Does anyone know how Amazon.com book sales rankings work?

Asked by occ (4179

) May 12th, 2008

I asked this question a while back but it never got any responses…I’m hoping new members have joined the Fluther community who might know the answer this time. If a book is, say, # 10,000 in Amazon sales rankings, is there any way to know how many copies it is selling? Is there that much of a difference between # 10,000 and # 100,000? My guess would be that the top 1000 books are the ones that are really selling a lot, and the others probably are selling between 1–100 copies a week. What is considered a respectable number of copies for a book to sell, anyway? Does anyone have more concrete information?

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2 Answers

I think this website is precisely what you’re looking for. It contains some graphs, which appear to be estimates of sales numbers given an approximate rank.

The author does warn: 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.

I hope this, at least, provides some basic information on the topic.

giovani (62

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