The Kindle Sales Calculator by Rank

Amazon Sales Calculator
This author tool might provide more food for conversation than accurate sales data, but it does provide a handy “guesstimate” of sales per day by sales rank of eBooks. Of course, nobody really knows the secret Amazon algorithm, and even if it was known, it would never be this simple. However, the estimate can provide a sort of ballpark estimate of sales to expect at a specific rank.
First, try out the kindle sales calculator by entering an Amazon sales rank. These ranks can be found on the page of any Amazon book. Below the tool, find more discussion of how it works and some considerations to keep in mind when judging the data.
The Kindle Sales by Rank Calculator is at this link. We had it on our site, but the plugin seemed to blank out our RSS subscription feed. Sorry about that!
Issues With Calculating Daily Sales With an Online Calculator
There are a couple of problems with trying to estimate actual daily sales this way:
- Amazon borrows: Amazon also figures borrows into the sales rank. It’s possible they just count borrows, or they might actually figure in pages read of borrows because that’s how they pay these days. Anyway, it’s quite possible that a book may have fewer sales but a lot of borrows.
- Promotions: Very commonly, authors run all sorts of promotions that increase sales and boost ranks. Because of this, daily sales may not really be level, as suggested by this tool. For example, a rank that indicated a book is making 15 sales a day might really come from a rank that got generated by a promotion that generated 40 sales over a couple of days and very few after the promotion ended.
The tool is imperfect, but it’s still interesting. You just have to understand that it is probably better to look at the results as some kind of average sales (and borrows) over a longer period of time, and you shouldn’t consider the results an actual daily sales figure.
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