Noticed by myself as well as Aaron Shepard from SalesRankExpress, starting around December 7th Amazon (at least on Amazon.com) has only rarely adjusted sales rank to reflect actual sales for paperback books. This also includes assigning sales rank to books who have their first sale. From personal experience, there was a 48 hour delay (usually 3 hours) to get a new sales rank assigned to a paperback book after it’s first sale.

I put out a complaint post on the facebook wall and a few others seemed to share the sentiment, so I think this is universal. My only guess is that since December is so busy for not only Amazon’s primary business of selling products, but also for all of the cloud services they run, they decided that they would relegate sales rank adjustments to the back of the line as far as computing resources.

What does this mean for you?
It means that during December, the accuracy of NovelRank for paperbacks is going to be severely limited. Let’s hope that my assumptions are right, and that in January, everything will return to normal. It does not seem to be affecting sales rank for Kindle Edition titles, but who knows what will happen as we get closer to Christmas Day.

Enjoy the season!

PS
Maybe this or this short story will make you feel better (girls and guys, respectively).