If you want to know how popular your books are or how successful a marketing campaign has been, looking at your Amazon sales rankings is a great place to start.
What are Amazon sales rankings?
Amazon ranks products in all categories based on the number of units sold in a given time. Sales rankings are updated every hour to keep shoppers informed about the best-selling products in whatever category they’re looking at.
In this article, we’ll specifically be looking at Kindle book sales rankings, how they’re calculated, and how you can find where your Kindle book stands among its competitors!
How are Kindle sales rankings calculated?
Kindle sales rankings are broken into two main lists: Free and Paid. When a book is available for free as part of a promotion, it will have a ranking on the Free list. Once the promotion ends, it will be listed in the Paid category.
Kindle bestseller rankings are calculated based on the “customer activity” of a book compared to other titles in the same category or genre. Customer activity is not well-defined by Amazon, but likely refers to sales, Kindle Unlimited downloads, page reads, and perhaps borrows. A single book may be listed in up to three categories, such as Fiction, Sci-Fi, or Thrillers, and so it will show a ranking in each of those categories (see image below).
Rankings are updated every hour based on sales or downloads, but it may take a day or two for you to see a change. Amazon also takes each book’s entire history into account, with more recent activity being weighted more heavily than past activity. Additionally, each available format of a book (kindle, paperback) has its own independent rank. For more info see the KDP help page on sales ranking
How to find a book’s ranking
You can view any book’s ranking by going to the product page and scrolling down to the “Product Details” section.
In this case, the book has an overall Kindle Store ranking of 109, while it’s #1 in Time travel Sci-fi, #3 in Time travel fiction, and #5 in Women’s lit fiction.
How to convert sales rank to daily sales
Wondering about how many Kindle books are sold per day based on their sales ranking? A 2013 study established a basic conversion model. Based on that model and other new information, here’s a good estimate of what the rankings mean in terms of sales.
| Kindle sales ranking | Estimated # of books sold per day |
| #1 | About 10,000 |
| #2 to #5 | 5,000 to 9,000 |
| #6 to #10 | 4,000 to 5,000 |
| #11 to #20 | 1,500 to 3,000 |
| #100 | 1,000 |
| #1,000 | 120 |
| #5,000 | 40 |
| #10,000 | 20 |
| #50,000 | 5 |
| #100,000 | 1 |
There are also online calculators and tools available to estimate a book’s daily sales, such as this one from Kindlepreneur.
Do KU downloads count towards sales rankings?
Yes, all Kindle Unlimited downloads impact Amazon sales rankings, even if the reader doesn’t complete 10% of the book. However, authors only receive royalties if their book is read to the 10% mark.
In other words, you could theoretically help support a Kindle author by downloading a title through Kindle Unlimited and scrolling through 1/10th of the book!
