Thoughts on Amazons and Microorganisms and the ways they me be similar

Even if they don’t admit it, I’ll bet most authors watch their Amazon ranking. Some, like me, go beyond admitting “watching.” I will admit to tracking and analyzing, in some detail. That should not surprise any of you who know Aspergian nature.

In an analysis of 20+ big books last fall, I found the absolute Amazon rank, and the rate of rank change (up or down), and the longer term momentum to be strongly predictive of trends 2-4 weeks later on the NY Times Bestseller lists. As much as people disparage these ranks, I think there’s a lot to learn by watching the movement at the top.

Many articles have been written about Amazon rank and I won’t repeat them here. In this post, I’d like to talk about something different: the hidden relationship between Amazon sales and bricks-and-mortar stores.

I have tracked Look Me in the Eye since last June, when preorders began trickling in. Back then, my Amazon rank was in the 250,000 range, rising to 2,000 two weeks before the on-sale date. When reviews came out, the rank shot up. A full page in People pushed the rank into the top 100 the day the magazine went on sale. Appearances on network TV pushed it even higher, into the single digits by the on-sale day. After the media blitz, my rank dropped through the top hundred over a few months, and the top 1,000 over nine months.

The meteoric rise is common for books that get a lot of media coverage. The slower trail-down is normal too. Obviously, some books trail off at a steeper angle than others but the general trend is shared by almost all books.

For the past 11 months, the demand curve for my book (as expressed by Amazon rank) has been steady and fairly predictable. Suddenly, a month ago, demand dropped precipitously. What happened?

In the space of a few weeks, the rank dropped from 1,000 to 10,000.

Why?

It took me a little while to figure out the answer. My Amazon rank dropped as bookstores allowed their stock of Look Me in the Eye to run down in anticipation of the paperback release. The less visible I was in stores, the less I sold online.

There is a fascinating and observable correlation between the visible presence of my book in stores, and the Amazon rank. What does this say? I don’t know about you, but it tells me that people see a book in a store and then buy it on Amazon.

Why would they do that? Why buy later online if you are actually next to the book in a store? There are many possible reasons. I’ve even had people admit to this to me in stores. They’ve said things like, “I enjoyed coming to see you tonight. I’m going to go home and order your book!”

I always wonder at comments like that. I’m standing in a store, next to a pile of books, and someone says, “I’ll go home and order it.” I say, “Why not buy a copy now?”

Sometimes they look like I suggested something shocking, and they buy the book. More often, though, they offer some inane excuse and wander off.

So we have a kind of commercial symbiotic relationship. The evidence of my own book shows how Amazon feeds off people’s exposure to books in stores. How does the existence of Amazon benefit the bricks-and-mortar stores?

I know some booksellers will read this and feel like jumping all over me with hostile disagreement . . . but consider the balance between Amazon and the traditional bookstore like the relationship between many microorganisms and the host body.

Those organisms have evolved over thousands of years to a point where both benefit the other in some way (thought it may be hard to see), and neither one is too lethal to the other. Is there such a balance between the traditional retailer model, and online models like Amazon?

For online businesses like Amazon to succeed, I submit that they must achieve a stability based upon mutual benefit, just as microorganisms do. Is that happening?