Amazon Ranking Explained

Do you have a published book on Amazon? Or are you a curious reader wondering if that rank can give you some useful information about the book you’re about to buy? Well, here is the skinny: the Amazon sales rank measures how many copies your book sold compared with all the other books on Amazon.com. The rank shows how many books on Amazon are selling more copies than yours; therefore, the smaller the Amazon sales rank, the better the sales. The rank does not tell you how many copies of the book Amazon has sold. It’s a relative ranking, one that compares your book’s sales to other books.

For instance, if your book is ranked 100,000 then that many titles on Amazon have sold more copies than your book. Keep in mind that Amazon carries around 6,000,000 titles; so, your book has sold more copies than 5,900,000 other titles. That’s pretty cool. 

Remember that the ranking provides a relative figure, not an absolute figure. It compares your sales to others on a scale of from 1 to their highest number (around 6,000,000).

Of course, you will likely not see a rank of 6,000,000 because books that haven’t sold any copies are not ranked and there are apparently many sitting on the shelves of Amazon’s virtual bookstore that have yet to sell. This is why when a book first sells, its rank may leap significantly, ahead of those books that haven’t sold yet.

So, why does your rank fluctuate so much and what does it mean? One minute it’s 1,000,000 and the next it’s 500,000. When it jumps up, it simply means that you’ve sold more books over that time period than the titles you were behind. It could mean that you sold 2 and they sold none or you sold 25 and they sold 6. The corollary is true of the reverse.

Dog Ear Publishing recommends that the best use of Amazon sales rank is to check the progress of your marketing efforts over time: how your book is doing in relation to its competitors.

Amazon Sales Rank Calculations

Morris Resenthal at Foner Books described to the best of his knowledge how Amazon sales rank is calculated:

Amazon’s sales rank is calculated as a rolling figure. It’s based on sales over a recent period. I can’t remember if the period is 60 or 90 days, though. It is, however, weighted by overall total sales (they put this back in after having dropped it for a couple of years), keeping long-term big sellers afloat even after their sharp sales peaks have leveled out.

Not all books are recalculated with the same frequency. The top 1,000 are recalculated hourly. The next block (up to 100,000, I think) are recalculated weekly, while the rest get checked monthly. However, a sudden burst in sales is enough to force an immediate recalculation on a 100,000+ book. This is probably based on a percentage of overall sales, but that’s just a guess.

Amazon Rankings Translated into Estimated Sales

Because the Amazon sales rank is comparative, it does not directly translate into actual book sales. Having said that, the general character of sales can and have been approximated by several publishers and marketers. Some have tried to correlate the rank into actual sales, based on an actual sale to rank comparison over a set time period. As you might have guessed, the estimates vary and therefore do not hold much significance.  However, I know you are curious, so here they are:

Wildfire Marketing published these results in 2008:

Ranking = Estimated Sales per week

• 10,000 = 30 books
• 100,000 = 6 books
• 1,000,000 = less than 1 book

Dog Ear Publishing published these weekly estimates around the same time:

Ranking = Estimated Sales per week

• 1,000 = 90 books
• 10,000 =  60 books
• 100,000 = 16 books
• 300,000 = 12 books
• 500,000 = 1 book
• 1,000,000 = 1 book per month

The Amazon sales rank is good to watch because it helps you to see the progress of your book in relation to others, based on your marketing efforts and other events that may affect sales of your book. I know many authors who daily check and fret over the rank of their book. I used to. Wheatmark suggests that you treat it like weight loss: average out your observations over several days, smoothing out both peaks and valleys to get a more realistic picture.

And focus on the super fact that you are selling your book despite the competition of six million other books on Amazon.