Checking Your Amazon Rank
It’s a sad fact of modern life, but most people, once published, spend an inordinate amount of time checking their book’s ranking on Amazon. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it. We don’t necessarily know what it all means, mind you, but we do it anyway.
If you’d like to feed the obsession and have someone else keep up with the comparisons for you, then you might want to check out TitleZ, a website mysteriously still in its beta version (and therefore still free) that will help you navigate the complexities of Amazon ranking for your particular title.
Want to learn more about what it all means? Then check out this article, written by one of TitleZ’s developers (looking oddly like Harrison Ford, gotta love PhotoShop…) who gives the following bottom lines:
Bearing the above very much in mind, here’s a temperature gauge you can use to get an idea about a particular title’s success. The following numbers apply to average sales ranks over time:
- Less than 100: Best-seller. Author, publisher, agent are all getting rich
- 101-1000: Extremely good performer. Any publisher/author would be thrilled.
- 1001-10,000: Very successful book. A few of these can sustain a small publishing company.
- 10,001-50,000: A successful book by most industry standards.
- 50,001-100,000: Not bad.
- 100,000 - 500,000: Not good.
- 500,000 or more: Poor.
Keep in mind that books with average ranks above 100,000 may have performed much better before we started tracking them on TitleZ. However, books that launch with ranks above 100,000 are probably not considered successful from a publishing industry point of view. Of course, the book could be selling well through non-bookstore channels such as trade shows, speaking events, etc. In general, though, we’ve found that Amazon sales ranks provides a good indicator for how a title is doing throughout the book market as a whole.
Bear in mind, also, that Amazon isn’t everything. Write a good book, develop an aggressive marketing plan, and leave the counting to others.
If you can.
And then you’ll be .. beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Books, Publishing, Getting Published, Publishers, Words on June 8th, 2008