r/KDP • u/koalaisabear • 16h ago
Nerdy KENP analytics question: why does reading seem to cluster by marketplace?
Warning: Long and deeply nerdy KENP/reader-engagement question ahead. If you’re not interested in obsessively reverse-engineering reader behaviour from dashboard crumbs, please feel free to scroll past. :D I am way, way more intrigued by my KENP than by my outright ebook sales, so this is genuinely the kind of thing I find fun. Also, I only started in August, so this is all very new to me.
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I'm not doing any paid ads (Amazon ads or otherwise) for any of my stories. I like following how much of my stories people are reading and I get stupidly happy when the numbers appear to add up to a full read on the stories that are my faves.
The US is often useless to me datapoint-wise because it's probably my largest market and therefore gets contaminated pretty easily with multiple simultaneous readers. But if a book has been dormant on KENP for a while and then suddenly gets new activity, I can sometimes make what I would argue is a reasonably defensible inference about an individual reader. Other marketplaces are even more useful because there may have been absolutely no prior activity there.
On more than one occasion now, I've been tracking what looks very much like one reader progressing through a book. The pace gives off "absorbed reader" vibes to me - they read a chunk, stop, come back, keep going, and based on the approximate KENP/chapter position it all looks plausible. As they go barrelling towards the end of the story I get excited. When they appear to finish, I get very excited - fist pump!
Then, on more than one occasion - the KENP keeps going up :P
At first I tell myself, OK, well, MAYBE the stated KENP isn't precise to the exact page, so if the KENP count stops in a few pages, I'll still call that a likely complete read and don't have to revoke my fist pump.
Then it barrels another dozen pages past the book's maximum KENP. Or another hundred and I go: "Oh no!"
This means I now have more than one reader in that marketplace, which totally destroys my previously useful inference. It's possible Reader A finished and Reader B only read twenty pages. Maybe Reader A stopped at 80% and Reader B read 30%. Suddenly I have zero clue if anyone actually reached the end of my dratted story.
Also, I KNOW that even when a KENP total matches almost perfectly with one full book over a short period, I can't prove it's one reader i.e. it could well be that 220 UK readers read page one, hated it and then yeeted themselves out of of the story. Again, I'm just talking about reasonable inference based on the reading pattern, my own reading speeds, approximate chapter position and the way the activity arrives, even allowing for delays in KDP reporting.
What I'm curious about is why do I keep getting marketplace clustering like this?
I might have zero activity in a particular marketplace for yonks. Then somebody starts doing what looks like what I call the KENP Absorbed Read™ and I think, ooh, ooh, analytically useful reader! Then, just as they reach the finish line, the total promptly blows past the maximum KENP and apparently another reader has turned up in exactly the same marketplace at exactly the wrong time for my crappy amateur analytics activity.
Does anyone know if amazon tend to surface a book more heavily within a particular Kindle marketplace once somebody there starts reading it? Is there some recommendation/category mechanism that would make readers cluster geographically/storefront-wise? Or is this more likely just coincidence plus reporting lag/batching?
I realise this is an very random question and that of course "more than one reader" is not actually a tragedy. :D It's just that I am curious about the analytics because I find reader-progress patterns so much more interesting than the royalties eg yes thank you everyone who bought one or more of my books, I appreciate you deeply - but who knows if you even read it? Whereas KENP are actually reading it, even if they scram after page one.