Amazon Ratings & Growth
Ratings. They are the be all and end all of Amazon products, not least for books.
They, quite literally, give books a chance at being noticed, or allow them to drown in a sea of Amazon nothingness.
Very recently the first Great Hearts book reached 200 ratings, which is amazing and I thank everyone who has taken the time to leave a rating / review, but it got me thinking. More accuately it got me amazed at the jump between the first 100 and the second.
The first 100 ratings took over 4 years for the first novel to achieve. This could be down to any number of things: I was a complete unknown competing against thousands (if not millions) of other books, I was terrible at marketing (still largely am), or perhaps it was that the book itself wasn’t hitting the right audience.
The second 100 ratings took 4.5 months.
Let’s assume the first book hit 100 ratings after exactly 4 years. That means 100 ratings in 1460 days, equating to 1 review every 14.6 days.
For ease, we can assume that the second hundred ratings took 135 days, equating to 1 review every 1.35 days.
Which makes for a fun little graph.
Interestingly, because 2 ratings is a much higher increase when compared to 1 rating, the rate of growth for the last 135 days is technically much less than the first 100. Going from 1 rating to 100 is 9900% growth! Going from 100 to 200 ratings is meanwhile just a measly 100%
As such, whilst it very much didn’t feel like it, the first 4 years had a growth of almost 6% per day, whilst the last 135 days has seen a growth of 0.74%.
Moral of the story? If I had a regular 6% increase on a daily basis for my income, I would be a very rich man indeed.
Note* I am not a statistician and fully expect my calculations to be completely and utterly wrong.