A quick test recently confirmed that when a customer borrows your ebook and reads it through the Kindle Unlimited program, that counts as a sale the same way as if they had purchased your Kindle book directly. To demonstrate this here are is the salesrank data for the test book:
Perfect for the holiday season, we asked free users what deal they would prefer and the clear winner was 3 months of PRO for $33. The deal ends on October 1st, but the best part is, if you act now, the benefits would go through the prime shopping season. This is not a subscription, just a one-time payment to upgrade to PRO. Payments are collected through Stripe, a credit card processor used by thousands of companies online.
In the last few months, two new websites have come online in an effort to weed out fake reviews and give buyers an honest view of products on Amazon. First on the scene was FakeSpot, which gives a letter grade summary based on analysis of the words used by reviewers, especially reused across multiple reviews by the same reviewer.
Today, I want to point you toward another free service that recently made a big splash, ReviewMeta. After releasing a video (below) explaining the unsurprising bias of reviews received for a discount (or for free), their site has stabilized and is now usable again.
One of the big features is an adjusted review, based on ReviewMeta filtering. It’s even available directly in your browser when viewing Amazon products, all via their extensions for Chrome and Firefox. I decided to put a book to the test that was new to the bestseller list (#13 at the time of this writing according to NovelRank Top Lists): Home by Harlan Coben. Putting it through ReviewSpot, they found the same rating (4.7), but based on only 4 legitimate reviews out of 18 possible. You can look further down the page for their breakdown of why, so I’ll save you from reading it here again.
First, it should discourage you, so you never use a website that offers to provide you reviews from real customers in exchange for freebies. Secondly, it should also reinforce the value of Verified Purchases when it comes to reviews (for more on this, see this fascinating breakdown of the release of Amy Schumer’s book).
High review counts & star ratings may get customers to click on your book in a search list, but only quality reviews will convert them into customers.
For publishers, before taking on an author you should run every book they self-published previously through this and know whether you’re dealing with a quality author or a charlatan. For authors, you should look at potential publishers before signing on the dotted line, ensuring they don’t use these practices with your books (and your reputation).
Feature image courtesy of ReviewMeta
This is just a quick post that helps out the majority of users of NovelRank. I was able to request an increase to my API calls/hour with Amazon.com, meaning that within 1 hour I can make 10,800 API calls rather than 3,600 API calls. This means that (especially for books that have sold a copy in the last few days), sales rank data is being collected 100% faster than 3 months ago (~19/day vs ~9/day). That means that sales estimates will be more accurate moving forward (still underestimated for bestsellers) since the sales rank data it is based on will be more reliably captured.
One final note, some are turned off by the 100 book limit for user accounts, even for PRO accounts. The above is the reason this exists, because the more books in the system by a few individuals, the larger the slowdown they can have for everyone’s experience. NovelRank has always been about helping out the little guy authors, and that won’t change even if it means leaving money on the table.
As a reminder, PRO customers always get sales rank checks 23 of the 24 hours each day, among many other benefits.
Image credit: CC-A Marcelino Rapayla Jr.