Amazon Book sales question

[greenleaves]

If a book has been consistently under 2000 in the Amazon Best Sellers Rank in Books, how many monthly book sales would that translate to?

I'm not talking about ebooks.

 

[csnreyes]

treefiddy

 

[stefanie]

That's a tough question, given that I've never seen anyone who tracks it and releases that information. Big publishers aren't really in a hurry to give out precise figures that correspond to rankings, and self-publishers (who share data pretty frequently) often have lower rankings and/or a lack of an actual paper version of their book.

One thing we do know, though, is that Amazon has been reporting Kindle sales as higher than real book sales since ~2012. If you plug in the sales rank information at KDP Calculator, you'll get an estimate of ebook sales at that rank - which would most likely be higher than the equivalent rank for actual books. Still, there's no way to be SURE of that since the distribution of ebook sales vs. paper book sales could be very different. It could be that the top 5000 books see far more sales than the top 5000 ebooks, but ebooks make up more volume in the long tail, since there are so many more things available in ebook format due to self publishers.

That's not a very good answer, but there's surprisingly little data on paper books and sales as they correspond to different rankings. If somebody actually has recent data on the topic, it would be interesting for sure.

 

[greenleaves]

treefiddy

I thought it was $85/facebook status update. Now that's balling.

That's a tough question, given that I've never seen anyone who tracks it and releases that information. Big publishers aren't really in a hurry to give out precise figures that correspond to rankings, and self-publishers (who share data pretty frequently) often have lower rankings and/or a lack of an actual paper version of their book.

One thing we do know, though, is that Amazon has been reporting Kindle sales as higher than real book sales since ~2012. If you plug in the sales rank information at KDP Calculator, you'll get an estimate of ebook sales at that rank - which would most likely be higher than the equivalent rank for actual books. Still, there's no way to be SURE of that since the distribution of ebook sales vs. paper book sales could be very different. It could be that the top 5000 books see far more sales than the top 5000 ebooks, but ebooks make up more volume in the long tail, since there are so many more things available in ebook format due to self publishers.

That's not a very good answer, but there's surprisingly little data on paper books and sales as they correspond to different rankings. If somebody actually has recent data on the topic, it would be interesting for sure.

Thanks, great answer and +1 for the link. I'm looking at several books in a niche, they all have sub 2000 ranking in overall books, I think that includes both ebook, paperback and hardcover. I didn't communicate the non-ebook part well. I just meant to differentiate this from the micro-self published ebook only books. I mean, if something is ebook only in a time of print on demand it shows, from my perspective, a general lack of business acumen and therefore not something I'm counting.

Thanks for the link. Even if it is only 1/5 of that, it would make for a decent publish, especially since the money from most well marketed books in this niche comes more from other related sales than from the book itself.