Industry guru Dave Taylor answers free tech support questions about a wide variety of business and technical topics, including blogging, Google AdSense, MySpace, Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Mp3 players, management, Linux, SEO, Mac OS X, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Microsoft Windows.

Still befuddled? Get immediate live tech support with SupportSpace!

How do I figure out my Amazon sales rank?

I'm the author of book "Nuestro dios, el hombre" (See Amazon) and I can't figure out my sales rank. Do you want to help me?

Dave's Answer:

As an author, I have to say that there's not much more puzzling than trying to figure out Amazon sales rank figures. On more than one of teh author mailing lists I'm on, this subject comes up at least twice yearly and results in a flurry of theories and very little actual hard data. Making this more complex, Amazon just recently changed how they calculate sales rank, so you don't have the ability to see the "long tail" sales with ranking over a long period of time.

With your particular book, Nuestro Dios, El Hombre, it appears that the basic problem is that while it has one five-star review, no-one's ever bought a copy through Amazon. As a result, your sales rank is "none":

This is rather interesting as I haven't seen it before, to be honest. My book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, by comparison, has the following product details:

You can see that my sales rank is in the ten-thousands, not too bad considering the millions of books in Amazon's catalog, but notice that sales rank varies based on what kind of "calculation window" they use: today's value is 20,547, while yesterdays rank was 51,024. Not bad. But perhaps this is the difference between one sale and two sales, there's no way to know.

Which leads to something that I've realized: worrying about your Amazon sales rank is pointless because we have no way of knowing the basis of their calculation. It's like being obsessed with your Google search engine placement results (SERP): since we don't know the actual formula that Google uses, the best way to get a good placement is to turn your back on the formula entirely and simply produce the best possible content.

Similarly, use the actual sales figures from your publisher as the only accurate gauge of your actual book sales, and put your effort into promoting your book online and offline, as appropriate, rather than worrying about Amazon sales figures. In the long run, it'll be a much better - and hopefully more profitable - use of your time.

I hope this helps clarify what's going on with your book at Amazon. Good luck to you!

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Simpy.

Categorized: The Writing Business (Article 4263)
Tagged:
Previous: How do I get started making money with Google AdSense?
Next: Shell script to scrape /etc/passwd data?

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

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.

Posted by: Danny Goodman at November 7, 2005 6:39 PM

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

Posted by: Alex Choo at November 13, 2005 4:50 PM

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.

Posted by: Pansy at January 19, 2007 7:31 PM

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.

Posted by: M.R.Rambler at October 3, 2007 5:53 AM

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.

Posted by: Rambler at October 3, 2007 7:05 AM

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

Posted by: paula thomas oandasan at March 30, 2008 9:59 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!