When making a buying decision, sales rank is among the most fundamental factors. This is the rating system used by Amazon to rate an item’s popularity.
To define it in the simplest terms: Sales rank is the amount of time since a book last sold.
When a book sells, its rank will jump up to somewhere in range of 150,000 (maybe lower, maybe higher, depending on sales volume that day and the book’s historical demand). And starting at that point, its sales rank will drift upwards until it sells again.
While sales rank does not tell us when the book will sell again, it is the best piece of evidence we have.
So how do we decipher sales rank to determine how long since a book last sold? This is not an exact science, but this chart gives you a rough estimate.
- Sales rank of 1: 10,000 copies per day.
- Sales rank 10: 400 copies per day.
- Sales rank of 100: 70 copies per day.
- Sales rank of 1,000: 30 copies per day.
- Sales rank of 5,000: 15 copies a day.
- Sales rank of 10,000: 10 copies a day.
- Sales rank of 100,000: 1.5 copies a day.
- Sales rank of 300,000: 1 day ago.
- Sales rank of 500,000: 3 days ago. (2 to 5 days)
- Sales rank of 650,000: 5 days ago. (3 to 7 days)
- Sales rank of 800,000 7 days ago. (5 to 9 days ago)
- Sales rank of 1,000,000: 10 days ago. (5 to 15 days ago)
- Sales rank of 1.2 million: 15 days ago. (8 to 20 days ago)
- Sales rank of 1.5 million: 25 days ago. (12 to 35 days ago)
- Sales rank of 2.5 million: 40 days ago. (20 to 60 days)
Top 5%
1.5 million
Top 1%
300,000
*These figures are based on the total number of books that have a sales rank (i.e. the items that have sold one ore more copies) - not the total number of books on Amazon. Using the number of books with a sales rank provides a more accurate look at demand.