Tag Archives: sales rank

Author Central and NovelRank Sales Rank Tracking Comparison

On December 10th, Amazon announced a new set of features available for free through Author Central: BookScan sales and historical sales rank data. Naturally, since at first glance these seem to be a similar feature set to what NovelRank offers, I took a look (along with thousands of other authors). After careful analysis, I decided to write this post and help inform current and future NovelRank users about the key differences and benefits. I’ve always said, if there is a 10,000 lb elephant in the room, put the spotlight on it.

First, a few quick links. If you want to read some FAQs about Author Central Sales Info, login to your Author Central Account, or learn more about BookScan, then take a look and then come back here. Otherwise, let me refresh your mind on a few key points.

BookScan data represents Nielsen tracking of 75% of book sales through retail and online providers, as identified through the Amazon provided graphic to the right. Strangely, Amazon is not supplying their actual sales data to their suppliers (i.e. authors), but rather a 3rd party’s data. Granted, it offers a broader scope, but Amazon still is not providing actual data (like it does with Kindle sales for self-publishers through the digital text platform). BookScan data does not track Kindle sales, and thus authors cannot get this data through Author Central.

The sales rank tracking provided is a daily history of sales rank, collected at 11am PST (7am GMT). It goes back as far as October of 2009 or when you joined Author Central, if that date is after October of 2009. This matches NovelRank’s oldest tracking, as it launched in Oct 2009 as well. However, within 24 hours, Sales Rank can fluctuate dramatically providing valuable hourly sales data analysis.

None-the-less, I think there is some great information here, but I’m still happy to have NovelRank. Below is a breakdown of the strengths of each of these services.

Author Central Strengths

  • BookScan data includes retail sailes
  • Geographical data offers touring authors useful data
  • Sales Rank history is available without prior request (as long as you had an Author Central account)
  • 100% reliable sales rank collection from the source

Author Central Weaknesses

  • No sales data for Kindle ebooks
  • Sales data only available for the most recent 4 weeks
  • Only available for Amazon.com (no international support yet)
  • Limited to your own books (no competitor or research tracking)
  • Sales Rank recorded only once per day
  • Data updated weekly (not real-time)

NovelRank Strengths

  • Hourly Sales Rank tracking
  • Support for Amazon UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Japan
  • Ability to track books by others; for competitor or book development research
  • Support for Kindle books on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
  • Historical sales estimates available beyond recent weeks
  • Downloadable sales and Sales Rank history (CSV)
  • RSS feeds, widgets, and other integrations

NovelRank Weaknesses

  • Sales estimates are not 100% accurate
  • Sales estimates are based on only Amazon sales
  • No geographical sales data
  • Sales Rank data only available from when tracking was initiated

I’m excited for the benefits to authors that Amazon is providing, but I’m still thrilled to be offering this free service, NovelRank, to authors and publishers across the world with more specific needs. If you continue to enjoy this service, remember to consider a donation to support it.

Amazon Sales Rank of 7600 books!

Girl Reading Antique Book In less than 9 months, NovelRank has grown to track the Amazon sales rank of over 7600 books! This is only counting Amazon.com, as the Amazon.de and Amazon.co.uk sales rank numbers have steadily grown for region specific publications, German and British, respectively. I’ve compared these numbers with the statistics of a few other tracking sites and this is 4x’s the number of books than other free sites and more books being tracked than free and paid sites with 5 years of history!

I’m flattered and thrilled that NovelRank is tracking the Amazon sales rank of so many books across the world, and hope new features and continued improvements will add even more books to the list! Thanks for your continued patronage of NovelRank and sharing it with your readers and fellow authors. Without your help, others would not find and enjoy the benefits of tracking their sales rank!

Update: July 4, 2010
While developing new features, I got a count of all the unique books actively tracked on NovelRank across all Amazon domains (.de, .co.uk, etc.) and it is 8997 books!

Book Sales Rankings

Pursuit of Honor book cover
I was recently asked what amount of book sales lead to rankings averaging 100, 1000, etc. Put another way, how many books would an author have to sell in a given month to have an average ranking for the month of 1000? So, I dug back into the book sales estimates and came up with 3 examples.

This is based on data on Amazon.com only. For Amazon.co.uk, you can roughly estimate that it takes only 80% of the number of sales on Amazon.com to equate to the same average ranking. For Canada, Germany, Japan, and France, it is approximately 65%, though there is not enough data in NovelRank to depend on that percentage.

Sales Rank Average: 1000 (paperback, hardcover, etc)

Example book: Pursuit of Honor by Vince Flynn
About 250 copies were sold to maintain a sales rank around 1000. That makes it 8 books per day, with a sale occurring every 3 hours, or maybe 2 books selling every 6 hours! Either way, this is a very healthy sales rank.

Sales Rank Average: 100 (paperback, hardcover, etc)

Example book: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and Alison Anderson
Almost 2000 copies were sold in May to garner an average sales rank of 106. That is a selling rate of at least 3 books per hour! What is likely is that this number may actually be notably higher, as sales rank changes are less defined or varied at this level, however it is hard to verify.

Sales Rank Average: 2000 (Kindle Edition books)

Example book: In the Mood by Ellen Fisher
Selling approximately 500 kindle books a month will lead to an average sales rank around 2000 for your book. To do this, you need to sell about 16 books a day or 1 book every 90 minutes.

Note: This Kindle sales estimate is based upon real sales data from Amazon DTP provided to me from the author. NovelRank is currently underestimating for Kindle Edition books with a Sales Rank below 4000.

Hopefully this is enlightening for you. Remember, the strength of NovelRank is not in raw numbers; You will get those from your publisher eventually, but rather in understanding the fluctuations so you can attribute your best marketing efforts to the strongest sales bumps in near real-time.

Disclaimer: NovelRank book sales estimates are based on fluctuations of sales rank and thus there are many factors (another blog post coming soon) that can cause for more sales to occur than is estimated by NovelRank. These numbers are estimates.

Book Sales Rank – Understanding the Basics

The day has finally arrived and your book has a sales rank on Amazon. Great! Now what? Sure, maybe you start by tracking the book across Amazon, but what does it all mean? What if your book is on Amazon.com but doesn’t have a sales rank? Here are some basic concepts to help you understand more about what a book’s sales rank really means.

Your book is on Amazon but does not have a sales rank listed.

Amazon has decided that your book may generate sales eventually on that particular domain and has permission from the publisher to sell the book globally. However, if the sales rank is not present, it means that nobody has ever purchased a copy of that book. Someone may in the future, but right now your book’s sales rank is not listed.

My book’s sales rank is really high on Amazon.com! In the millions!

polynesian-chartCongratulations, someone bought your book, once, a long time ago. For instance, this pre-order only for dummies book has a sales rank of 4+ million! In the last 2 months, it’s lost 300,000 ranks. If your sales rank was 1,000,000 it would lose more ranking a bit faster, but it’s been a while. Now let’s look at one with a bit more history, “Polynesian Interconnections“. In the last 6 months, it has lost 4.4 million positions in sales rank.
It loses ~1 million rankings over 15 days until it starts to level off and slowdown around 3.5 million. Thus, if you haven’t sold a book in a month, it’s likely you will be in the millions for your book’s sales rank.

Let’s pretend you sold one book a day, every day…

production-assistance-oct-chartYour sales rank would stay pretty darn steady! You would have a sales rank between 50,000 and 150,000 most likely and it would constantly be going up and down. Here is a book that sold 24 copies in October of 2009, “The Production’s Assistants Pocket Handbook“. While it wasn’t 1 copy an hour, you can see the pattern. The takeaway is that in 24 hours, your sales rank will climb back to its pre-book sale sales rank.

Your book has a sales rank of 400 and it holds steady at 400.

You sold 2 books each hour approximately, congrats (I hate you, in a jealous way)! When you are in the top 200, 300, 400, etc. your book’s sales rank should drop about 14% if you didn’t sell a book. If you sell 1 book, it drops 7%. If you held steady, you sold 2 books! Seeing a pattern? This gets much more complicated the better the sales rank (lower number), and less complicated when you are above a sales rank of 1000.

I sold 1 book every hour…

On some estimates, you would be averaging a sales rank of 100. This is according to Nimble Book’s Power Law formula. That data is based on 2006 data. You may also have a sales rank around 300, just like “The Game” by Neil Strauss. It’s tricky, and personally, I’m still tweaking the formulas as more data is being collected.

Your book is in the top 50.

I don’t even want to talk about it. You’re doing fantastic, go out to dinner at a nice restaurant… oh, and donate to help support NovelRank (It’s in the bottom right, below ‘Stay Informed’)!

What about the other domains, like Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de?

Amazon.co.uk is a pretty popular site (so is Amazon.ca), but they have less inventory, so everything is scaled down. Amazon Germany, France, and Japan are even lower in inventory, so it scales down even further.

Final Thoughts on Book Sales Rank

  • Staying below 7 digits of sales rank is a good idea
  • A book a day keeps the 200,000’s away
  • Sales Rank overall is lower in all other domains besides Amazon.com
  • It’s even lower and less variable in Germany, France, and Japan
  • NovelRank is awesome

Look for some more research in the future!