Amazon Sales Rank For Books

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Graph Explains What Amazon Sales Ranks Mean

Note: This analysis is in no way sponsored or approved by Amazon.com. I have another article for Amazon sales compared to Barnes&Noble and Borders. Way back on October 14th, 2004 Amazon made the first major change to their ranking system that I'd seen in five years. The new system is actually more transparent than the old system. The new rank is preceded by a # and appears right on the sales page for any book. There are two main differences between the old system and the new system. First, the new system includes sales of both Marketplace books (used and new) and e-books. Second, the new system is based almost entirely on "what have you done for me lately." Historical sales only have a small impact on the decay rate.

The following graph is was updated in June 2006 with the red line based on a month's new data. The graph addresses books with an average Amazon sales rank between 1,000 and 1,000,000. Keep in mind that the actual sales vary with the season. For example, industry wide, twice as many books are sold in December as November as the summer months, and the relationship may well hold for Amazon as well. I've seen ranks as low as the mid-three millions for books that have sold a single copy, the line would be completely vertical by around 4,000,000. I cannot stress enough that checking the rank twice and looking at this graph means nothing. You have to get an average rank for at least a week for it to have any meaning at all. As I'd suspected, sales appear to be picking up a bit on the Long Tail, though I don't have the data to know whether or not sales are also up in those top ranks that I don't graph.

The very top ranks I do in terms of sales per day instead of per week. The following estimate is from July 17, 2007

If you like the videos, check out my publishing channel. Note that I didn't use estimated data for a sales rank of 1, I just rank it out to 10,000 a day, since it's going to be all over the place, depending on the particular date and bestseller.

Also note that Kindle sales ranks are on their own scale. Some recent work I did indicates that in the fat part of the curve, a Kindle ebook is selling around one copy for every 20 copies of a paper book of the same rank. But that's based on a sample with a Kindle rank of around 25,000, and would probably yield a very high estimate as you get into top Kindle sellers because the entire Kindle curve is shortened by two orders of magnitude. I won't be at all surprised if I'm missing something obvious in the Kindle analysis, due to the sales being split over the different media, so take it with a grain of salt or send me your own data:-) A little further research has me convinced that the example I used may have sold one Kindle copy for each 10 paper copies sold. Applying that factor to the example would lead to a Kindle ebook selling one copy for every 200 paper copies of a book with the same sales rank. Almost wish I hadn't looked into it at all, pure guesswork at this point.

The new system, while it requires the author/publisher to keep checking over a period of time to establish an average rank, doesn't appear to include any funky constants. A spike in the rank over a couple days is usually due to a special book promotion by the author or publisher. It takes a long term book marketing strategy to actual raise the sales (and average rank) over a long period of time. I estimate that checking the Amazon sales twice a week for a four weeks and dividing by eight will give you an average rank that's well within a factor of two. Checking once a day for four weeks and dividing by 28 will yield an average rank just as meaningful as if you checked every hour. For those authors don't want to visit Amazon all the time, you can use salesrankexpress.com to check all of your books at once and also see other important info. Books with an average rank in the top 5,000 will rarely be found more than a couple thousand ranks away. Books with an average rank in the 10,000 to 20,000 range sometimes drop as low as 50,000 following a day without a sale, and books with an average rank in the hundreds of thousands bounce all over the place from day to day.

Under the new system, the sales ranks of top books don't dip because some title out of left field suddenly sells three copies in an hour, that won't get them past 20,000, and they'll start sliding back towards left field the next hour. Rounding errors aside, sales ranks under the new system never rise without a sale, and they don't fall unless some other book has more sales in the past 24 hours. Under the old system, books in the top 10K were daily reset to a relaxation rank, even with no sales. The sales rank decay rate depends where a book falls in the continuum; strong sellers decay slowly, mediocre sellers decay quickly, and weak sellers decay relatively slowly. All books are now re-ranked every hour.

I used to include a table giving some equivalent sales numbers for some distinct ranks, but I dropped it with the recent update. Nobody outside of Amazon knows EXACTLY how many copies of a given title are sold in a given time period, and since ranks are relative to each other, it's a constantly moving target. The idea behind my reverse-engineering the ranking system was always to give rough idea of how a title was selling, not an exact number. So, don't read an average rank of 10,000 to mean you sold exactly 22 books that week, or a rank of 100,000 to mean you sold two and a half copies - Amazon doesn't sell half copies. Read an average rank of 1,000 to mean you have a seriously successful title, an average rank of 10,000 to mean your doing pretty good for a book that's no bestseller, an average rank of 100,000 to mean it's not going to contribute significantly to your income, and an average rank of 1,000,000 to mean you only need to check a couple times a year to computer the average rank.

Two books about selling on Amazon that everybody should take a look at. The first is Steve Weber's "The Home Based Bookstore", which describes in detail the art of selling through Amazon Marketplace. The second is Aaron Shepard's "Aiming at Amazon" a publishing business plan that focuses on Amazon sales. Finally, if you're interested in the publishing system I use to make my living, and for which I've walked away from many trade contract offers, I summed it all up in "Print-on-Demand Book Publishing", not to be confused with subsidy publishing.

Several parties have written academic papers based my earlier sales rank analysis and linking this page. I used to keep copies on this site, but I realized that they are all in the Internet Archive as far back as 2001.

Publish What You Know You Can Sell

There's no more true or succinct advice for new authors in any genre than the old adage, "Write what you know." To help those writing and publishing a book, I've taken the liberty of adding a couple of words, "Publish what you know you can sell." If the great American novel walks through the door of your cookbook publishing company, you had better think twice and three times about how you're going to promote that novel and justify the advance the great American novelist will no doubt expect. No successful business adds new products to the mix at random, just because the quality is high or the price is right. Expanding your horizons is always a good idea, both professionally and personally, but in the publishing business, you had better have a marketing plan. The main reason I wrote a publishing book was to drive home the economics of the publishing industry, and how POD is changing the picture for authors and publishers alike.

The most frequently overlooked component of a book marketing campaign is the determination of whether or not a market for that title exists. Researching the Amazon sales ranks of similar books goes a long way to clarifying the situation. It's occasionally possible to create a market for a new title where none existed before, since every new genre in publishing begins with such a breakthrough, but it doesn't happen every day. The safest marketing bet for any any veteran authors writing and publishing a book is to target their next title for the same market as their last success. Not a competing title, but a complimentary work, one that would appeal to both customers and resellers of the previous book. Even if you create a perfect book promotion, it won't help much if the potential audience is limited to your mom.

If you're writing or publishing books in groupings of closely related nonfiction subjects, it's difficult to determine when the market is saturated. A parallel between book publishing and the stock market is that nobody, not even the insiders, can predict with certainty when the bubble is going to burst. New titles can dilute the presence of the original, causing them all to disappear from the shelves or fall off the radar screen at Amazon. A typical trade publisher will follow up a bestselling title "How to Grow Tomatoes" with "How to Grow Plum Tomatoes", "How to Grow Organic Tomatoes" and "How to Grow Cherry Tomatoes." There may be a market for the books, especially if the previous series on "How to Grow Peppers" went into five editions with successful offshoot titles on "Chile Peppers", "Decorative Peppers" and "Diet Peppers." You can't blame publishers for trying, but I wouldn't bet the ranch dressing.

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