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?
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!
Can you please tell me what 4,536,567 in books mean? Are they saying in books sold are in a books ranking. And if it saying in books sold, how can I calculate this in actual dollars? Cant seem to get any help from the publishing company, in fact this particular Company is selling my book illegally. The contract was canceled in 2010,and they are still selling my book on amazom.com, Barns and Noble etc. The name of my book is ” The Crowds” by Helen White and also “The Crowds” by Jasmine Inkwell.
Sincerely
Helen White/ Jasmine Inkwell ” The Crowds”
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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.