Flash! Do free downloads boost a book up the paid bestsellers list?

Flash! Do free downloads boost a book up the paid bestsellers list?

A while back, people were concerned because most of the books on the Kindle bestselling list were free.  The argument was that free downloads weren’t the same as sales. 

So, Amazon took care of the problem and created two lists…one free, and one paid.

However…

I’ve noticed that, if a book was free and then becomes, say, $9.99, it can be at the top of the paid bestseller list right after the change.  Arguably, making the book free creates great word of mouth (or word of “mouse”, as I like to say), and then people are happy to pay $9.99 for it.

But my guess is that those free downloads pump up the position on the paid list for a while.

I recently told you about Germs, Genes, & Civilization being free (it was when I told you).  It’s not now.  It’s ranked #4 in the Kindle store…and #4 on the paid list.  This is a book with 18 reviews…not hundreds.

We’ve seen some things happen on the bestseller lists in the past that suggested that they were being spiked by very few purchases.  The list is updated hourly, and if you only looked at the past hour, you might get some strange results.  Somebody might buy 30 copies of a book for a class, for example, and throw that off.

So, even though it is updated hourly, that doesn’t mean it only reflects the last hour’s sales. 

If a book gets pumped to #4 because of free downloads, and then gets a price, it’s still #4 in the store for a while.  So, if the paid bestseller list looks at store rankings and then just filters out the freebies, that’s going to leave it up there until the sales are re-checked.  Is that only an hour?  Don’t know…but my intuition is that it’s at least a day.

Good reason to make a book free for a short while…and to jump on those freebies when I post them here. 

Just something I’ve noticed…I was prompted to write this one because of a comment one of my readers left me about how quickly that GG&C book became paid again.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.