death in the family, so she's not in the office. So Melissa Sobey's in the house and Melissa is our client care specialist. And so she's the one that handles a lot of the meetings with our clients and handles all of the editing oversight and the COVID design and title brainstorming, table of contents, brainstorming me whole bunch of stuff. So I'm really grateful to have her here today to help out behind the scenes for all of those moments when I'm lost and I don't know what number it is and all those sort of things. So thank you. Hey, Andrew. Hey. You're live. Fantastic. And Rachel, you made it live too. That's wonderful. So great to have you here. So, yeah, do say hello. If you're new to the live streams, you may think you're going to lurk in the background, but if you do that, you will not get entered to win our fabulous journal or our mug. So make sure you Say hello. Because a lot of our prizes are, you know, the requirements are low. The barrier to entry is simply saying hello. See, Digital Products says hello. And Jill, hello. So thank you so much for saying hello. All right, so today's topic, we are talking about Amazon Sales Rank, Amazon Popularity, and Amazon Bestseller List. Ultimately, really, I'm touching on these things so you have a better understanding of how to help Amazon sell your book for you. And because that is ultimately the goal, I think, or one of the goals when you have your book on Amazon is to get Amazon to help you sell your book. So Amazon Sales Rank is. Well, so first of all, in 2021, one of my goals is to get a little fancier with these live streams so that I will be able to screen share with you. Right now, I'm going to give you a verbal instruction and hopefully you're all familiar enough with Amazon that you can picture where these things are. And then I'll shoot a YouTube video with screen Share into it in the future. But 2021, you can hold me to it. I'm going to get fancy. We've sorted out most of our Internet issues now that kept me from using some of the streaming software. So I will be able to do screen shares live with you on YouTube in the very near future. But until then, bear with me. So when you go to the Amazon product listing for a book, okay, you guys can all picture this in your mind, what that looks like, because I'm sure you've all looked at many of these pages. So of course you see the COVID on the left, and this is my left, so it's probably not your left, but work with me. So you're going to see the product listings, you're going to see the book, you're going to see the COVID the title, the description. As you scroll down, you're going to see books, product recommended, like, you know, items or customers also bought sometimes, but usually it's books you may like or books recommended to you. Then you'll see Editorial Reviews under that, if the author has some. Otherwise it'll be the about the Author section. And. And then finally you're going to get to this little section called Product Details. Now, in Product Details, you're going to see things like publication. This is the metadata, right? So metadata, my friends, very, very important on Amazon everywhere, actually, but it's very critical on Amazon. So the publication details, you're going to have all that metadata, publication date, publisher, et cetera, et cetera, length of the book. Under all of that on Amazon, there's this little section that says bestsellers rank and it gives you a number and you. It'll vary depending on which product you've clicked on. So if you click on the Kindle, you're going to see one version. If you click on the print, you're going to see another. If you click on the audible, you're going to see another. If you click on the hardcover, you see another. So it's ranked by product type. And so when you get to the best sellers rank, you'll see if you've clicked on the Kindle version, you'll see number 125,000 in the Kindle store or 125,000 in the print store, I think is what it says. So that's what you're going to see. And then It'll usually have three other rankings underneath it, sometimes only two. And it'll be number 200 or number 20 or number five in X subcategory. So maybe it would be biographies of business professionals or motivational business management or, I don't know, something else like that or memoirs of famous people, those kind of things. So it'd be a subcategory and you'll have another ranking. So that's, that's the sales rank. Okay, so that's one of the things we're going to talk about today because again, we're talking about Amazon sales rank, popularity and really packaging that up so you can better understand how Amazon knows to recommend your book to other people. Okay, so that's what we're talking about. Hope you're cool with that and hope you understand what I'm talking about when I say bestseller rank. And hopefully you guys are all familiar with that. So I'm just checking out more people have said hello. So hello, Ben, Rachel, great to have you here. Mike, Linda. Yay. Okay, Guardian writer. Hey, I don't know if I've seen you on a live stream before. Welcome Andre Carson. Yeah, it's so great to see so many faces here. Okay, so, okay, Daniel, we'll come to that at the end if we have time. I love that question. That is my kind of question. In case you don't know what I'm talking about. Daniel wrote. Hey, Julie, do you know how I can possibly make my book, my autobiography, in this case, not boring, but still write chronologically like how my cousin suggest it. We're all about no boring books. So we can figure that out. But we might not have time today. But we can talk about that at the end. So today difference. Okay, great. Altcoin. Analysis. Thank you for being here. By the way, can you talk about the difference between being in a big category with big fish or small category to get the bestseller badge? Yeah, we're going to definitely, we're going to be definitely talking about that. But Melissa's already on it because Melissa does this stuff all day long, my friends. She also, I didn't mention this at the beginning. She is also the research person. So our clients, we do metadata research for our clients. We do keyword research both for Amazon as well as for Google and we also do category research. So that's your question right there. And we also do pricing research to make pricing recommendations. So that all falls under Melissa, who is for those of you who've just arrived, Melissa's here today to help me out. She's our client care specialist at Book Launchers. Okay, so getting back to that. So sales rank. So what I want to kind of touch on here is how sales rank is calculated. So it's an Amazon algorithm which is not published. Nobody knows precisely how the Amazon algorithm works. But the one what I want you to know is the sales rank is not a measure of your overall sales. It's a measure of your sales relative to the other books in your category for the current time period. It is based on the type of book, as I mentioned. So it's based on Kindle versus the print book and it is based on recent sales. That's all that matters as far as that goes. It's in fact, it's specifically hourly and I'll get into a little bit more detail on that in a second. Obviously we're talking about sales ranks. So lower numbers are better. This is not where high number wins. This is where the lower your sales rank, that means the more sales that you've had recently. And so there's actually a tool which I'll mention in a minute that will kind of give you an estimate of what kind of rank or how many sales you're selling of that type on Amazon and in a given day based on your sales rank. But lower number is better. So if you've got a sales rank overall of 10,000 on Kindle and 10,000 on print book, you're sitting, you're sitting at overall 10,000 of all the books on Amazon. So that's pretty cool. And that's where the distinguishing thing so kind of going back to altcoin analysis question. So when I talk about my first book being number one on Amazon, I'm talking it was number one on the sales rank of all books it was Emperor one in books, which was pretty cool to see. And that's, that's relevant, relevant to all the books there relative to all the books that were on, on there right now. So I usually use Dan Brown and Game of Thrones as my point of reference. Now there's also underneath that there's three, the three categories that I mentioned. And so that's where it can be useful to be in a smaller category and that's where you can rank number one in that category. But maybe you're 125,000 overall, so you're number one relative to the other books in that category and you're 125,000 relative to all the books. So hopefully that makes sense. Now, sales that happened in the most recent hour are given the most weight or the most value as far as Amazon goes. And that weighting goes down over time. And in fact, the estimates and a lot of my kind of data and research comes from a few different sources. But my main kind of trusted sources is a man named David Gogren. He's got a book, he's got a blog, he does a lot of research on this. And I'll be getting when you are watching the replay or afterwards, I'll have a link to his book afterwards. It's called Amazon Decoded. Excellent read for a deep dive into this stuff, by the way, if you're really into going into the rabbit hole. But I'm going to wrap this up at the end with a nice summary as well. So you don't necessarily have to go down that rabbit hole unless you really love this kind of stuff. So what you need to know is that the sales that happened in the most recent hour are worth over the course of a day, those sales actually lose about half of their value. So it's on tomorrow. While today it might be counted as one sale in 24 hours, it will now count as half of a sale and within seven days it deteriorates to the point of having zero value in sales. I know it's a little confusing, but if you understand what Amazon's trying to prevent, which is gaming of the system. So what used to happen back and still some companies still do this, but it's less and less prevalent now, thankfully, is you used to get all your friends or colleagues or whatever, some companies would offer this as part of their service and everybody would buy the book at 2 o'. Clock. So you'd have 50 sales in an hour, which shot you up really high in that overall ranking and got you that bestseller flag that you were so excited to get, and then promptly you go right back down. So. But overall, initially there was kind of a reward for this, but Amazon got onto this pretty quickly and one of the few algorithm changes they made was, I think in 2011 or 2012 when this was happening a lot, that's when they added this kind of degrading of your value of that sale so that you aren't actually rewarded for very long for having a hit. Right. So you know what I'm talking about, right? You sell 50 books in an hour and then don't sell any books afterwards. So you're going to have a really quick shot, but then it's going to do absolutely, absolutely nothing for you overall on Amazon. So. I know I just threw a lot at you, didn't I? Okay, I'll just back up and see what other questions are in here. Okay. It's an estuary. Water flows in and out, reacting to the previous water flow experience. All very fluid and often unpredictable. I like that analogy. And Deborah got her journal and she loves it. It is the softest ever. Okay. And Mike says that I wasn't kidding about it being oh, so soft. Okay, cool. Yes. The broadcasts are every two weeks and in December, there's going to be one on the 8th, I believe, and then two weeks after that. And I believe we're going to have a big party when we hit 25,000 subscribers and we're getting really close. I think we're less than 300 away, but I don't think we're going to quite make it in time for the December 8th broadcast. So we're gonna have our super duper holiday party on the math on the spot. My goodness, 14 days after the 8th. That doesn't fall on Christmas Day, does it? Hold on, let me pull up my calendar. So that will probably end up being our huge 20, our 25,000 subscriber extravaganza. So that will be the 22nd of December. That'll be our final, final live stream of 2020. We're also going to do a deep, deep dive session on Saturday, December 19th at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time, where we're going to just do open Q and A. It's going to be myself and I think Melissa volunteered as well as somebody else on our team volunteered. And Jacqueline and Sarah. Jacqueline runs our production and Sarah runs our book marketing team. We're going to do open Q and A and tons of prizes. Just have lots and lots of fun. It will definitely be Christmas themed. So that's happening December 19, 10am if you're not on our launch letter, go to book launchers.com and subscribe. Subscribe because you'll get the invite link. There's no replays of those typically, although I might give a replay of this one because it is the holiday Q and A session. So I might post a replay of that. But you still should be there live because prizes are only given to those that tune in live for those ones. Okay, I got distracted. Okay, so back to the sales value. So I talked about the degradation. I'm just looking at my notes here. Okay, so sales, the sales rank is updated hourly, but it's not something that happens hourly. So it, it has a little bit of a delay. So the sale that happens right now, so 2:15 Pacific Standard Time, you'll probably see it reflect in your sales rank or to a few more hours later. So just kind of letting you know if you're running a promo and you're expecting it to instantly update, it's going to show up. There is a delay between when those sales are happening and when it's actually reflected in your sales rank. So there can be a delay in that. And all the Amazon bestseller ranks are based on this. So the top 100 and Kindle, the top one print, they're all based on recent sales value. Now, the ranking. So this is where I did want to kind of pause for a second. Melissa, if you have that link for Kindlepreneur, you can drop that in there now. So a lot of people get all excited that they've hit number one in one of their subcategories and their ranking overall is still like 127,000 overall out of, I don't know, 3 million or whatever books on Amazon. So, I mean, first of all, it is great. It's fun. It's nice to see that bestseller flag. But just a heads up, it doesn't actually mean you've sold that many books. Okay. This is why we don't focus on it very much. What we focus on is relevancy and consistency. Those are the things that are really, really going to matter as far as Amazon goes, is relevancy, making sure that you've got the right metadata. You're showing up when people are searching for you. You're showing up with other books that are like your book that your reader is most likely to be reading and you have consistent sales because that's what Amazon's going to reward you for over time. Which is part of. Wanted to touch on the popularity list today, which is kind of a really hard thing to find. You don't necessarily have to find it. You just need to understand how it works. But I will walk you through how to find it as well. So, so sorry, I kind of lost my train of thought for a second there. I checked your guys's comments. I should just stay focused. I should stay focused on what I talked about. Oh yeah. So the number of Amazon. So the Amazon, the rank and how it converts to sales. So I asked Melissa to drop a link into the comments because there's a way, there's a calculator that is on kindlepreneur's website that will give you a rough estimate. Now just to give you an idea, if you have an overall sales rank of 10,000, sounds great, right? Knowing there's multi millions of books. Two things. One is that rank, when you punch it in, that's ranking again for Kindle and for print. So those are separate numbers. But you type it into this link that hopefully. Have you got it, Melissa? I'm not sure if you've got it, but it's a. It's on the kindlepreneur website. And I say I gotta stop. People are. You guys are funny. Distract me. I need to ignore the comments because I just saw a rum and Coke comment and all these things. So staying focused. Okay, I'm going to look over here and not look at the comments. So. So when you punch in say 10,000 into that Kindle printer ranking chart, you're going to see that. I think on Kindle it was like 12 books have sold and on print it's 15 or vice versa. Regardless if you rank 10,000 overall on the Kindle store or 10,000 overall on the print store, you've sold 15 books a day, which is great. Over the course of a month. That adds up. That's a good, that's a really good steady sales volume. But I'm just kind of sharing this to temper your expectations and to realize that's what a book ranking 10,000 is selling in a day. So you can quickly figure out that a book that's ranking at a million is only selling probably three copies. And I'm just guessing on that. I didn't actually look at those numbers. So this will give you an estimate for fun if you want to see where, where ranking might be. This is also why I don't get super excited over the bestseller ranks because you can rank in those smaller categories for a lot, for a lot less. Now there is value in ranking for those sales categories and being a consistent seller in a Smaller category because it will help you with the recommendations of Amazon because you're a consistent seller in a category you're ranking and you're showing up kind of. As long as that category fits for finding your reader, there is value in it. But as far as posting it on social media and celebrating it, you can do that. Absolutely. The general population will still celebrate it with you. You get that shot of dopamine which makes, I mean all of us authors need that. Okay, we have a rough ride out there. So take your wins where you get them and at the same time realize that one bestseller flag from Amazon is only one little marker in your long journey. To create success on Amazon, you need to on most consistent sales and ensuring you have relevancy with your book. So okay, so you guys are going off on rum and coke drinks over there. So I have to just ignore you for a minute to focus on what we need to do next, which is prizes. Okay, so we have to give prizes away. That is a very important part of these live streams. So for those of you who are new here, we give away a total of four prizes on these regular live streams and then on the extravaganza holiday livestreams we give away a ton and extra swag like hoodies and a surprise swag. You guys are so close to finding out what the surprise swag is. Melissa doesn't even know what our surprise swag is yet. And I asked my team and got them to guess and nobody guessed. Bit right. So it's going to be fun to reveal that. So prizes. So Melissa, because today is November 24th, it's also my parents wedding anniversary. So happy anniversary. Mom and dad, they didn't even know but I wish them happy anniversary. They both were gobsmacked. They said, oh is it the 24th already? True story. Okay, so in celebration of my mom and dad who didn't realize it was their wedding anniversary today, let's pick the 24th person from the top who said hello this morning or today, this afternoon and we will give you a prize. So Melissa, that's, that's, that's your job. Please count from the top to number 24 and let me know who are lucky. Livestream prize winner is number one. The other prizes we give away, I do that. I do another one which will be a skill testing question so make sure you're paying attention. And the other thing we do is give away the prizes for those of you who comment commented on the day a video is released. So new videos are released every Tuesday and Friday on the YouTube channel and those lovely folks who comment the day a video is released. And I know I see a lot of you here. Rachel Robertson, Mike Hurd. I know I saw some others are very, very regular commenters, and I'm so grateful for that. When you're a regular commenter, you become a YouTube bestie like they are. But everybody gets entered to win a prize, and we'll give one away right now because I'm on a roll. So I've put all your names into a handy dandy rave random name generator online, because cutting them all out and putting them in a mug started to hurt my hand, which is what I used to do. But there's so many of you lovely folks now that I have to put you into a random name generator. So our virtual drum roll, please, as we pick our first YouTube winner. And today's winner is. Guy Blaze. All right. Yay. I'm so excited. I don't think he's here today, but congratulations. All you have to do is email us at team T A M bookcontronchers.com and make sure you give us your mailing address. I know, sounds kind of funny, but we don't know where to mail it, and people do it all the time. They're like, hey, I'd love the journal, please. And we have to write them back and go, that's great. Where would you like us to send it? So you can choose between the journal and the mug. Okay. All right, so congratulations, Keith. Now let's see who Melissa picked here. Ysbooks is our winner. Yay. So, same instructions to you ys books. Hopefully you're still here. Not seeing any celebration over there, but if you're not here, then we'll pick someone else. But if you are here, then email us@teamoklaunchers.com Same instructions. Okay, so back to sales rank. So, again, I think that the sales rank loses its value over time to minimize the people trying to game the system. So and trying to get that category flag and doing that to push sales up once doesn't do anything on Amazon, thanks to this, because they want to see conversions on a regular basis. So that's the bestseller list. So when you see the top 100 and the bestseller ranks and all those kind of things, that's what that is. Now, the other thing I wanted to touch on today was something I'd heard about, I actually didn't fully understand until I read Amazon or, yeah, Amazon decoded by David Goggren. So I already mentioned him, and I'll I'll link to that book below. And this was really, really cool. So I'd heard of this popularity list and I'd seen it a couple times. It's not actually called Popularity List and it's really obscure to find. And so I'll give you instructions but again, I'll put out a video probably in January that'll kind of walk you through how to find it. You don't actually need to know how to find it. It's more important that you understand what I'm explaining about about it so that you know how to use it when you're thinking about your marketing on Amazon. But just like the sales rank, the popularity list is updated hourly. But it's calculation is what's important. And, and there's not a lot of overlap interestingly between the popularity list and the best seller list. So that's why I wanted to touch on it because it's an interesting thing. And then once I understood it and kind of dove into it further, after reading David's book, a lot of things that confused me about Amazon started to make a lot more sense. And so again, it's not actually called a popularity list. So if you start searching on Amazon looking for a popularity list like I did when I first heard about this, you won't find it. So essentially what you're going to do is in the top left hand corner of Amazon, there's three little lines. You click on that and then you go down to Kindle or sorry, you go to E Readers and Books and then you go to Kindle Store and then you click on books and you're going to be taken to a page that just seems like a bunch of Kindle recommendations. It's going to have top picks for you featured. You know, mine has featured children's books. It has featured business books basically, you know, kind of books all like our clients as well as of course I buy books for my 3 year old. So it's got all those kind of recommendations, top picks for you. You scroll all the way down to the page and it's a long scroll and then you're going to hit this section that says one of 90 or yeah, one of 90,000 books. And the listings are there and that's the popularity list and there's selections of genre, genre up above it. And so I changed mine. Mine looked like a fiction list when I first got there. So I clicked on nonfiction and got and it revisited and it kind of refreshed and gave me new suggestions. So if this list is so obscure and You've never, you've probably never seen it, you don't know what it is. It does look different on mobile, by the way. So if you do the same thing and you find it on mobile, it is a different kind of a look. And it's worth noting if you're in a Kindle E Reader and you click on book recommendations or something like that, it actually takes you to this popularity list. So there is relevancy in that regard. Like you will see it as a consumer going that route. But the reason it's important is to understand that the popularity plus sales rank is actually what feeds the recommendation engine at Amazon. And knowing that it feeds that and what feeds it will help you. And it's nothing. Again, if you're focused on recency, relevance or, sorry, if you focus on relevancy and consistency, you're going to do this naturally anyways. But it's fun every once in a while to kind of geek out and understand how things work, isn't it? And if it's not, at least there's prizes. Okay, so this is a rolling 30 day average of sales and it doesn't decay. So while sales rank has value, the most value in the hour the sale occurs and it loses its value over the course of 24 hours and 7 days total, the popularity list, as it seems to not be called but is what people refer to it as decays, has like a 30 day drop off. So it's a rolling 30 day, rolling 30 day sales, cumulus accumulation. So whatever sales are happening between 1 and 30, then 2 and 1. If it's a 30 day month, you get the picture, right? That's what's going to matter. And so this is where you can see a sudden drop off of things. If you're, if you had a short window of sales, you might be very popular for a period of time. And it's why consistent conversion is everything because you're going to stay in that popularity list if you are consistently selling over time with the combination of your sales rank. So it's, it's really hard to kind of explain it other than to say that it's a consistent measure of 30 rolling 30 days. So this explains there's a few things. Well, actually, yeah, I'm just trying to think of how I want to go. So they clearly are using both sales rank and this 30 day performance to make its reader recommendations. And some things that, that I really appreciated learning from David's book was that there's some nuances to this. So unlike bestseller rank, free Books are not free books are not counted in the bestseller rank in the popularity list. They are counted, but free books and cheap ebooks in particular are given lower weight. And this is all you know. Again, this, this popularity list is specific to Kindle. But I believe that understanding these things will help you no matter whether your book is print or Kindle. But this is specific to Kindle. Again, I went to the Kindle store in order to find this popularity list. So free books are counted in the popularity list, but they don't have as much weight. And 99 cent books are counted, but they also don't have very much weight compared to like a 4.99 sale. So that is different. Bestseller rank has two different lists. There's a paid list and a free list. So free books do not count in the overall bestseller rank for Amazon. There's a totally separate list when it comes to free ebooks for that. There is no separate list for free on the popularity list. Pre orders though are penalized, which may, which was kind of the eye opening thing for me because I have been mixed up in the past whether the sales matter when they happen or for launch. Because there was definitely pre orders didn't seem to matter as much for rankings. But it's clear now that a lot of the recommendations and what people are seeing, they don't see it in pre launch, I believe because Amazon knows the conversions are lower during pre launch. Just FYI, that's a whole, that's a whole other can of worms. We talked a little bit about that on our deep dive training that we did on Saturday, this past weekend. But pre orders don't have as much weight in this list until it launches and then you kind of get that pop up kind of sensation that happens as far as these lists go. So it's an interesting algorithm. But what you need to understand is Amazon is going to give overall 30 days waiting plus your most recent sales. So again, that's why consistency matters. I'm going to give, I'm going to stop and give another prize here and then I'm going to kind of summarize this, the five points as to why this matters and why to pay attention. But I also want to mention another list that I like checking out because it's fun. There's another list on Amazon called the Movers and Shakers list. I don't know if you guys have seen this one. So I'm just finding my notes so I say it right. Okay, so there's a Mover and shaker list. It is, it Seems to be a 30 day rolling as well. But instead of sales total, it is focusing on the greatest increase of sales rank. So if you have an epic launch and you jump from 0 to 1000 overall on like no ranking, I mean on Amazon, to a thousand overall, then you'll probably be featured here because you're going to have like a bazillion percent increase in your sales rank. And so that's what Movers and shakers is. And it's a fun little thing I like to check out to see who's coming on. You can see books that are just launching and their, their ranks jumping. You can also see seasonal buys, which is always fun. Right now when you go into the Movers and Shakers, you see a ton of Halloween books, an absolute ton of Halloween books. Because Halloween, the kid, they were buying kids books for Halloween. And when you go back to the start of the pandemic, this list was full of learn at home type materials for your kids. That was a huge boom. All that at homeschooling kind of stuff was huge. Huge. I mean, it's still big, but it had that huge jump, an absolute gigantic jump in that movers and shakers list. So that was really dominant. So it's kind of a fun list to check out. I didn't dive deep into learning too much about it, but it's clear. It's a 30 day rank and it's all about your sales rank, which is driven from. Yeah, it's all about your sales rank, which of course is driven by your sales. Okay, Phew. Check your questions, see what else we're talking about. Okay. Yeah, the pot. And it's not called Guardian Writer. I never knew there was a popularity list. It's not called a popularity list. It has no name. And that's, that's where I really wish I'd already upped my game and could do screen shares with you. I will in 2021. That is my commitment to you, my friends. I am going to up my live stream game and we'll have screen share and other beautiful features to, to make this experience even more enjoyable and fun. And of course have more technology that I can fight with. And, and all that good stuff too. I mean, all that technology I can be friends with and we can have a glorious time together. Okay, I am taking questions. Jim, you can, you can go ahead and post questions. Melissa will keep track of the ones. I just want to wrap this part up. And Rachel's doing the Costco run for Thanksgiving, so it was great to have you Rachel, thank you. I know you'll watch the replay. You don't seem to miss a single one. So thank you so much. Okay, so yeah, post your questions in there. That's fine. And yes, Efren, thank you for chiming in too. Great to see you here. Okay, so prize, I'm gonna do one more YouTube prize and then the participation prize will be at the end. So let me do the YouTube Prize and then I'll wrap it up. Okay, so Random Name Picker is picking a name for from the folks that commented on the last two weeks of Tuesday Friday YouTube videos, including the live stream. So if you're watching this replay, you can go ahead and comment. If you comment the day the video is released, you'll be entered to win our fabulous book launcher Swag. So our winner today is Sister Yester. I think that's how you say it. Or Sister Ister could be Sister Ister. So yes, congratulations, Sister Ister. Hopefully you catch the replay and find out you won't. And email us@teamoklaunchers.com and let us know where to send it and your whether you want our hashtag no boringbooks mug, which by the way, coffee, tea and hot chocolate have all been multiple verified, multiply verified, repeatedly verified to taste better in this mug. I've even had one person say they swear their coffee stayed hotter. I can't verify that one. And then our oh so soft journal for writing down all your fabulous ideas. The one is full, but I do now have a new one. Angela sent me a new one, so I've got a fresh one so I can start fresh. I'm so excited. Soon I will fill this one up too. Okay, so those are your two prizes today and we do have one more prize for all you folks who are here live. It's going to be a skill testing question, so hopefully you've been paying attention. Okay, so just kind of summarizing why I thought we could talk about this. First of all, I thought it was kind of fun and I know as an author it can be really fun to check your ranks and see what's happening. But I ultimately, I don't want you to worry too much about these things. You don't have to really. Instead focus your efforts on things that are going to generate ongoing sales with Amazon. So things that will generate ongoing sales with Amazon, of course, are doing promotions, sending people to buy books from your Amazon page, making sure your book description sells, making sure your cover sells, making sure your title is clearly speaking to your reader. Those are all Things that are essential, getting book reviews, of course, making sure your metadata is all on point. Those are really good things for Amazon. The next thing I want to make sure that you know is that Amazon will, okay, Amazon does not sell your book for you, but they will help you sell your book and will do it better if you are really focusing on these things. So knowing that consistency and relevancy are the most important things that you can do for Amazon success. Metadata with Amazon matters a lot and I have a really good book recommendations for that. Our our friend at Book Launchers, Dale Roberts, self publishing with Dale, his YouTube channel. He put out a great book a couple months ago called Amazon Keywords for Books by Dale L. Roberts. And I'll drop that link into the chat below after and I just realized Melissa, you couldn't drop that link before because you're not an admin. That's why I was like why can't you put that link in there? But yeah, I just remembered because Angela is an admin and I didn't set you up as an admin on the channel. That's why we couldn't get that link. So all the links I've mentioned today will be in the link in the descriptions after the video is live. I'll make sure they all get posted there. But Amazon Keywords for Books from Dale Roberts is a really, really good book for you to read. It's a quick read, easy read. I highly recommend it. But it explains keywords and some of the other metadata pieces for you to do research. And ultimately he recommends my favorite tool which is Publisher Rocket. Melissa lives in Publisher Rocket so she can verify how useful it is. But he ultimately goes back to Publisher Rocket as the tool that he uses for a lot of the research. But he also explains how you can do a lot of the research manually. The Amazon won't sell your book for you if it doesn't know your book will sell. So you really have to show it that your show Amazon that if they send traffic to your book page it's going to convert. That's really the key here. One time boosts are not going to be beneficial. You really, you can have a one time boost in an ebook promotion, for example, and there will be benefits to you over the long run. But I recommend you having other things that are going to go on immediately after so that you have a spike. But it's not an immediate drop, it's a spike with like a leveling off. Okay, so hopefully that makes sense. But yeah, this was fun. So hopefully you found it useful? It's kind of more analytical than we often get on the channel. But I thought it was an important subject and we've had a lot of questions on it from our clients lately. And then it came up a lot on our Saturday deep dive. So that was a great subject for today's conversation. Okay, so questions. I know there was a few questions. Let me go back here. Let's see. Joyce. Joyce Scott. Dale Roberts. Book two is very helpful. There we go. Okay, see, I know there was questions. Here we go. Oh, I have to do the skill testing question. Okay, here we go. Steven says my book got to number 20, number 45, and number 75 in three categories yesterday. Yay. That's fantastic. Congratulations. I love it. I used a free ISBN on Amazon. Can I use different pen names on different platforms and also use a free ISBN? I don't know the do's and don'ts of ISBNs. Okay, yeah, you can use different platforms and different pen names. You can. I feel like there's more to this question, Shane. Like, I'm not quite sure. So I don't generally. And they're not free ISBNs on Amazon, by the way. They're ASINs. So there's a YouTube video, which I'll write to this down so I don't forget to put it in the description. But there's a YouTube video on my channel that explains the difference between using the Amazon ASIN versus an ISBN. It's totally fine. I don't know the nuances of doing a bunch of asins with a bunch of different names, but I know there's a lot of people who do. You probably. I don't know if you'd use different accounts to do. I don't think so. I think you all set it up with one account, but there might be somebody here who knows. It's kind of out of the realm of what we do at Book Launchers because all our clients have ISBNs, because we're not. Very rarely do we ever have a client who is only publishing on Amazon. We're almost always publishing wider. Most of our authors are, you know, going Barnes and Noble, you know, Amazon in other countries and an independent bookstores and kind of those kind of things. So we always have ISBNs for our authors. So I'm not super familiar on the nuances of only using the ASIN and what it does. But the thing to know that if you get a free ISBN on Amazon, you're not actually getting an ISBN, you're getting an asin, an Amazon Identifying number. An ISBN is an international book identifying number and you have to buy it through a body. And Amazon's not assigning that to you. Theirs is only an identifier that works on Amazon, so hopefully that makes sense. Okay, so let's do the skill testing question and oh is. Oh, that might be what the catch is. So Mike is saying there's a rule about not taking identical copies to other platforms. I felt like there was a catch to what you were asking. So if you're asking me if you can republish the same book on different platforms with different pen names, yeah, I don't think you can. Or if you do, like Mike is saying, you have to give notice to kdp. There's some. This again, this is out of my world. This is not the kind of stuff that we specialize in. But yeah, there was like warning bells in my head like there's something wrong with this question. So that might not wrong with the question but something that I need to be warning you about on that. Okay, perfect. Okay, so the skill testing question today is I was going to do one, but I'm going to change it. So what, how is a two parter? So you got to get both parts right, A and B. So part A is what is the sales rank calculated on? Or how. Sorry, I should say how far frequently are the sales that matter for sales rank and how frequently are the sales that matter for popularity. Okay, so what are those two time frames that matter? It's calculated and hopefully I said it enough times that you can get part A and part B. Right. So the first one to get that right will be our fantastic winner for today. And so Renee, I think that's how you say your name. Thank you for joining us. Nice to see you here. Is it better to have your, your own ISBN and. And Bill, congratulations. Woohoo. You're the winner. But yes. So is it better to have your own ISBN? It depends. I mean if you're just going to publish on Amazon and that's all you care about, you know, you could save the money and have an asin, but that's where my video is really going to help because I go deep into it. Me personally, I'm a big. I don't want to say that about myself, but I'm a control freak. I want to control everything. So I want to be the owner, I want it to be me, I want it to be my publishing company. So I buy the ISBN and I will own my rights. I will be the publisher on record and you know Even if I was only publishing on Amazon, I would do that. The thing is, if you only have an asin, you're not able to use that anywhere other than Amazon. So if you have any intention of having your book elsewhere, then you're going to need to have your own ISBN. So yes, I love control. I love, I love owning my rights, I love keeping all my royalties and I love being in charge. I am what you would call unemployable, which is self explanatory. Okay. Although my boss is really hard on me. Just so you know, the boss being me, I'm quite a hard boss on myself. Okay, just checking to see if there's any other questions. Yes, Mike is our hero today. I think Mike's won all the swag, otherwise I would have given him his own official swag. So, Bill, congratulations. I don't know if you've won this stuff before, but I know you've been around, so I'm so excited you won. So email us@teamoklaunchers.com so Team Tamooklaunchers. I'm just typing it in for you and let us know if you want the journal or the mug and make sure you include your mailing address to let us know where to send it. Where's the most affordable place to print out books you can price it out and get. If you do big batches, you can get cheaper. But for me, having a garage or a storage unit full of books is not worth the savings for most. For most authors. So generally print on demand is great for a typical. You know, let me just see what I've got over here. Where's one book like this is just one. That's right here. This is one of the books that we did. And it's probably $4 for him to order this book and then plus shipping. So that's pretty cheap. I think that's a great place to get books. They're high quality. So we use Ingram for most of the orders. But KDP print will work as well. Mike's waiting for the big swag surprise. He's saving up. It's gonna be good. I'm excited. I can't wait to share it with you. Okay, so December 8th is our next live stream and. And I don't think it'll be our 25, 000 subscriber party. I think the December 22nd will be our 25, 000 subscriber Party. Unless you guys all want to rush out there and subscribe if you haven't. And December 19th is going to be our holiday extravaganza of fun. So we'll be unveiling the swag that day because I'm giving some of that fantastic new swag away. Plus, we have new hoodies and lots of mugs, lots of journals and books. We're gonna have lots of books to give away. So it's gonna be a ton of fun. And you can bring all your questions and you'll be able to hear from the real experts on our team, the people who are behind the scenes doing all the hard work every day, like Melissa and Sarah and Jacqueline and I think. I think it was Ashley. I'm not sure. Somebody else on our team. I wish I remember right now who said they were going to be there as well. We might. Might get a couple other people to chime in too. But it's going to be a lot of fun. So I hope to see you there. Thank you so much. It was fantastic to spend another Tuesday with you. I'm really grateful for you being here. Make sure you smash that thumbs up button and see you on the eighth by.