amazon book ranking
October 10, 2022 12:04 PM   Subscribe

In advance: I know this is a meaningless statistic in all meaningful domains of meaning and I attach no meaning to it. But nonetheless I wonder what it means. How do amazon best seller rankings work and what do they really signify in terms of book sales?

The book rankings change SO MUCH based on small purchases that I am curious.
There is a specific book I track a bit. Yesterday its place was over a million in best sellers, that is, over a million books outranked it. Today it is ranked below 100,00, (so less than 100,00 books are above it).
How many copies of this book actually sold between yesterday and today to produce such a jump in its ranking?
posted by ojocaliente to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
How many copies of this book actually sold between yesterday and today to produce such a jump in its ranking?

One copy? Two? I'm not kidding.

There's no way to give you an actual answer without knowing the book and the categories in which the ranking has jumped. But this is the "long tail" in action. When most books on Amazon sell zero copies per day, it's easy to climb the list with a purchase or two. It's in the top 100 to 1000 books where all the action is.
posted by jdroth at 12:35 PM on October 10, 2022


Best answer: Agreed that the jump, in that range, is in single digits. Maybe one.

I have found this chart to generally track with my experience of having four cookbooks for sale and paying (too much) attention to how they sell.
posted by fruitslinger at 12:45 PM on October 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm an author and as far as I can tell, a ranking less than 5,000 means you're doing well, less than 500 means you're a New York Times best seller, and greater than 50,000 means you sell an average of 0 or 1 books a day.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:45 PM on October 10, 2022


Yeah, it’s probably one, because Amazon dices up categories quite finely. For instance, there’s one book I bought that’s categorized as “Midwest US Travel Guides”. How many books do you think there are in that category? Maybe a few hundred? And even the ones at the top of the category probably aren’t selling hundreds of copies a day. The Midwest isn’t a tourist paradise, and part of the reason why is because it doesn’t change much over time. If you’re the type who would buy a Midwest travel guide in the first place, and you bought one twenty years ago, you probably don’t need to buy another. So a single sale might vault you to the top of the category. Other categories, like “Cookbooks”, are obviously different - there are a ton, and a lot of them sell.

If it’s one of the more popular categories, you might check to see whether the author made an appearance in the media. Being a guest on “Fresh Air” or (sadly) “Tucker Carlson” will lead to a big bump in sales.
posted by kevinbelt at 3:22 PM on October 10, 2022


@AlSweigart -- I don't think that an Amazon rank of less than 500 necessarily means you're a NYT bestseller. My book made it to something like #89 for a day, and it wasn't anywhere close to a bestseller. It's sold somewhere between 12,000 and 22,000 physical copies in ten years, plus who knows how many digital copies. But the week it was released, Kevin Kelly endorsed it which gave me a day or so of brisk sales. But nowhere near the bestseller charts.
posted by jdroth at 4:13 PM on October 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


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