I’ve been taking these things a lot easier over the last month, but I’ll be paying attention to the ranking of The Compass Key for a while. Mostly because I want to see if it can get higher up the list the Family of the Tri-Rune (#16 on Sword & Sorcery). So here is where we started:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #36,353 Paid in Kindle Store
Thank you to everyone has reblogged, shared, and retweeted so far. Hopefully the book picks up a lot of momentum over the weekend and those who start reading it enjoy the adventure.




Congratulations!! That’s an awesome ranking!
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Thanks. Now to make it better. 😉 Maybe after a nap.
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Best of luck, Charles. Top 100 by Sunday!
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Thanks. Fingers crossed.
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Good luck. 🙂
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Thanks. Got to the 14,000’s this morning and I’m on the Hot New Release Top 100 for Sword & Sorcery. Strange thing there is that many of the books on that list aren’t even out yet. You can only be a new release for 30 days, but it seems a pre-order situation allows you to be on there until 30 days after your book debuts. Too bad there’s no way for Indie Authors to do that.
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Well, you can do it with a paperback, but if you mostly sell ebooks, that may not help much. Top sellers can earn invitations and special privileges, but it’s not easy.
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I think that’s a special privilege that hasn’t opened up to Indies yet. I check every now and then to see if there’s a spot for ‘Future Release Date’ and it isn’t there. Guess it makes sense because you’d have a bunch of unscrupulous authors filling up the lists and getting money for a book that they never release. At least with a traditionally published, there are some checks to prevent that.
I should be happy to be on the list though. For some reason the 4th book of my series just stopped dead 3 days ago. I’m wondering if the longer a series goes, the less of an effect new books have on previous ones.
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I think this special privilege is both rare and requires Amazon to do the work on the indie’s behalf (i.e. you’d never be able to set it through the bookshelf). I know, for example, that indies can receive an invitation to have a video displayed on a product page, but can’t do this themselves (but indies can add a video to the author page themselves, just not to the book page). I’ve heard other cases where KDP contacted the indie author, inviting them to participate in a special privilege, but it’s always KDP doing the work on the author’s behalf.
Probably, readers still need to work their way through the series, even when the new volume comes out. The effect may be more long-term. I expect the newest volume and first volume to get the most sales, then you multiply fractions together as readers get from one volume to the next. But then I know some people who’ve read books out of order on many occasions…
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You’re probably right. Things are still evolving too, so who knows what the future holds. Though this has been an oddly low key year.
Good point and book 1 has seen more action than 2-4. I guess the key for a series is to get readers at different stages because it will increase longevity. Any motion is some motion. The pause might even mean that it takes fewer sales to boost the ranking since sale rate factors in.
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