Comments on: What You Need to Know about Amazon’s Sales Rank System

By: Bill Stephens

Bill Stephens — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:22:43 +0000

Sorry I left out the word “not” from “Cannot be computed” in the previous comment.

By: Bill Stephens

Bill Stephens — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:21:22 +0000

Aron, Thanks for the comment. apparently I was sorking of old information, and i will make a correction in the next column.

You are correct when you say an accurate book sales can be computed using the Amazon Sales Rank, but the system I will talk about in a future article always errs on the low side when compared to actual Nielson Scan Data. So this can be factored in to any decisions made from the data.

By: Aaron Shepard

Aaron Shepard — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:03:44 +0000

Bill, ALL sales ranks change every hour, and they do that all at the same moment. The info here describes a tiered system that was replaced years ago. You'll often find this outdated info on the Web, but I'm sure you'll no longer find it on Morris Rosenthal's site.

Anyone interested in Amazon Sales Ranks should visit Sales Rank Express, both for monitoring multiple sales ranks (on Amazon sites in six countries) and for the FAQ, which explains additional facets of sales rank and many other Amazon features. That's at http://www.salesrankexpress.com.

By the way, it is impossible to accurately calculate sales from sales ranks because the figure depends on total sales volume at Amazon, which changes continually. You can only get a ballpark figure.

Aaron

By: Bill Stephens

Bill Stephens — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:55:54 +0000

Anne, Thanks for the comment The next two Mondays will have ASR articles also that you should find useful.

By: Anne Wayman

Anne Wayman — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:24:07 +0000

Bill, this is helpful… truly helpful and I'm thinking including sales ranks of competing books in non-fiction could really be useful too… maybe quoting you about what 1,000 etc. means.

By: Bill Stephens

Bill Stephens — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:43:18 +0000

Timothy, thanks for the comment. The two references I gave, Rampant TechPress and Morris Rosenthal's Fonor Books, are the source of my information regarding the frequency with which book sales are ranked on Amazon.

By: Timothy Fish

Timothy Fish — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:35:27 +0000

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?I... for an explanation of how this works.