Every book on Amazon has a sales ranking number located near the publisher information. This rating indicates how well the book is selling. For example, if a book has a current sales rank of 15,800, that means that 15,799 books are selling more copies (and millions of titles are selling fewer copies!). The lower the sales rank, the more copies of the book are being sold.
As an author, it’s helpful to monitor sales trends for your books, especially if you have active marketing and PR campaigns. If an article comes out about you in an industry magazine or you’re a featured guest on a radio show, your book’s sales rank can show a resulting spike in sales (Or not! PR does not always lead to book sales).
Sales ranking is recalculated throughout the day, so the rank you see at 9:00 A.M. will be different from the ranking at 5:00 P.M.
While Amazon doesn’t publish information about how it tabulates book sales ranking numbers, many authors have speculated over the years about how the ranking system correlates to the number of copies sold. Following are estimated average book sales based on the ranking.
Sales Ranking vs. Number of Books Sold Per Day:
50,000 to 100k = 1 book per day
10,000 to 50,000 = 5 to 15 books per day
3,000 to 10,000 = 15 to 70 books per day
500 to 3,000 = 70 to 175 books per day
200 to 500 = 175 to 500 books per day
35 to 200 = 500 to 2,000 books per day
20 to 35 = 2,000 to 3,000 books per day
5 to 20 = 3,000 to 4,000 books per day
1 to 5 = 4,000+ books per day
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