What You Need to Know about Amazon’s Sales Rank System
By Bill Stephens - Jul 07 , 2008
The Amazon Sales Rank (ASR) is a powerful tool. It determines the commercial viability of any book you might wish to use in the “Competition” segment of your nonfiction book proposal or for a competitive survey to accompany a fiction manuscript submission. Not only can it indicate how a book ranks in sales to other books, but it can be used to approximate actual copies sold. [Most of the information in this article concerning the ASR was researched using Rampant TechPress and Foner Books.
What Is Amazon Sales Rank?
Amazon’s Sales Rank establishes a book’s relative number of copies sold to all the other books sold by Amazon. The ASR is a unique number that is constantly recalculated. For example if a book has an ASR of 100,000, then 99,999 other books sold more copies and approximately 4,900,000 books sold fewer copies at that particular time. The ASR is calculated as a rolling figure, and is based on sales over the last 90 days. It is, however, weighted by sales over the last five years to compensate for long-term big sellers after their sharp sales peaks have leveled out.
Rankings can spike due to large corporate purchases or heavy marketing promotions and are accurate only for the exact time they are calculated. ASR’s from 1 – 10,000 are recalculated hourly. ASR’s from 10,001 to 110,000 are recalculated daily. ASR’s above 110,001 are re calculated monthly. To get a more accurate ASR requires that the ranking be averaged over at least a six to eight week period with two to three ASR’s taken per week.
Does ASR Cover all the Sales of an Author’s Title?
The ASR is based on a single ISBN (edition), not the book title. Therefore, the ASR for a title released as a mass-market paperback ISBN does not reflect the sales of that title as a hardcover edition, trade paperback edition, or special edition. Getting the ASR of all editions for a book title is difficult because out of print editions are not reported.
Does ASR Reflect Total Retail Sales?
The ASR refers only to sales by Amazon. In a later article I will show how to calculate total retail sales from the ASR.
What Is a Good ASR for a Book?
Obviously, the lower the ASR the better, but here are some parameters explained by Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books:
“An average rank of 1,000 (or lower) means you have a seriously successful title; an average rank of 10,000 means you’re doing pretty good for a book that’s no bestseller; an average rank over 100,000 means it’s (your book is) not going to contribute significantly to your income.”
In a recent article of mine here in Beneath the Cover, Research and Sell, I explained the benefits of breaking from tradition and including a competitive book survey along with your fiction manuscript submission showing the commercial viability of similar novels.
In subsequent articles I will explain how to compute the number of copies these competing books sold.
Timothy Fish
Posted on July 8th, 2008
Bill, Amazon updates their sales rank on an hourly basis for all books. While it may appear that books with high numbers are not being updated, this is a product of how this type of ranking works. A book will not change ranking unless the book sells or a book with a higher number moves to a lower number than the book. See http://www.timothyfish.net/Articles/Article.asp?ID=46 for an explanation of how this works.