Amazon Book Rankings
***an unauthorized analysis of Amazon Sales Rank***
This page is a regularly updated, continual discussion of our most frequent questions about book sales and how the market works - “what in the world does my Amazon sales rank number mean?” When it comes to selling your book on Amazon, the Amazon Book Rank really does mean everything. Generating enough book sales on Amazon to garner high (or is it low…) Amazon book rankings is something authors dream of with every marketing program they develop.
Very roughly, the Amazon sales rank (or Amazon Book Ranking) can be taken as a measure of your book’s relative success to now over 30 MILLION other books at Amazon. Every book that has sold at least a single copy is assigned a rank in relation to all the other books on the site. How many books are on Amazon has a direct impact on your Amazon book rank. Currently you can be as high as number 1 or as low as 33,969,607 (as of May 20 - in paperbacks).
The Amazon sales rank is a measure of how many books YOUR book sold compared to all the other books on Amazon. Your rank is yours and yours alone - no two books can share the rank at any one time (books that have sold the same number have additional criteria applied). The period of time over which the sales are measured is variable; however, book rankings on Amazon are updated hourly. Book rankings on Amazon have to be updated this frequently because of the incredibly high volume of sales, as well as the ever-changing number of how many books are on Amazon. So if you’re looking to boost your Amazon book sales rank, or just looking into selling your book on Amazon, here’s how Dog Ear can help you:
Want to sell more books? Dog Ear can help!
Want to make more money from the books you sell?
Dog Ear can do that to!
-Click here to find out more —
Amazon applies some very complex (and apparently top secret) math to maintaining rankings for their top 5,000 books. Sales are measured hourly, daily, and monthly - and rankings are determined by even the amount of time BETWEEN sales. Books in the top 5,000 keep their Amazon book rankings very consistent - and Amazon enforces some “averaging” of sales to keep your book from jumping up to number one just because you got all your relatives in New Jersey to buy a copy at exactly noon on Tuesday (but, do it if you can…for about 30 minutes you’ll have the most incredible ranking!)
Changes in your Amazon book sales rank is a great measure of the success of your marketing efforts - hopefully a nice bump upwards in rank corresponds to a book promotion or event. Unfortunately, individual events create changes in rank that are usually temporary. However, a consistent and concerted effort will move the sales rank significantly. A general rule of thumb (first proposed by Morris Leventhal of FonerBooks) is to note your rank twice a week for four weeks, then divide by 8. This will show your “average” Amazon sales rank. Checking any more than that is really meaningless, since these ranks can change on an hourly basis. You’ll find that titles that sit within the top 5,000 do not usually fluctuate by more than 20% (and Amazon is trying to contain even this level of fluctuation). Titles in the 10-20,000 range may jump or drop by as much 50 or 60%. Titles under the 50,000 mark will swing wildly.
Amazon Sales Rank - the “numbers”
So - what does all this mean? How many books does Amazon sell? How MANY books am I selling?
Well, that’s a tough question, but here’s some very general numbers based on average Amazon sales rank books for our Dog Ear Publishing titles listed on Amazon (updated May):
Rank
Weekly Sales
1,000 90 copies
10,000 60 copies
100,000 16 copies
300,000 12 copies
500,000 1 copy
1,000,000 1 copy per month
Now, this isn’t going to hold true all year long on a unit basis - sale rates change per season - but it will hold in the RELATIONSHIP between sales ranks.
So, theoretically, sales ranks don’t change without some action having occurred - meaning your rank won’t go up without a sale, and they don’t fall unless some other book has more sales in the past 24 hours (though the numbers get pretty funky in the “under 50,000” range). Your titles rank will drop if you have no sales, but the rate at which it will drop is dependent upon how consistently strong your sales were BEFORE it stopped selling - sort of… It’s a bit of a bell curve that hits the middle ground most severely - books with long term, strong sales drop slowly, moderate sellers (under 50,000 to about 250,000) drop faster, and weak sellers (500,000 and beyond) change positions very slowly. As we said, the Amazon sales rank is calculated every hour of the day.
How can I apply this to my book?
Well, you really can only apply it in hindsight… use Amazon sales rank to check your progress as a marketer, and keep track of how many books on Amazon are competing directly with your book. Selling your book on Amazon is truly a competitive venture, and every time a book sells a unit, in any category, and your book doesn’t it moves your Amazon book ranking downward. To get a handleon your book marketing ideas that will drive Amazon book sales, think about what rankings of competitive titles mean - are you moving up or down in relation? Use your Amazon book sales rank goals to choose your next publishing objective or marketing program plan. Selling your book on Amazon could look very different the next time you list one, considering how your past books have performed in their Amazon rankings .
If you have a brilliant idea for a book - and you just know it will sell - and there is nothing like it, well, you might just be right. But, a little research never helped! True expert marketers understand that the smartest bet is to target a book to a successful market, providing a COMPLEMENTARY product to expand the ultimate size of the market.
Don’t forget that Amazon isn’t the entire universe of book selling. While Borders may be gone, Barnes & Noble is still a strong (albeit somewhat struggling organizationally) competitor.
For perspective, here’s the data on last year and what each of the largest retailers reported for sales:
Amazon - $10.71 billion ($7 billion in media sales)
Barnes&Noble - $5.3 billion
(BN was $0.433 billion of this total)
Borders Book Group - $4.06 billion
Total $20.06 billion
Not an insignificant amount of sales - now let’s get out there and sell some books!
May you have success in your creative efforts!
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