Amazon.com & BN.com Rankings = $$? - Writers Forum

Orion7 · 12-31-2005, 10:17 PM

I was reviewing the list of Amazon.com best sellers...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...951818-6767060

This is roughly the end of the list... Currently there are 4,155,515 books.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...951818-6767060

And I was wondering, how many copies sold do you think correlates to a best seller versus the middle and the end of the ranking.

I would think being anywhere in the top 500,000 ranking would be very good.

This is my guess...

rankings
1-500 = about a million sold
500-1k = about half a million sold
1k -10k = about 300,000 sold
10k - 100k = about 100,000 sold
100k - 500k = about 50,000 sold
500k - 1m = about 20,000 sold
1m - 2m = about 10,000 sold
2m - 3m = about 5,000 sold
3m - 4m = about 1,000 sold
4m - 5m+ = less than 500 sold

I was just curious how the ranking probably correlated to sales. Am I about right, or way off? Any guesses?

dcrenshaw · 12-31-2005, 11:14 PM

That sounds a bit high. Take a look at this website: http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm

"a book with an average rank of 1,000 was selling around 90 copies a week on Amazon in November, while a book with an average rank of 500,000 was selling approximately 1 copy per week."

Orion7 · 01-01-2006, 02:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dcrenshaw

That sounds a bit high. Take a look at this website: http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm

"a book with an average rank of 1,000 was selling around 90 copies a week on Amazon in November, while a book with an average rank of 500,000 was selling approximately 1 copy per week."

Wow, that seems really bad for writers then. If being ranked #1,000 out of around 4,000,000+ on Amazon means you are only selling around 4,700 books a year, that's very discouraging.

Mike C · 01-01-2006, 07:23 AM

Best to ignore the rankings. I've known a couple of authors drive themselves crazy seeing their ranking veer wildly (buy a couple of thousand places) up and down in short periods of time.