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Plug Your Book!
175
Power tools
One of the favorite pastimes of authors is checking the Amazon Sales
Ranks of their books. In the past few years, several free tools have
emerged to help authors and publishers monitor the ranks of their books
and competing titles.
www.RankForest.com allows you to chart your Amazon Sales
Rank by drawing a line graph similar to a stock chart. You can add books
to a “collection” for quick reference, and leave comments on books.
Many of the site’s features are free.
www.TicTap.com also allows you to track Amazon Sales Ranks
over time on a bar graph and compare purchase prices from different
retailers.
Amazon Sales Rank
Amazon ranks each book based on how often it sells relative to every
other book in its catalog of some 3.5 million titles. The best-selling book
is ranked 1; the slowest seller exceeds 3,500,000. Books for which
Amazon hasn’t recorded a sale are ranked “None.”
A book’s Amazon Sales Rank appears in the Product Details
section of its detail page on Amazon. Sales ranks are recalculated hourly,
and can change significantly day to day.
Since Amazon has an estimated 70 percent market share among
Internet book retailers, its sales rankings are the best free, publicly
available information about the relative sales performance of individual
titles. The rankings include new and used books sold by third-party
sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace platform.
Amazon doesn’t publicly discuss its sales figures for individual titles,
so it’s impossible to correlate the rankings with quantity of sales.
However, based on anecdotal reports from various publishers, you can
assume that an Amazon sales rank of 5,000 translates into about 15 to
20 sales per day, depending on seasonal factors.
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