on Kindlepreneur:

Thanks to advancements in Publisher Rocket, we’ve been analyzing data from Amazon for a while. Because of this, and the use of other tools, we picked up on a pattern in how Amazon treats books and their discoverability that I think changes a lot in the industry, and how we authors should operate.

Basically, through analytical proof, we found that when a book has a rise in sales on Amazon through just about any means, Amazon responds by increasing the number of keywords that that book shows up for naturally, and its rankings for those keywords as well. Therefore, because of the increase in a book’s popularity, the book would show up more often in the Amazon store.

I’m calling it the Amazon Popularity Effect.

On the one hand, this makes sense. However, this also opens up a lot of questions like how does Amazon do this and what does this mean for authors? Are there things we can do to help ride this popularity effect or take advantage of it? Make better decisions? Plan better launches?

But to answer these questions, we need to understand more about the popularity effect, and how far it really goes. Therefore, in order to help understand this phenomenon and see what else we can learn from Amazon, I decided to conduct a full experiment, record the data and give my thoughts on what is going on here.

In this article, you will learn: