How to Use Our Audible Book Sales Calculator
Using our Audible ACX Sales Calculator is really easy – just input the best sellers rank of an audiobook into the calculator and it will show you an estimate of how many sales it is making per day and per month.
How to Find Audible Best Sellers Rank?
If you’ll look around on Audible, you’ll notice that a best sellers rank is nowhere to be found. Not on Audible listing pages, not on search pages, not on categories… So where are they?
To find Audible rankings, you have to go to Amazon. Interestingly enough, Only Amazon shows the audiobook rankings.
This means that first you identify the book on Audible and then you find it on Amazon. Every audiobook published through ACX will be published on Amazon too and 90+% of audiobooks that are sold on Audible will also be listed on Amazon.
Just search the exact title and subtitle of the audiobook on Amazon and it will show up.
You may be wondering – how does it make sense that we have to go to Amazon to get rankings for Audible audiobooks? Are these not 2 different platforms?
The short answer is yes …and no. The longer answer is that Amazon owns Audible. Some aspects of each of these platforms are separate and some are shared. Sales data for example is shared – Audible sales data is “fed” into Amazon’s rankings. The overwhelming majority of all audiobook sales are made on Audible, not Amazon. This is why the rankings shown on Amazon are a valid source of sales data for Audible.
How to Best Use the Audible Book Sales Data?
Use it to understand the sales and demand side of the audiobook market. Knowing the sales that books are making will make a night and day difference to your understanding of the market, and thus you’ll be able to make much smarter and more informed decisions for your own audiobook.
Audible Niche and Keyword Research
Knowing the sales figures will help you to better understand the popularity of different niches and keywords. How many copies are the top-selling books selling? Is it just 1-2 copies a day, or perhaps 50 a day?
You can also use sales data to get a better feeling of which keywords are the most popular within a niche or genre, and which ones are secondary keywords.
Market research is really critical to the success of your book and jumping back and forth from Audible to Amazon and back is rather tedious. This is why we added Audible support to our most powerful tools – the Chrome Extension and Keyword Research Tool. Our tools make Audible and Amazon research fast, and easy and most importantly, they show publishers the best niche and keyword opportunities.
The BookBeam Chrome Extension quickly shows you the best seller rankings, sales, royalties, historic ranking trends, and much more. It will also show you averages to help you quickly get an overview of a keyword or niche.
How Does Audible BSR Work? How is it different from BSRs of other book formats?
In essence, Audiobook best sellers rankings work in exactly the same way as Amazon rankings for other formats. The only difference is that there are 2 platforms involved and accessing the rankings for books on Audible becomes a more tedious task.
Audible and ACX FAQ
What’s the Difference Between Audible and ACX? Are They the Same Thing?
Audible is the platform on which customers purchase, download and listen to audiobooks. ACX is where you upload your audiobook, access your sales dashboard, manage your audiobooks, and so on.
They are like 2 sides of the same coin – one is for the end consumers (Audible) and the other is for the producers (ACX).
How Much Does Audible Pay Authors?
This is dependent on a myriad of different factors like have you opted to sell your book exclusively on Audible or not, are you doing a royalty split with a narrator, and so on. Let’s have a brief look at each of the main factors.
Audiobook Length
The length of your audiobook will determine its price on Audible and Amazon. The longer the total run time of the audiobook, the higher the price. When considering length purely from the profitability and royalty optimization side, it is best to have your book be at least 3 hours long since this gives a disproportionately high increase in price and royalty. See what we mean below.
ACX lists the audiobook pricing ranges on their site. However, these price ranges are just ranges, in practice, the Audible audiobook prices do not vary much, if at all.
Here are the most common prices for books published through ACX:
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under 1 hour: $3.95
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1 – 3 hours: $6.95
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3 – 5 hours: $14.95
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5 – 10 hours: $19.95
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10 – 20 hours: $24.95
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over 20 hours: $29.95
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If we take a moment to examine the numbers, we can see that the most significant increase is from the 1-3 hour range to the 3-5 hour range. The price increases by more than double. Whereas the other price increases are more incremental.
Exclusivity
Next up we’ve got the exclusivity selection. If you choose to sell your book exclusively on Audible, you’ll earn a 40% royalty rate.
If you opt for the non-exclusive option, your royalty will be 25% on Audible, Amazon, and Itunes. You will also maintain the right to sell your audiobook on other platforms.
Royalty Share
Lastly, if you would like to eliminate narration costs and you are willing to split the audiobook royalties with the narrator, your royalty share will be cut in half. In this scenario, you split the royalties 50-50 with the narrator.
Royalty share is a good option only when you have a low budget, and want to reduce your risk. If you know that your audiobook will sell, it will be a lot more profitable to pay for narration and keep the full royalty rate.
Using tools like the BookBeam Extension and Keyword Research Tool will help you to ensure that your Audiobook will be keyword optimized for the most profitable keywords in your niche. The Chrome Extension will help you with on-the-go research and the Keyword Research Tool will show you extensive lists of Audible keywords, competition, and much more!
Get Access to the Most Advanced Research & Analytics Tools for Self-Publishers
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Easily find the most in-demand niches
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Quickly discover the most profitable keywords
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Access historical BSR and sales data for any book on Amazon and Audible
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Find the best categories at the click of a button
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Track the performance of any book on Amazon
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..and much more
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