How do I figure out my Amazon sales rank?

I treat those numbers as coming from a Black Box. In fact, as I was preparing a Macintosh Dashboard widget to track rankings (using the Amazon APIs), I found that the values returned by their programming services and what shows on the Web page do not necessarily match at any given moment.

The only thing I look for is a kind of order-of-magnitude check. I'll pop up the widget (which is documented in my [plug] Dashboard book) perhaps a couple of times a day to see how five of my titles are doing relative to each other. Over time I see where titles tend to lie, giving me an indication of relative volumes AT AMAZON (not the only bookseller in the world). I gloat over every improvement ("They like me, they really like me.") and rationalize each decline ("It's the weekend."/"Everyone's on vacation."/"Charles has brought Camilla to the U.S.").

It's interesting to check the number of a slow seller. When it leaps from a sad, low six figures to a mid-five figures, I know someone bought a copy. Whoopee! A year from now, I'll have a new dollar in my pocket.

But, like Dave says, the only sales numbers that should really mean anything to an author are the ones compiled by the publisher, and from which royalties are calculated.

Hi,

You can try TicTap's sales rank history feature. We track the sales rank of a requested item daily, and even show a sales trend. It's free :)

See this for an example.

http://www.tictap.com/salesrank/0312330545

Alex

Amazon sales rank, like most ranks, are relative and cannot be translated into hard sales numbers. However, they do indicate trends. Refer to http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm for detailed analysis.

Comparing sales rank of two titles over a period of time gives a good idea of their relative sales. You can use http://charteo.us (it is free!) to look at sales rank charts.

Hi,

My novel at Amazon.com has come down from 0.2 to 2.4 million in book sales rank.Is it correct to say that total books sold were less than ten?
Kindly comment.

Hi,
My novel has gone down from 0.2 million to 2.4 million within two months.Does it mean total sale of my book is less than ten copies?
Rambler.

Barnes and Noble sales ranks...how do they figure them. i have a book on there "There's not a healthy recipe in this whole damn book, a guide to southern comfort food" it's rank today is 127,134..up from 252,592 4 days ago. what does this mean? thanks in advance, paula

The one good thing about tracking your Amazon Sales Rank is to see how your marketing efforts are working. If you are a self-published author, it's a good idea to know if a particular blog or news coverage lead to increased sales. Finding the best use of your time, as you put it, is a great idea. Sales Rank by itself isn't all that useful without two things:
- Tracking over time
- Sales Estimates based on the rank changes

As an author, I wanted all of this, and eventually turned it into a site for other authors as well, and created http://www.novelrank.com/ for just such a purpose.

What exactly is Amazon's sales rank and, from the book seller's point of view, is a book's ranking to his advantage if higher?

These sales rankings are cumbersome.
You can go from the millions to thousands with a sale of a few books.
All depends on Amazon's overall book sales for the period in question.