---
title: "Amazon Author Rank"
description: "We all know about best seller lists.  Best seller lists make a different.  A lot of people buy based on what is on the top of the list.  This is not just laziness, best seller lists are a way to..."
url: https://bookwi.se/amazon-author-rank/
date: 2012-10-24
modified: 2012-10-24
author: "Adam Shields"
categories: ["Kindle Tips"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# Amazon Author Rank

[![Amazon Author Rank](https://bookwi.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/screenshot_17.jpg)](https://bookwi.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/screenshot_17.jpg)We all know about best seller lists.  Best seller lists make a different.  A lot of people buy based on what is on the top of the list.  This is not just laziness, best seller lists are a way to find out what is good.  There is a relationship between what is good and what is selling.  It is not a 1 to 1 correlation, but there is a correlation.

Last week Amazon started something new, [Amazon Author Rank](http://www.amazon.com/author-rank).  It is a best seller list for the authors, not the books.  [NPR had an article about this yesterday](http://www.npr.org/2012/10/20/163239292/anxiety-ahoy-amazon-now-ranks-author-popularity). And I have to agree.  When it is the books being ranked it seems more objective.  When the Authors are being ranked it seems more personal, a popularity contest..

Amazon has not released how the Author Rank works (or how its best seller rankings work), so we really don’t know how objective it is.  I wish it was not updated hourly.  I really don’t want my favorite authors to be obsessively checking their ranking and not writing.  I want them to be writing.  But it is an interested thing to look at, at least occasionally.