I just came across the following online comments from a multiple New York Times-bestselling author, one of the authors I respect and enjoy most in all the world:
Ah, Amazon sales rankings. What do these numbers — changing every hour
in their hypnotic fashion that drives authors mad — really mean?
Here’s the skinny:
Ranking above 10,000 — essentially meaningless. At that point, the
books are in order by ISBN or alphabetically or something. Don’t even look.
8k – 10 k — your title is selling one or two units a month, maybe.
4k – 7k — your title is selling one or two units a week. Nationwide.
2 – 4 k — OK, maybe a little better than that.
Ranking below 1000 — Now, at 3 figures, we’re getting into “selling
briskly for its genre” territory.
Below 100 — Pay dirt at last. A book pretty much has to attain and
sustain rankings at two figures to crack any of the bestseller lists; to
crack the big lists like the NYTimes, the title needs to hold well below 50.
The key thing about her comments is that the numbers are completely wrong.
It’s amazing, and depressing, that someone who should be extremely well informed by her publisher, is operating in a near complete informatoin vacuum. I try to give my authors a hell of a lot more transparency than that.
I am a publisher with more than 75 books in print (all POD, so 90% of my business is via Amazon) and I watch the sales ranks v. my inventory closely.
The real numbers are more like this. When a title hits
80,000 that means 1 sale today (within the last couple of hours)
40,000 = 2 sales today
20,000 = 4 sales today
10,000 = 8 sales today
and so on.
It’s a logarithmic function, so as sales rank decreases, unit sales rise exponentially. For a great explanation, see http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.html, and for the goriest possible details, see http://www.nimblebooks.com/wordpress/2006/06/power-law-converting-amazon-sales-ranks-to-units-sold/.
The trick is that the sales rank “decays” as soon as you sell a book, so if it’s down around 500,000 that means you haven’t sold a book for a week or so. 1,000,000 means you’re probably doing 1 or 2 a month. Whenever it bounces back up to around 80,000, that means a sale within the last hour or two.
You can follow all your titles (24 x 7, compulsively 
) using free services www.salesrankexpress.com or titlez.com. After you watch them bounce up and down for a while, you’ll get a feeling for what’s happening.
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