{"id":941,"date":"2014-07-09T15:18:55","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T15:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/?p=941"},"modified":"2014-07-09T15:18:55","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T15:18:55","slug":"a-year-on-amazon-how-many-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/2014\/07\/a-year-on-amazon-how-many-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"A year on Amazon: how many reviews?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A year ago, for reasons not relevant here, I decided to record every Kindle ebook uploaded to Amazon for a full month. For the sake of my sanity, I restricted it to epic fantasy. I recorded 390 ebooks uploaded over the month of April 2013, excluding foreign language ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

A year on, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what had happened to those 390 books. So during April 2014, I looked each one up on Amazon, and noted the number of reviews. These are total numbers; I didn\u2019t attempt to track numbers of 5*, 4* and so on. I noted rankings, too, but these are just a snapshot in time, whereas reviews are cumulative.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ignoring ebooks that have disappeared, there are 338 books with review numbers. Two books are anomalous: Memory of Light has 3,048 reviews, and Blood Song has 1,374. Below those outliers, a Mageborn book has 309, Promise of Blood has 255 and a Casey Odell has 147. A couple of others also have more than 100 reviews. Nobody else comes close.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are the overall numbers, of the 338 surviving:<\/span><\/p>\n

0 reviews: 38%<\/span><\/p>\n

1 review: 13%<\/span><\/p>\n

2 reviews: 10%<\/span><\/p>\n

3 reviews: 4%<\/span><\/p>\n

4-9 reviews: 14%<\/span><\/p>\n

10+ reviews: 20%<\/span><\/p>\n

So 38% of these books have no reviews at all after a year \u2013 which is kind of tragic. And 66% have fewer than 4. Just 20% manage double figures.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the part you could have predicted: the highest ranked books also have the most reviews. Those in the top 5% of ebooks (rankings 1-125,000) have an average of 165 reviews (or 42, if you exclude the two outliers). After that the numbers drop off precipitously. <\/span><\/p>\n

Impossible to say whether a large number of reviews lead to higher sales, or whether high sales result in more reviews, but there does seem to be a correlation. However, as you might expect, there are big exceptions: some high ranked books have very few reviews, while some with a lot do poorly.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of this is particularly startling. The only aspect that surprised me was how many books had very few reviews, or even none at all, after being on sale for a full year. That does suggest that a lot of them are just not selling and\/or not being promoted. And the take-home message is the obvious one: promote and get reviews.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A year ago, for reasons not relevant here, I decided to record every Kindle ebook uploaded to Amazon for a full month. For the sake of my sanity, I restricted it to epic fantasy. I recorded 390 ebooks uploaded over the month of April 2013, excluding foreign language ones. A year on, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what had happened to those 390 books. So during April 2014, I looked each one up on Amazon, and noted the number of reviews. These are total numbers; I didn\u2019t attempt to track numbers of 5*, 4* and so on. I noted rankings, too, but these are just a snapshot in time, whereas reviews are cumulative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":943,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}