Are cheaper books discriminated against in Amazon rankings? See blog post.

I think one of the big posts on lists here mentions that poplist does take price into account.

But price is also a major factor in buys.

If amazon gives you 0.9 credit (total random off the top of my head number for sake of arguement) of each 0.99 book instead of a full 1, then the increased number of buyers than may occur at that price makes it worth using the low price strategy....

Say your book might have sold 75 at 1.99 but 100 at 0.99.

At a .9 credit instead of a full credit you would still end up getting a higher ranking in the poplist.

Of course without knowing what the actual penalty is, or without knowing how many more books you would sell at lower price, it all reverts back to guess and test..

Ahhh, 2012. That was a great year for The Data Avengers as we weren't as distracted with writing and selling our own stuff as we are today. I think I was the first to suggest the price bias in the poplist when it showed up, and Ed Robertson was the one who did the heavy lifting to disprove the hypothesis and wound up proving it instead (ha!). David Gaughran has been our authorized documentarian. And there are/were a handful of other Avengers who prefer to remain anonymous. I came up with some likely weightings by price and posted them here, then it seemed Amazon promptly reweighted things a couple more times, punishing the 99c price more with each re-weight, some of which Ed also documented.

Then a year later, we noticed that books with BookBub ads weren't gaining the way they should have in the poplist rankings. Our work indicated freebie downloads of books that ran via BookBub weren't being calculated even at the 0.1 weighting we think is typically assigned to freebies. Then we noticed it appeared the 99c books advertised on BB were being snubbed as well. From that we concluded sales and downloads originating directly from BookBub emails or website were being excluded from the poplist calculations altogether.

It's this reweighting in the poplists that's responsible for the devolution of the Golden Age of Select in early 2012 to the Silver Age of 2013 to the Bronze Age of early 2014. When the poplist algos were finally squeezed to their thinnest, the history weighting in the bestsellers list appears to have come under the reweighting knife, chopping the long tail off books that spike quickly and can't sustain high rank on their own, leaving us where we're at today (although it's a given the algos will continue to change to respond to market conditions).

The poplist feeds the KU/KOLL ranks, so for books in Select, the poplist ranking is especially important.

A holistic marketing plan looks at the effect of sales on bestseller lists, poplists and in the recommendation and visibility engines. It's ALL important if you're hoping to sustain sales and not just spike them.