Ratings

Some very unusual things happened to the book ratings last week, so unusual that I thought I'd write about them to see if I could sort them out myself. There are reasonable explanations for things but one never knows, so putting it all down helps me think about the possible reasons.

One of the weirdest was that all my international book ratings went up, way up. I only sell a few books internationally - one here in Germany, one here in Canada, a couple in the UK, that kind of thing, so they carry their ratings for about a year and then they disappear unless people come along and buy another one. After a few months they're sitting there with a rating of like 2.7 million, but this week that one went down by 250,000 (lower number is actually a higher rating) so what I'm saying is that it appears that 250,000 books just disappeared from the system. You can get rid of 250,000 books either by a mass culling (declaring that after a year, say, they no longer get a rating), or by a mass reorganization (saying that such-and-such book is no longer in this category - has a new category? or whatever. What's unusual to me is that it happened in paperbacks throughout the system - Germany, Canada, UK, Japan,

In the US (.com) paperback ratings also went down (got better) dramatically. Lots of them got a million points better, give or take a few hundred thousand. What's up? Mass culling? Mass reorganization? There are probably other explanations. Like, from now on, we won't count books that you printed but we're not sure if you sold them. Or, from now on, we won't count books that you bought yourself from home or all from the same address. Or, from now on, we'll count books the libraries bought. Or something like that - who knows what they count or what they don't? I can't imagine so many books though, getting a million points better. I used to have three books with paperback ratings of over ten million; now I hae only one.

Finally, kindle category ratings took a dive. A book that had a rating of 9,389 (US Short stories) last week was at 12,809 this week. What, 350,000 books of short stories were published to push them down? This by the way happened with many books of short stories, lost 300-350K in the USSS category, but oddly enough their base kindle rating, which I believe the category rating is based partly on, behaved like usual. Only got 20,000 points worse or so. Now, how do you explain? Sounds like a reorganization to me, like you have the same books in the same six million or so slots above it, only 20,000 new ones to push it down, but more of them are being called "USSS" these days, whereas they used to have a different category.

Can't really explain. Only that I watch, keep track, feel an odd sense of pleasure that any of my books has any slot in the entire system at all. When I have books in the top 100 of anything, or even in some cases below a million in general rating, I'm proud for a week or as long as it can stay there and resist the general relentless ratings push to the astronomical numbers. They fall off a cliff every once in a while - if you keep track you see it - but then when somebody buys one you shoot up and shed five or six million points in a single moment - always worth watching.

Does anyone care? I mean if someone opens up your book and looks it over, do they scroll down and see what its rating is, and then buy or not possibly being influenced by that number? Open question. The numbers do occasionally impress other writers. Or not, as the case may be.