How to Use Our Amazon Book Sales Calculator?
Using our book sales calculator is very easy! Just find a book’s bestseller rank on Amazon, and copy-paste it into the bestseller’s rank field. Then select the relevant marketplace, make sure that the appropriate format is selected (kindle or print), and hit the “Estimate” button. And voila, just like that the calculator will show you how many sales this book is generating on Amazon.
How to Find a Book’s Best Sellers Rank (BSR) on Amazon?
To find a book’s Best Sellers Rank, open the Amazon sales page of any book, and scroll down to the “Product Details” section. There you will see the Best Sellers Rank number.
How is our Amazon Book Sales Calculator Able to Estimate Book Sales Rates?
The sales figures come from our proprietary sales calculation engine. We have analyzed the sales data of books in several Amazon marketplaces to create reliable estimates based on large sets of verifiable data.
In simpler terms, we have used data from real Amazon book sales and mapped it to Amazon best seller rankings.
What is Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR) and How Does It Work?
Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR in short), is a number that any product on Amazon is given once it has made at least one sale. All products on Amazon are ranked based on how many units of it have been sold in the very recent history.
The lower a book’s Amazon best sellers rank number, the more copies it sells every day. And vice versa.
For example, a book with a BSR of #2000 will be selling dozens of copies a day, whereas a book ranking at #120,000 BSR will only be selling around 1 copy per day.
A mistake that new self-publishers make is confusing best sellers rank with a book’s rank within a sub-category. Those are 2 separate rankings and although there is a correlation, you cannot use the sub-category rankings to estimate sales.
How Are Kindle and Book Sales Ranks Different?
Amazon ranks products within separate categories, not against all products. Books (paperback and hardcover books), Kindle eBooks, and audiobooks all are ranked separately.
This means that all Kindle eBooks are all ranked against all Kindle eBooks, all print books are ranked against each other, and so on.
How Does Amazon Calculate Which Books Are Bestselling Books?
Amazon determines bestseller status within each book sub-category. A book that makes the most sales in a specific sub-category is branded a bestseller.
Amazon gives the highest selling book in each category an orange “#1 Bestseller” tag that is visible on the listing page, in search and other pages throughout the platform. This is great for the credibility, and the visibility of your book on Amazon.
How Many Copies Do You Need to Sell to Get the #1 Bestseller Tag?
That is entirely dependent on each sub-category. Some of them have very low competition and you’ll be able to be number 1 with just 2-5 sales a day. Other more popular categories are viciously competitive and your book will rank lower than #200 and will not be visible anywhere in the category page.
You can use BookBeam’s Category Explorer tool to quickly find relevant categories which are less competitive. We maintain a database of thousands of book categories across several Amazon markeplaces. You can sift through these categories using a set of filters to find the most effective categories for your book.
Do Kindle Unlimited Borrows Also Count as Sales?
Yes, Kindle Unlimited borrows do also count as sales and they do count towards your BSR just like normal sales do.
In case you’re not familiar, Kindle Unlimited is a book subscription program offered by Amazon, wherein subscribers can borrow up to 10 Kindle eBooks every month. You could liken it to a Netflix for books.
Authors and publishers who choose to enroll in this program (through “KDP Select”) get paid based on pages read, through a standardized counting method called Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP).
If you have enrolled in KDP Select, you can calculate your KENP royalty using our KENP Royaltly Calculator.
How Can I Improve My Amazon BSR?
All you need to do to improve your Amazon best sellers rank is quite simply… sell more books! The more copies your book sells, the higher your BSR is going to be. That’s all there is to it.
Quite simple …but not that easy. As you probably already know, there is a lot that goes into increasing book sales, like running Amazon ads, optimizing your book listing, and your book cover, just to name a few things. The BookBeam toolset was created to help you with most of them.
How to Use the Sales Data from Our Book Sales Calculator?
Research Book Niches and Genres
Book sales data can be used in several ways. First and foremost, it will help you get a better understanding of how popular and in-demand different niches and genres are. Is a book selling 1 copy a day or 100? Or perhaps it is not selling at all. This information is invaluable when you need to make decisions about your own book.
Set Realistic Goals
Knowing the sales data for books in your niche will also help you to set more realistic goals for your own book. If an average book in your niche is selling 12 copies a day, you know that something close to that may also be a realistic goal for your book as well.
Estimate Revenue and Profitability
You can use our book sales calculator in tandem with our royalty calculator to estimate the profitability of a book. Just multiply the daily sales that the sales calculator gives you with the royalty that the book makes per book sold (from the royalty calcualtor) to come up with the estimated royalty.
Of course you cannot know what are any given author’s or publishers expenses for marketing or Amazon ads, but this will still give you a good estimate.
To get this done for you instantly for any book on Amazon, you can use the BookBeam Chrome Extension – it will show you how many sales any book on Amazon is making whilst you are on the site. It will also show you royalty estimates, historic BSR trends and much more.
What Is a Good BSR for Books?
Generally, speaking a “good” BSR will start from around 80,000 to 100,000 in the US Amazon store. With this BSR a book will be making at least 1-2 sales a day, which means that the book is making sales regularly. From then on, in terms of BSRs, the question becomes how much it is selling.
You can keep coming back to our Amazon Book Sales Calculator whenever you do your research on Amazon and with time you’ll start to develop a more intuitive understanding of the different BSR numbers and what they mean.
Get access to the most powerful analytics tools for Amazon self-publishers.
Access historical BSR and sales data for any book on Amazon and Audible
Easily find the most in-demand niches
Quickly discover the most searched keywords
Find the best categories at the click of a button
Track the performance of any book on Amazon
..and much more
