How can I find out how many copies of a book has sold?

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cunparis

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Is it possible? I'm researching competing titles and I'd like to determine which ones are the best sellers. So far the only thing I have is the amazon sales rank but I'm not sure that's really accurate.

Any other ways to find out which competing titles are the best sellers?

-Michael
 
Claudia Gray

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This is pretty difficult, actually. There are BookScan numbers, but even they do not reflect the full range of sales and can be extremely misleading. Each publishing house determines this for their own titles (and they ways in which they determine profit are specific to each publishing house), but I'm sure they only share for purposes of PR on the biggest titles.

Can you talk more about your research specifically? Finding several successful books in a specifc genre might be more useful to you than determine which outsold which.
 

Bo Sullivan

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cunparis said:
Is it possible? I'm researching competing titles and I'd like to determine which ones are the best sellers. So far the only thing I have is the amazon sales rank but I'm not sure that's really accurate.

Any other ways to find out which competing titles are the best sellers?

-Michael
Click to expand...

You could try Titlez.com - (which is free) and it is designed so that you can do research into book titles/favourite authors. Although it will tell you what the sales rank for each book is once you start tracking it, it will not tell you how many have sold. However, after a book has been tracked for a while it shows up in a graph, which gives some indication.

I use titlez every day to keep track of my books for sale on Amazon and my Amazon Shorts. It saves looking up all the titles all the time.

I hope this helps.

Barbara
 

cunparis

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ClaudiaGray said:
Can you talk more about your research specifically? Finding several successful books in a specifc genre might be more useful to you than determine which outsold which.
Click to expand...

My research is pretty much based on Amazon.com. I live in Paris and there are only a few English bookstores and they are all small with limited selection.

I have read several books on my topic (France) and so I have them as a starting point. I then look on Amazon which shows me similar books and I kept following them. There are a few that I've read myself so I know they're good, but the thing is I have no idea if they are selling.

I'm worried that for example I compare my book to 3 others and in fact those three others haven't sold many copies so the publisher will think there is no market. Or maybe one of the books I didn't choose is outselling the one I did, etc.

I'm new at this so let me know if you have any suggestions. So far the Amazon sales rank is my only clue. And sometimes it's 10,000 and others it's 100,000. But that doesn't tell me that much really.. it doesn't mean one sold 10x more than the other..

-Michael
 
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