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Title Z www.titlez.com: Amazon Sales Rank Article

Since its beginning, Amazon.com has displayed a “sales rank” number with every book it stocks on its website. This number is like the numbers used on a booksellers top 10 list–the best-selling book is ranked #1, the next best-selling title is #2, and the tenth best-selling tome is #10. But at Amazon, they rank every single book in their inventory–all the way up to around 2.5 million! And they update their sales ranks constantly–the top selling books are typically re-ranked every hour.
So, what’s a good sales rank?

There is, of course, no hard and fast rule about what constitutes a best-seller, whether you are looking at sales ranks or actual sales volume. However, I’ll throw caution to the wind for a moment and offer a few generalizations. First, it’s important to look at a book’s average sales rank over time–a book that spikes to, say, number 25 on Amazon for an hour or two may be selling well for that brief period (perhaps because the author just appeared on a morning talk show or got a favorable review in a regional newspaper), but you’ll want to see how that book performs over days or weeks to fairly judge its success. Plenty of books break into Amazon’s top 1000 or even top 100 for a few hours but are not able to sustain the high ranking over time.

Bearing the above very much in mind, here’s a temperature gauge you can use to get an idea about a particular title’s success. The following numbers apply to average sales ranks over time:

• Less than 100: Best-seller. Author, publisher, agent are all getting rich
• 101-1000: Extremely good performer. Any publisher/author would be thrilled.
• 1001-10,000: Very successful book. A few of these can sustain a small publishing company.
• 10,001-50,000: A successful book by most industry standards.
• 50,001-100,000: Not bad.
• 100,000 - 500,000: Not good.
• 500,000 or more: Poor.

Keep in mind that books with average ranks above 100,000 may have performed much better before we started tracking them on TitleZ. However, books that launch with ranks above 100,000 are probably not considered successful from a publishing industry point of view. Of course, the book could be selling well through non-bookstore channels such as trade shows, speaking events, etc. In general, though, we’ve found that Amazon sales ranks provides a good indicator for how a title is doing throughout the book market as a whole.

I also found an interesting article doing a google search. The link is: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/11/the_long_fail_of_books.html And this is probably the best site I’ve found so far. http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Dec2007StatsRelease.htm

I also found this article in the NY Times, it’s old, but interesting. “Susan Arnold, public relations coordinator at the 1,100-store Waldenbooks chain, said Mr. Gorbachev’s book, ‘’is selling well in 85 percent of our stores, not just the big cities or in any one area.'’ At B. Dalton, the other major chain, ‘’Perestroika'’ started off with sales of 913 the first week. But last week, sales climbed to 1,422, and this week - the week after Mr. Gorbachev’s visit to Washington - they may be close to 4,000, Matthew Goldberg, the assistant to the merchandise manager, said. While sales of the Gorbachev book are gathering steam, ‘’Trump: The Art of the Deal,'’ an implicit celebration of the capitalist system by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz, is doing even better. It is No. 6 on the best-seller list in The Times tomorrow and also appears to be a beneficiary of holiday gift giving.

‘’It’s our No. 1 best seller by far,'’ Doubleday’s Mr. Gross said. And in the Dalton chain, according to Mr. Goldberg, ‘’It’s begining to sell the way the Iacocca book did.'’ During its first week, for example, ‘’Trump'’ sold about 1,700 copies; sales rose to 4,050 last week, and it sold almost 2,500 copies the first three days of this week.â€�

So if anyone has other resources, please share. Thanks.