Amazon Rankings

For print books anything over 50,000 means you are selling less than a book a week or thereabouts. For ebooks I don't know.

It's like golf--the lower the number, the better. The best-selling book with the highest ranking has a ranking of 1.

Amazon does not discuss these things, lest we understand their dark calculations and game the system.

But here are some links from people who've tried to reverse engineer the equation:

http://www.rampant-books.com/mgt_amazon_sales_rank.htm

http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm


Note: These are already out of date. The number of ebooks available is already higher, and being not entirely comfortable with any math besides what I need to choose the cheapest can of chickpeas, I don't know what that would do to these charts.

If you become an author central member, which is not that difficult, you can see your real sales numbers.

You need to get your publisher to confirm that you are the real author of the book... I don't remember it being difficult (I did it a few years ago). Then you can get sales info pretty much real time.

https://www.amazon.com/?tag=absowrit-20

Hrm. I've long since joined Author Central, but no amount of clicking turns up a "what does this mean in raw numbers" feature. No info about contacting my publisher, either.

The "sales" tab has links to my rank charts, and a note saying I could pay BookScan a fee to see my print numbers (of which I have none). There's a link to KDP saying that if I self-pub, I can see the sales over at KDP. But nothing about ebook sales numbers.

I've sent a note to their "Contact Us" form, hoping for help. I loooooove data.

Oh sorry, now that I think about it this feature doesn't cover ebooks yet. I forgot about that.

You know you just made me cry, right? I hope my tears add flavor to whatever you're drinking.

Okay so:

Amazon's Author Central counts books sold in stores. It will track your Amazon sales rank but will NOT tell you how many books were sold on Amazon.

Novelrank will. Check it out.

I'm not sure I should be posting this; it's sort of like stats crack for authors.

But for another way to track /rank print sales beyond Amazon:

http://titlez.com/welcome.aspx

But seriously, don't make yourself nuts over this stuff; they're not all that accurate, and Amazon ranks are easily gamed.

Um, as far as I see Amazon tells you how many of your print books are sold on Amazon. Which is what the rank is based on. No?

Only the royalty report knows for sure.

Lmc71775 said:

I tried all these sites and don't get much info at all. Novelrank says I sold 1, which I hope is wrong. I'm pretty sure I know of 2. LOL

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Don't forget, that's only Amazon. Your publisher also has sales made off their website, I assume, along with other distributors like Barnes and Noble, Fictionwise, etc.

Amazon is only one way of getting your book out there.

Lmc71775 said:

But like someone said in this thread, I'm not gonna go batty over it. Try not to at least.

Click to expand...

Really, don't. There's the whole-return-against royalties thing, and the fact that there are lots of retail outlets that simply aren't counted.

Worrying about sales, especially wrt Amazon rankings, is one of the varieties of insanity known to affect writers.

Instead, work on the next book.

For people in the lower numbers ebooks 1,000 or less the rankings don't swing wildly.

But when in the higher rankings you can go from 750,000 to 70,000 with 1 sale. Then you slowly climb again. The more frequently you sell the slower the climb. This graph illustrates it pretty well.



A raking of about 1,000 will yield about 1,000 books a month but that is only conincidental.

A ranking of 15 - 30 will yield 1,000 to 1,500 books a DAY.

I have a blog post (Demystifying the Amazon Sales Ranking) on this (a bit dated but worth further investigation)

Novelrank is pretty inaccurate, as well. I put one of my self-published books up to see what it would show as 'sold' and compared it to the reports of ACTUAL sales I can pull up on the KDP website. Yeah. Novelrank is more than 50% off of the actual number of sales.

I wouldn't pay much attention to it either. The only thing it tracks is how often your sales rank dips. It might be a sale (or seven!) but you have no way of knowing.