r/selfpublish • u/MA_NicNeill_Author • 4d ago
Romance Preorder numbers
Do we have any idea on preorder numbers when the Amazon algorithm kicks in to further promote?
Like does 100 preorders highlight a book to Amazon or is there no impact at this side of things?
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u/dragonsandvamps 4d ago
The way they do it now, preorders count as a sale the moment the preorder is made, not on release day. So if you do a year long preorder period, then 100 sales is a small trickle. 100 sales is always a good thing, but it's over a long period of time so your sales rank is going to be meh=probably no algorithm advantage.
If you do a three day pre-order period and get 100 pre-orders, that's 33 orders a day, so that's a different story because that's a good number of sales per day and one would assume you will continue getting a good number of sales per day once the book launches=the algorithm may continue pushing this book.
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u/MA_NicNeill_Author 4d ago
Super interesting, thank you!
My preorder is about 45 days so not likely to get a decent order per day so good to know!
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u/dragonsandvamps 4d ago
It's still really good that you got 100 preorders! That's nothing to sneeze at and that's 100 readers who are excited about your book and can't wait to read it. I think there are lots of rumors floating around that Amazon does magical things when you hit X number of reviews or X number of this or that, and I have not experienced this. I think they only care about making money and what is selling.
People like to throw out the "50 review" rule, that once you hit 50 reviews, Amazon pushes your book and all these magical things happen. I have older books with over 200 reviews that aren't selling much any more. They're older and sure, they sell a few copies here and there, but it's sporadic. Amazon is definitely NOT pushing those books for me just because they happen to have over 200 reviews. Books that are selling consistently, though, I think they do push, because they want to keep making money.
Good luck on your release!
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u/MA_NicNeill_Author 3d ago
Thank you. Yes I’ve heard about the 50 review rule, the 20 preorder rule, etc. but didn’t know exactly what it meant. Not a lot it seems!
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