Amazon Sales Ranking Explained

Theresa Ragan has written the most useful article I've read concerning what Amazon's sales ranking means: Sales Ranking Chart.

Theresa's entire article is well worth the read, but here is an excerpt:

Amazon Bestsellers Rank is the number you find beneath the Product Description. Every book on Amazon has an Amazon Bestsellers Rank. Click on any title and then scroll down until you see it.

March 2013 update: rankings have changed substantially in the past few months and I am making changes to reflect rankings and book sales as information is given to me.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 50,000 to 100,000 - selling close to 1 book a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 10,000 to 50,000 - selling 3 to 15 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 5,500 to 10,000 - selling 15 to 30 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 3,000 to 5,500 - selling 30 to 50 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 500 to 3,000 - selling 50 to 200 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 350 to 500 - selling 200 to 300 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 100 to 350 - selling 300 to 500 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 35 to 100 - selling 500 to 1,000 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank 10 to 35 - selling 1,000 to 2,000 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank of 5 to 10 - selling 2,000 to 4,000 books a day.

Amazon Best Seller Rank of 1 to 5 - selling 4,000+ books a day.

Once again, Theresa Ragan's article is: Sales Ranking Chart.

I came across Theresa's blog  because I've started reading The Naked Truth About Self-Publishing, a book she contributed to. So far it's been informative.

Photo credit: "verfremdeter lavendel" by fRandi-Shooters under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Amazon Rank: How Related Is It To Author Earnings?

I've always wondered this. Let's say your book has an Amazon Sales Rank of 50,000, and lets say it stays there for a month. What does this mean in terms of how much money an author could expect their book to make?

Is there a correlation between sales and Amazon Rank?

Passive Guy brought up this topic today in one of his rare posts. He posed three questions:

Question #1: Is this [Amazon Best Sellers Rank] a fair way of evaluating how well an ebook-only or mostly-ebook publisher performs for authors?

Question #2: While we’re discussing Amazon Best Sellers Rank, has anyone seen any credible discussions concerning how sales rank translates into dollars for indie authors? If you’re at 20,000 with a $2.99 ebook, are you making $500 per month from that book? Or is Amazon’s algorithm too volatile to make it a useful gauge of the dollars coming in the door?

Question #3: Everybody knows that lots of ebooks have experienced sales spikes immediately after Christmas as new ereaders and tablets are packed with ebooks. What about other sales patterns? For example, do sales go up on the weekend when many people have more leisure time to read?

PG hasn’t seen any analyses of sales rank that address these kinds of questions.

He doesn’t want to trigger obsessive-compulsive behavior centered on your KDP dashboard, but would be interested in whatever tribal knowledge his readers might have about sales rank.

The rest of PG's article is here: Amazon Sales Rank vs. Author Earnings.

Cheers.