How to know how many copies a book has sold on Amazon

Amazon is the largest e-commerce of books, both in physical and electronic format, thanks to the Kindle store. On the other hand, the company founded by Jeff Bezos started its business in 1995 by selling books. Since then, water has passed under the bridge, Amazon has become an e-commerce of boundless dimensions, which sells goods of all kinds, but books remain one of its most important businesses; just think of the fact that it is possible not only to buy books and eBooks on Amazon but also to publish them.

In this regard, you have just published your first book on the platform in question and would like to understand how to follow the sales trend. At the same time, you were taking a look at the overall rankings and wondering if there is any way to know how many copies a book has sold on Amazon. Well, if that’s the case, don’t worry: in this guide I will analyze the topic in its entirety, explaining what you can do.

In the first instance, I will explain how to view the sales data of your books published with Amazon, then I will explain what you can do to try to understand the numbers made to be recorded by the other books on the famous Jeff Bezos store. Curious to continue? Yup? Then take a few minutes for yourself and keep reading: you will find everything explained below.

Index

  • Preliminary information
  • How to know how many copies your book has sold on Amazon
  • How to know how many copies another book has sold on Amazon

Preliminary information

Before going into the details of the procedure on how to know how many copies a book has sold on Amazon, I think it might interest you to know more about this possibility.

Well, you should know that you can only get official information about the sales of a book on Amazon if you yourself have published it through Kindle Direct Publishing (self-publishing). Alternatively, obviously in case of publication through a publishing house, you will have to ask the latter if necessary (if possible).

If, on the other hand, you intend to try to understand how many copies a book published by another person has sold, I have to “curb” your enthusiasm a little: in this case, it is only possible to make estimates, which could clearly be inaccurate.

However, if you want to investigate the matter, later in this guide I will examine an interesting solution that could at least allow you to understand the general number of sales recorded by the book market in certain countries is.

In short, if you are interested in the subject, as I imagine you have seen that you have arrived on this page, you can continue reading the tutorial. You will surely find information that is right for you. In fact, I will analyze both the possibility of knowing the number of copies relating to a book published by you and that of obtaining an estimate linked to the works of others. Good fun!

How to know how many copies your book has sold on Amazon

If you have published your book on Amazon yourself, perhaps following my guide dedicated to the subject, you can obtain the official sales data for your work in a very simple way.

In fact, all you need to do is connect to the official portal KDP via browser, press the button Sign present in the upper right corner, enter the ‘ e-mail address and password related to your Amazon account and click on the button Login.

At this point, click on the Report button, located at the top, in order to access the section relating to statistics. Perfect, that’s it: you will see graphs appear on the screen that accurately show the number of sales (or downloads) recorded over time by your book.

In the case of an eBook and you have decided to join the Kindle Unlimited program, at the bottom you will also see the number of pages read relating to your work through it. A little further down is the royalty table that shows how much you have earned from the various countries in which the book is available.

By pressing the Generate report button at the bottom, you can also get an XLSX document with all the data in evidence. For the rest, at the top, there are various filters that allow you to select which data to show in the charts. More precisely, you can select the market involved, the author (in case there are books published with different names), the format (eBook or paper), the title (in case you have published more works) and the time period to be analyzed. . Just click the Refresh button to get the data for the selected filters.

In any case, if you want to get a “summary” of what happened in the past, I suggest you switch to the History tab, using the appropriate box at the top. By doing so, you will get data for the entire period in which you have decided to publish books on Amazon. Clearly, you can use the classic filters also in this case, as well as obtain a “total” document, by clicking on the Generate Report button.

I remind you, that at the top there are other various tabs, namely Progressive monthPaymentsReservationsPromotionsRoyalty for the previous months and Advertising campaigns. Through these pages you can check all the other statistics related to your book, going beyond the number of copies sold.

For the rest, you can manage the publication and modification of your books from the Library page, accessible by pressing on the appropriate item in the top left. In short, using the official portal of Kindle Direct Publishing is child’s play and in this way you can easily obtain all the official data of the case.

You should not disclose them to other people in any case, unless of course in case of need. It is in fact personal data, which is better to keep for oneself (it is still referring to a commercial project unless books are published for free).

Finally, as already mentioned in the preliminary chapter, if you have published on Amazon through a publishing house, in this case, the most valid advice I can give you is probably to ask for information directly from those in charge.

In fact, everything depends on the way the publishing house manages the publication, but obviously, only the people you have entrusted to will be able to tell you if you can actually get official and detailed information about the sales made by your work or not.

How to know how many copies another book has sold on Amazon

How do you say? Would you like to know the sales of someone else’s book on Amazon? I’ll explain immediately what you can do.

In this context, as you can imagine, obtaining sales figures can be complex. In fact, unless the author has published official information online for some reason, it is difficult, if not impossible, to access this rightly confidential data.

However, there are obviously ways to at least make estimates of the number of copies sold by a given book. In fact, online there are various third-party tools that promise to provide purely indicative sales numbers depending on the ranking position reached by a work in a particular country.

Beware, however, that many of the portals that try to estimate book sales typically make blunders. My advice is therefore to use the AMZScout website, which at least seems to provide plausible data (although obviously, it is impossible to verify them, as the sales of other people’s books are not public).

In any case, the portal does not allow you to track the sales of a single book by entering its name but is simply based on the BSR (Best Seller Rank) made public by Amazon, calculating approximately how many copies a book could sell in a given position in one month.

I would like to reiterate that this statistic may be inaccurate, but at least it allows us to understand at what level more or less a book is “traveling”. Obviously, take this data with a grain of salt and do not use it to “judge” the works of others, as it is simply estimated that you should keep for yourself, simply designed to make you understand a little the numbers “moved” by the market.

As for Italy, you must know that the market for our country is clearly much smaller than in other “key areas” of the world. To be clear, placing a few hundred copies or obtaining a few hundred downloads (even free) in the first month of the book‘s release is generally considered a good result for Italy. In the USA, for example, the numbers are obviously different.

For the rest, keep in mind that the aforementioned tool does not distinguish between eBook, paper book, various versions of the work and cost of the latter (there are different rankings for free and paid books). In short, I repeat once again that the data provided must be taken with a grain of salt and you should take them into consideration only for yourself, out of pure curiosity.

In any case, once you have reached the portal I indicated above, you just have to choose Italy (or another country of your interest) in the Select Country section, Books in the Select Category box, and position number in the Amazon Best Seller Rank. After that, just click on the CALCULATE SALES button to get an estimate of the book’s sales.

To find the BSR of a book on Amazon, I recommend that you proceed from a PC. In fact, from this platform, you just need to go to a book page, scroll down and take a look at the Position statistic in the Amazon Bestseller ranking. The number you will find here is what you need to enter as a Best Seller Rank.

Pay attention to the fact that, by using the free AMZScout portal, from time to time you may be required to wait sometime to obtain information relating to sales related to a certain position in the BSR (Best Seller Rank). However, if you are only interested in taking a look at certain positions, you will not have any “problems”.

In short, now you know how to obtain indicative information relating to the sales of someone else’s book, although obviously with all the “limitations” of the case.

 

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