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!