Amazon sales rank: What the heck does it mean?

By Randi Minetor

Are you obsessed with your Amazon sales rank?

If you’re like most authors, you may find yourself checking the book’s page daily—or several times a day—to see if the number has changed, and to speculate on what it means.

If it changes by 1 million or more in a day, is your book a runaway bestseller?

If it zigzags up and down across the 100,000 line, does that mean sales are especially brisk?

If you’re not watching this mysterious ranking on a daily basis, let me introduce you so you, too, can join the fun.

Where to find your ranking

On any book’s sales page on Amazon, there’s a block of type toward the bottom of the page with the heading, “Product details.” Under this, you’ll find a line titled Amazon Best Seller Rank, and a number.

This number tells you how the book’s sales compare with all of the books for sale on Amazon. On the day I’m writing this, there are more than 22,920,000 book titles listed for sale on the world’s largest bookseller’s site, so this figure can tell you a lot about your book’s relative popularity.

I have 49 books currently for sale on Amazon, and for the past 15 years I’ve watched their rankings rise and fall with the rapt fascination of a raccoon studying a morsel of food in a trap. I’ve had the opportunity to interpret the rank’s meaning, and I’ve researched what others have observed as well.

Amazon doesn’t reveal information about its algorithm or how it works, so what we can discern falls under the heading of “educated guess”—but marketing experts share my conclusions.

The basics

The ranking works like a golf score: The lower it is, the better your book is selling. So the #1 book at any given time is the bestselling book on Amazon at that moment. A book can become a #1 Amazon bestseller for days or weeks or minutes.

Amazon updates its rankings of the top 10,000 bestselling books in real time.

Books ranked between 10,000 and 99,999 are updated hourly, and those at 100,000 or more are updated daily. (That’s the official word, but during the busy Christmas season and occasionally at other times during the year, I have seen the rankings above 100,000 change several times a day. Extremely high volume sales throughout the Amazon site will move the needle more frequently.)

Books don’t have any ranking number at all until the first copy sells.

If your book is ranked 4,984,306, for example, don’t despair—at least one copy has sold at some point in its lifetime. So you’re off and running once the number appears.

Here’s the part that seems crazy: Sales over the life of the book are not computed as part of the ranking. For example, on the day I wrote this, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was ranked #276 in books. This is one of the top-selling books of all time, but if this fact were part of Amazon’s ranking process, the Harry Potter books might occupy the top spots for eternity.

The Amazon rankings indicate sales that are happening (or not) right now, giving any book the opportunity to strive for the #1 ranking, no matter how fleeting its presence there might be.

How sales activity affects your ranking

Here are some general rules of thumb for interpreting the number as it fluctuates over time:

1. Numbers higher than 1 million generally indicate that the book has not sold in some time.

The time since its last sale may be as short as a week or as long as its entire lifetime on Amazon. The more millions accumulate in your book’s ranking, the longer it has been since anyone bought a copy.

So, books that have sunk into the 8 million area or more may have had exactly one sale on Amazon, while those in the 2- to 3-million range have had numerous sales, but their last sale might have been months or even years ago.

2. On the day someone buys your book, it will immediately shoot up to a ranking in the 100,000 to 200,000 range.

If just one copy sells that day and none the next day, the book may slide back into the 300,000 to 500,000 area by the following day, and return to the 1 million or more ranking within four or five days. If someone else buys it, it will remain in the 100,000 range for longer—so you can surmise that you’re selling one book a day as long as your ranking stays between 100,000 and 200,000.

3. A second sale on the same day can catapult your book into five-figure numbers.

So, for example, the first sale sent you to 153,922, and the second one—later the same day—pushed your ranking to 85,635. Now the ranking will start to update hourly, so you can watch to see if it remains at this height throughout the day and into the following day. If it does, you’ve sold several more books.

Now, perhaps you’ve organized a posse to buy your new book on the same day. Maybe around 70 of your relatives, coworkers, pals, and classmates converge on Amazon and purchase your book within a 12-hour period.

What happens to your ranking? Your number gets lower and lower with the volume of sales, until you’re looking at a four-figure number (say, 6,532).

Now your ranking will update in real time. You can watch as it climbs with each new sale, perhaps rising to 3,285, and then 1,961. As long as sales continue at a rate of several an hour, the book maintains this significant ranking.

Hitting #1

How many sales does it take to hit #1?

This depends not only on your own sales, but also on how other books are selling that day.

If you’re attempting your one-day sales boost on the same day that Nora Roberts or Stephen King releases a new book, your chances of hitting #1 may be compromised.

I can say from experience that it requires hundreds or even thousands of sales on the same day to move from a four-figure ranking to a three-figure one—and to reach the single-digit rankings, you will need many more.

If it’s so difficult, how are there so many books that claim to be Amazon #1 bestsellers?

The clever folks at Amazon came up with a way to allow hundreds more books become #1 bestsellers every day by dividing the site’s millions of titles by genre and area of interest. This created niches in which books can be “category bestsellers,” like my Best Easy Day Hikes in Buffalo, NY, which became a #1 bestseller among books about Buffalo.

I was amazed recently to find that my newest book, Death in Zion National Park: Accidents and Foolhardiness in Utah’s Grand Circle, had become a #1 bestseller in the new books about Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks category. Amazon places a bright orange banner on the page of a #1 book . . .  even if, like Death in Zion, it’s actually the only book in that category.

Have you ever been obsessed with your Amazon sales rank? Tell us in a comment how often you refreshed the page!

Author Kevin Daum started with a tattoo.

I had dinner with Daum and several other writers last week while in New York City for the American Society of Journalists and Authors annual conference for writers. I was glad to have an opportunity to meet Daum in person after reviewing his book, Video Marketing for Dummies, here on the blog.

He mentioned that when he wrote an earlier book, Roar! Get Heard in the Sales and Marketing Jungle: A Business Fable, his goal was to make it a New York Times best seller. To make sure he didn’t forget — and to make sure he worked toward that goal every day — Daum tattooed “New York Times best seller” backwards on his chest.

Why backwards? So that he’d be able to read it in the mirror every morning.

Here’s my picture of it. Let it be an inspiration to anyone who wants to achieve the same goal — or any high goal, for that matter.

(Did it make the list? Nope.)

What would you do to make your book a best seller?

The authors give ResultSource money to buy thousands of books in a very short period of time from retailers that include Amazon.com. The sudden artificially-created volume can land the book on a best-seller list for a week, after which sales typically fall off because there isn’t any real, organic demand for the book.

“My book is a best-seller! Pay me more!”

But the author can say he or she was on a best-seller list. This can supposedly generate income from higher speaking and consulting fees.

Or, as ResultSource explains it on its website, “. . . having a Bestseller (sic) initiates incredible growth—exponentially increasing the demand for your thought leadership, skyrocketing your speaking itinerary and value, giving you a national (even global) spotlight, and solidifying your author brand as the foremost leader in your niche.”

But where is the proof? There’s none in the article and I can’t find it on the ResultSource website. Common sense and experience suggest that higher speaking or consulting fees are likely to be generated by big buzz in general rather than by a one-week guest appearance on a best-seller list. (Not surprisingly, the company also provides speaker marketing services.)

Would you do this?

Still, I can see the appeal, especially for those who write business books and rely on speaking and consulting income. Would I do it myself? Nope. I’d get no satisfaction from telling my mother that I spent my way to a best-seller. Should you? Would you? Only you know the answers.

I was on the receiving end of a similar, but different, campaign for Get Rich Click. The hardcover appeared in my mailbox from Barnes & Noble with a message on the packing slip asking me to talk about it among my social networks. Not long after I received it in the mail, I attended a conference where it was a free give-away in the exhibit hall.

The book was self-published (first clue: the word “copywrite” on the copyright page), so the finances were probably different from those in the WSJ article published by traditional publishers.

Can you afford it?

The cost to work with ResultSource? Tens of thousands of dollars. You pay for the books the company buys on your behalf — and hopefully you can fund that purchase with pre-orders for the book — and you pay the company a fee for its services. One of the authors interviewed for the WSJ article spent $55,000 for books and an additional fee in the range of $20,000 to $30,000.

I think there were three interesting details in the article; each one tells us something about this approach:

1. ResultSource owner Kevin Small declined to be interviewed for the article.
2. Amazon has stopped doing business with ResultSource.
3. Publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc. recommends the service to some of its business book authors. Wiley seems to be exploring more publishing options and models than its big publisher counterparts, so this didn’t surprise me. It offers a hint of some of the newer options that make the publisher appealing to successful entrepreneurs who don’t need an advance to write a book.

I’ve noted that I wouldn’t do this, but I’m wondering about you. If you could afford it, would you hire ResultsSource for a best-seller campaign? What’s your take on this approach?

*Special thanks to Susan Weiner for the article link.