Using Amazon’s Sales Rank System

By Bill Stephens - Jul 14 , 2008

Amazon’s Sales Rank (ASR) is a powerful tool for searching out competitive books for your nonfiction book proposal or for a survey to accompany a fiction manuscript submission.

Amazon has a very comprehensive search engine for finding similar books, but the ASR puts legs under your selections by allowing you to calculate actual sales by numbers of copies to show the competing book’s commercial success. Refer to my last article “What You Need to Know About the Amazon Sales Rank System to get a better understanding of the ASR.

Step One in surveying for competitive books is to spend time determining the search keywords and phrases to use in Amazons’ search engine that define your nonfiction thesis and makes it unique.

For your fiction manuscript, develop keywords and phrases based on venue, characters, plot, genre, and themes within your work to find commercially viable competing novels significantly similar to yours. Once you have your bibliography, then you can cull out unsuccessful books using the ASR.

The first thing you need to know about the ASR for books is where to find it. Bookmark this URL — 100 Bestselling Books — to get the bestsellers on Amazon. The easiest way to find a specific book’s ASR not in the top 100 is to click the Amazon Search dropdown menu and click “Books.” Bring up the book’s webpage by typing in the title and clicking the “Go” button. Searching by author will require that you click on a particular book to bring up its webpage.

Scroll down the webpage to the section entitled “Product Details.” Here is an example using James Lee Burke’s new novel, Swan Peak:

Product Details
• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416548521
• ISBN-13: 978-1416548522
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #65 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What’s this?)

#1 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Authors, A-Z > ( B ) > Burke, James Lee

#2 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#2 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Mystery > Hard-Boiled

You see that the ASR is #65 in Books. You also see rankings in various other categories, genres, subcategories, and subgenres. These illustrate the myriad of possibilities available for keyword searches when you are looking for books similar to your manuscript.

Determining what books to select as examples of successful competing titles requires not only that they are similar in some distinctive way, but also that parameters be established to define that success. Competing books need to be contemporary —– probably released within the last six or seven years. Books with higher than 100,000 ASR are not deemed very successful.

I will explain how to calculate reasonably accurate copy sales for the competitive books you selected in my next article.