Amazon Best Sellers Rank: What the Number Means, and What It Doesn't

Amazon Best Sellers Rank is the number that appears on every book's page, and it shows where the book stands compared with other books, based on what shoppers have done lately. It doesn't tell you how many copies you sold, and Amazon itself writes that it isn't an accurate way to track your book. It does give you a general feel: if you did something to promote the book, and within a day or two the number went down, something probably worked.

What Amazon Best Sellers Rank is

Scroll down a book's page on Amazon to the product details, and there's a line called Best Sellers Rank. Next to it is a number, and sometimes two or three more numbers with category names.

The first number is the book's place among all the books in the store. The numbers after it are its place in smaller categories, like "Historical Fiction" or "Memoirs." A book can be at #200,000 in the whole store and #40 in a small category. Both numbers are correct.

In this ranking, low is good. Spot 1 is the book that sells the most.

How Amazon calculates it

Amazon's help page on the rank gives a few simple facts:

• The rank is based on shopper activity on your book compared with activity on other books.
• Recent activity weighs more than old activity, but history counts too.
• Canceled orders aren't counted.
• The rank updates at least once a day, and a change can take up to two days to show.

Amazon doesn't publish the formula itself. Anyone who promises you that "X sales a day will get you to spot Y" is guessing.

Why the number jumps when nothing happened

This confuses most authors the first time. You didn't sell a single copy this week, and the rank got better. Or you sold three, and it actually got worse.

The reason is that the rank is relative. Amazon says so directly: the rank can change even when your activity stayed the same. If books above you stopped selling, you move up. If a new book started selling fast, you move down.

So don't check the rank every morning. It wasn't built for that.

Every format and every language has its own rank

According to Amazon, each format of the book has a separate rank. The ebook, the audiobook, the paperback and the hardcover each get their own number.

As far as the store is concerned, a translated book is a different book altogether. It has its own page, its own number, and different shoppers. If your book came out in English, its rank has nothing to do with the rank of the Hebrew original, and the other way around. The author page works the same way, as we explained in your Amazon author page in every country.

What the rank is good for

It isn't a sales measure, but it has two real uses.

Checking whether promotion worked. You sent a newsletter, posted something, got a mention on a podcast. If in the days after that the rank went down noticeably, people probably bought. Amazon itself says the rank can give general insight into your marketing.

Understanding a category. If you're deciding which category to put a book in, you can look at the rank of the books leading it. A category whose top book sits at #500 in the whole store is a crowded category. We wrote more about this in categories and keywords for a translated book.

How to know how many you really sold

Not from the rank. From the reports.

If the book came out through KDP (Amazon's self-publishing platform), your account has reports that show how many copies sold, how many pages were read in the subscription, and in which store. If the book came out through a publisher, the publisher should send you a royalty statement. We explained how that works in how book royalties work.

The rank is a thermometer. The reports are the actual checkup.